My father once told me a story about aliens appearing in his hometown.He had been ten, maybe younger, when he and his brothers rode into town on the back of their father’s trash truck and found a crowd gathered on Main Street, looking up at the sky.In the glaring cloudless blue, a black shape hummed. It swayed from side to side, its path straight and graceful and unlike any movement the Ohioans below had ever seen. The crowd stared, shielding their eyes from the sun. A few men had binoculars but grumbled they couldn’t make out anything. One woman fanned herself and wailed about the Russians invading. My father found a man he knew with a telescope and asked to take a look.“It was like a quarter up there,” Dad told me one night before bed. “Only fat in the middle with little red lights spinning all around it.”The flying object held spectators for an hour. Then, without sound or warning, it flicked out of sight, fast enough that everyone knew it had not been a bird nor plane nor patriotically clad journalist from the Daily Planet.It had been something else.I wanted this story to be true. I wanted something fantastic to have happened in the town where I lived. Everything else about it nearly bored me to tears.I went to St. Joseph’s, the Catholic elementary school where my father and his father had gone. My class was minuscule; five first-graders in total and all were as worn down by the strict environment as I was. So when I had news from my father’s childhood about our town’s very own alien invasion, my lunch table immediately became the most envied in all the cafeteria. My classmates begged me to repeat the tale of the spaceship. When that got old, I told them about a glowing kid who appeared in my father’s bedroom the night after the UFO sighting.My classmates soon came to lunch eager for a scary story. I told them plots of horror films I’d watched with my father, making them my own by replacing characters with my classmates and giggling at their horrified reactions when the villain or monster slaughtered their avatars. Every now and then, someone would ask me to tell the glowing kid story and I would always oblige. It was over these green bean and ham casserole Catholic school lunches I learned stories had a pull. That gravitational force even the most reluctant classmates could not resist. Drawing them like moths to a flame, villagers to a humming black shape in the sky.