Mom has to work late tonight so Dad orders pizza from the place in Boone Village. You go with him, but you aren’t going to wait in the pizza place for the pies to come out of the oven. You want to go into the video store and look at the VHS cases. “Okay,” he says, “but we can’t rent anything tonight.”

The employees at the video store are always showing movies that you can’t watch. Once, and only once, your parents let you stay up to see Happy Birthday to Me while it played on a local tv network and you had screaming nightmares for days. As you look at the covers of all the movies that you won’t rent, a strange science fiction movie plays on the screens mounted around the shop. The future is shiny leotards and florescent headbands, large pieces of unwieldy computer equipment and flippant robots. Travel between stars has made the universe’s vastness comprehendible. A menacing alien presence stalks a heroine down a tiny hallway.

Why would the aliens build the hallways in their ships so small when they are so big? Your mind asks you. This is the beginning of you not being able to enjoy blockbuster movies.

Just as you forget that your time is limited, you hear your Dad’s voice behind you. The pizza is ready and getting cold in the car. You take one last look at the tv screen. There’s something about toaster-shaped spaceships and odorless disintegration mist and difficult interplanetary politics and furry posable tentacles and the unpronounceable greeting of the U’thkath. As the glass door swings closed behind you, the soundtrack of the movie fades away but the glimpses of the movie stay forever in your memory. What the hell were they watching in the video store that day?