Abnormal Occurrences Read Online Free PDF

change had come about.
    He told her about the telephone call.
    “But how could that have changed anything?” she asked incredulously. “Unless you are saying that the person on the phone was God?”
    “Golly, Linda, I don’t know what to say,” answered Frank. “I have always thought of myself as an atheistic scientist.”
    She frowned and made a funny sort of mouth. “The thing that bothers me,” she said, “is why would God use the telephone? Why would He have to?”
    But the person Frank married was Madeleine Swan, the multi-millionaire businesswoman, who picked him up in a health-food store. He gave up his career and stayed home all day, watching television and taking baths. Sometimes he missed his former life and its mental demands, but not often. He enjoyed being just another pretty face.

Planet Of The Losers
    W E HAD SOMETIME SINCE reached the stage at which anything could provoke a quarrel. In this case it was whether the cheese had ripened beyond the point of no return, and Myra finally threw her glass not at me but across the kitchen, apparently without special target—it struck the refrigerator—and hardly had the spray of wine and powdered glass reached the vinyl floor than she was out of the house and in the car, and by the time I reached the porch, her back wheels were churning up a wake of dust and gravel.
    It was her car, my weekend country cottage. It was Sunday evening. If she did not return by morning I would have to find another way back to the city from this pastoral area that was serviced by no train or nearby bus route.
    I slunk back inside and refilled my own glass with the Rhone red I had extracted from a wooden half-tub full of assorted bottles at my favorite discount liquor store, an establishment that provided more than a few pretexts for our spats, for Myra fancied herself an oenophile but was in reality that familiar sort of wine snob who despises any label which he-she has never seen before you present the bottle for inspection. There was a time when, in an effort to best her, I would do some research and find, say, a chateau unheard of by her but renowned to the wine critics of connoisseur publications. As expected, Myra would sneer at the name and grimace at her first taste, but it did me no good to produce the appropriate clippings. “Then this is simply one bottle that’s gone off ,” she would say between almost closed teeth. “If you have any self-respect, you’ll take it back. They’d think better of you for doing that. They look down on people who put up with such abuse and will only give you one bad bottle after another .”
    But before drinking my wine now, I cleaned up that which had run down the refrigerator’s face to mix with the broken glass on the floor. That was a job that could not be long delayed, for my Golden Retriever, who was occupied outdoors at the moment, might return at any time, and he had the appetite of a goat without the impervious stomach that should be prerequisite. Which is to say, this dog would have been quite capable of lapping up both wine and glass. His name was Bub.
    I had just emptied the dustpan into the pedal can that dwells beneath the sink when I heard the sound of an engine. Myra was returning much sooner than she usually did after a tantrum, and from the awful noise being produced by the car, I could tell why. It was obvious that her old Escort had finally revolted against a criminal lack of care.
    I hastened outside, I confess, to jeer. But when I crossed the threshold and stepped upon the porch which Myra insisted was practically unusable without screening, I left my familiar world for that of hallucination.
    A flying saucer was landing in the adjacent meadow. It looked exactly as they always do in vintage sci-fi movies and the eyeball-witness accounts printed in the trashy papers sold at supermarket checkouts. Which is to say, it was a great big disc with portholes around the rim. Have I said that the time of day was twilight?