LONELY STREET

By Steve Brewer

© 1994 Steve Brewer

SMASHWORDS EDITION

Chapter 1

Limelight has always settled heavily on my family's shoulders. It began with my grandfather, or at least that's as far back as I've cared to trace this particular family trait. He was the only person who died in the Martian invasion in "War of the Worlds." That would qualify him for martyrdom in most invasions, but since "War of the Worlds" was a radio play, it only made him look stupid.

My grandfather, Pincus Cutwaller, a stiff-backed Mississippian who developed a device that squeezed more oil from cottonseed, made his first and only trip to New York City in 1938, to pick up an award from The American Society of Inventors. It was a proud moment as he waved farewell from the back platform of the train as it departed Nazareth, Mississippi. It was the last time his family would see him. His only daughter – my mother – was nine years old.

The American Society of Investors being the prestigious group it is, my grandfather was put up in a suite on the fourteenth floor of the Waldorf-Astoria. The room had such an excellent view that he spent most of his time standing at the window, watching the city bustle.

I believe he was standing there when an excited radio announcer first broke in with news that Martian spaceships were laying waste to the New Jersey countryside. The news must've startled him terribly. They found him splattered on the sidewalk before Orson Welles revealed, heh-heh-heh, that this was only a fiction created by Mercury Radio Theater.