“I wonder…” he said, his voice trailing off as the departing spaceship shrunk into just another pinpoint of light among the nebulous night of stars.
“What?”
“Well, it’s a funny thing, but just how ordinary is the extraordinary?”
We shared a glance. He must have read there on my face my utter confusion.
“Sorry,” he smiled. “I can’t explain myself. But, what we just, this—how ordinary was it? I mean, from whatever planet they’re from, would this have been strange to them, as strange as it was to us? I mean, they’re on our planet, and so the setting is alien to them, but the events, the significance, I mean…”
“Only you,” I said, “would be thinking about this at this moment.”
He went on, unphased.
“Like, put it the other way. Like, what if we, some group of astronauts, landed on an alien planet and one of the astronauts gets murdered and his ghost starts haunting the aliens. The aliens would be so out of their depths that they wouldn’t know that ghosts are extraordinary, or that they were any more extraordinary than the bipedal cyclopes which had fallen from the sky. Even if they had ghost stories, would they recognize a human ghost as a ghost? They might assume that was just normal for us.”
As his idea finally got through to me and the dark memories of this strange night flashed like shadows in my mind, I shivered.
Tale Told 