On Dellacrosse, Extraterrestrial Capital of the World (or Buttfuck, USA)
"Everyone here seemed a stranger, the town of Dellacrosse had been preposterously named Little Spread Eagle, after a local Indian warrior hunted down like a dog by government militiamen and turnesfirst into the name of a golf course, then a motor lodge, then finally a town -everything about the place had been a kind of jokey curse from the start. When the village councilmen changed it to Dellacrosse, they also decided to try to remarket it as an extraterrestrial tourist site. Rumors of spaceship in the outlying cornfields and fiery brassy things floating through the night sky and even one or two probings of overweight Little Spread Eagle housewives (or the occasional passing-through truck driver) by strange creatures in black helped create the possibility of a mystique. It caused Dellacrosse to become the self-declared 'Extraterrestrial Capital of the World'. ("Not another anal probing", my mother took to saying, reading the Dellacrosse Courier. Or once, rather angrily to my father, "Why don't they just name this town what it is: Buttfuck, USA!" "Gail" chided my father. "Get a grip!") Little paper alien heads were fastened to the streetlights on Main Street, and people sold Venusian vanilla sundaes with Mars Bar crumbles. At first it was hoped that people would come from all over the country and camp out and stay put to try to see the spaceships and aliens that might appear in the roadside parks and fields outside the town. The burst of commerce and national publicity lasted less than a year then it vanished, like the spaceships and aliens themselves. People said the council had packed everything up in a rocket and sent it back to its planet, leaving some strays behind.
The strays I felt were my own friends, who were more like martians to me." L. Moore
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