"The Blue Light Lady"

I smoked blue lotus and met "The Blue Light Lady" - we ate at a country café 

Justin Sabata

The Last Martian on Earth

Before you email your nearest conservative lawmaker, who are always keen to waddle-march out of their Capitol slime caves in order to banish god-made plants older than Jesus, let's quickly yet laboriously explain what blue lotus is:

Firstly, it is not White Lotus (opium for non-Seinfeld fans). If it was anything similar, Big Pharma would've harnessed it by now and the youth of our nation would be dying from it. 

No, blue lotus is a relatively ineffective but totally legal flower-on-a-lily from the more aquatic regions of Africa. It's also called the Egyptian Lotus, which, given its lack of psychedelic mysticism upon consumption, isn't worth that kind of panache. At least at the moment.

Despite this surprising level of soberness, I nevertheless began my Halloween night saunter towards a tragically forgotten, trash-laden butthole of the Hays, Kansas park scene - Polly Park. 

This afterthought with weeds (just right behind a Dairy Queen), “honors” Elizabeth Polly, who was a nurse who died aiding soldiers during an outbreak of cholera at the long-since disarmed Fort Hays. In fact, she died the same year that the very city of Hays was founded - 1867.

While succumbing to the disease, she requested to be buried atop Sentinel Hill at that old fort. Apparently, it was too rocky at the top for her dying wish to be granted. So, they buried her on the side. 

Eventually, when Fort Hays closed up shop, her fellow servicepeople’s remains were moved to Fort Leavenworth or Fort Riley in Kansas. But she was not. 

And while she laid down to sleep in a lonely grave, stories of a wandering spirit wearing blue grew like the wild plants I stumbled through while walking in her “park”. 

Whether it was her denied dying request, the separation from the soldiers she cared for, or just too many bored cowboy campfires, the legend of “The Blue Light Lady” began to illuminate so bright that Polly the person was truly overshadowed - reduced to a so-so ghost story on a worn-down historical sign. 

A small marble brick bearing her name neighbors this sign on top of Sentinel Hill. Though, if you were to poll the people of Hays, I doubt that many would recognize the name “Elizabeth Polly”. Hell, even more probably don’t know there is a Polly Park. To most, she’s just “The Blue Light Lady”; a stranger, a soul-taker, something to be feared.

I arrived at her park after dark which is clear across town from her famous final resting place. At least that made for an easier walk for me. Especially considering I was sucking down burning blue lotus like a vape-kid in the school bathroom. 

A drainage pipe has carved the only path towards her lonely statue, only kept company by those bastard beetles that look like ladybugs. No flowers, some dumb looking bush, and one metal picnic table wedged out of the way behind a sad tree. A gazebo? Psshh. In this economy?

Those first few minutes were those moments you don’t want to take in, like the eerie silence after your favorite stadium has been blown to bits. Or the feeling of regret you get right after you watch a depressing movie that went absolutely nowhere. It was dreary, it was barren, the whole thing felt pointless, and I didn’t like being there. Who the hell would?

*Inhale

(Sounds of dueling truck dickheads)

*Exhale

(War cries from distant lightweights)

*Inhale

“Hello! Welcome back to DQ, what can I get for you?”

*Exhale

That was when the damned statue started to turn blue.

It flickered then glowed low like a bar sign, with a velvet violet hue reminiscent of a phantom in the old toons of Scooby Doo (The Space Kook was the best one). 

Maybe that was the reason I didn’t shit my pants right on the spot. Or maybe this flower-from-a-lilly actually has some firepower to it. Or maybe I’ve just seen worse.

The true blue lady floated down onto the crabgrass with comforting benevolence - almost on top of a discarded broken screwdriver where flowers used to be back in the park's heyday. Her face in this form was a hundred-times more human than when it was stone. And with a solemn expression that you would expect from a forgotten soul, she softly turned in my direction. 

Now, what the hell am I supposed to do in this situation? I can’t run and turn my back on the forgotten heroes of yesteryears. I never have. I also can’t just stand there frozen like a zooted zebra looking at the possible crocodile of my ultimate doom. 

What to do? Are the legends true?

The hundreds of horror movies I’ve seen did not prepare me for this moment. 

In what was perhaps the most bizarre Mexican standoff I will ever experience, my eyes were the first to break. Slowly looking to the left, I noticed another establishment right next door to DQ - an old-style country cafe. 

It was a Hail Mary in my mind but I had to go for it. I brightened my face to lighten the mood and gently pointed to the place. 

“Hungry?”

She must’ve been because suddenly we were inside. 

Under more normal circumstances, the arrival of this odd couple would’ve warranted a response of some kind. But it was Halloween night and it was almost closing time. All the old people were already home asleep and the servers couldn’t give a shit. For all they knew, we were in costumes. Her, dressed as whatever The Conjuring franchise just crapped out. And I, in my Chicago Bears jacket, an idiot.

We were put in a booth, both still under a haze of perplexity that hung like cigarette smoke. I was still coming to terms with the apparition that sat before me while she was trying to grasp, well, everything else. 

Like a fish that had been droned-bombed down into a desert - she was out of her element. In a place so unrecognizable it could be interpreted as a dystopian limbo with tacky curtains. A world so unlike what is remembered that existence and purpose within it becomes questioned. An existence that was not what we were taught. Are we still in the land of the living? 

I stopped asking myself that question a long time ago.

Once we both had a better grasp of our bearings, we finally got around to ordering. She gently called for a crispy fried steak which came with a whole heap of potatoes and sweet corn - what a woman. I proudly declared ditto and we dug in. 

Linguistic issues and a 154-year age difference aside, we had about as well of a conversation as you could. She told me about the wars, diseases, and overall uncivilized lives of her time - as did I for mine. I told her about the time the world hated each other so much that there were two wars over it. And the countless other conflagrations that inevitably followed.  

“They said the first one was “The War to End All Wars”, I snickered. 

She was interested in the various pandemics since her passing - she was a medical professional after all. There was the classic Spanish Flu, of course. The AIDS pandemic that people ignored until they couldn’t. And the more recent COVID-19 pandemic that Americans also wanted to turn a blind red, white, and blue eye to. 

Not because of horrific homophobia like during the AIDS crisis - but mostly because they wanted to drink in bars and being in their homes with their families must’ve been unbearable.

Our conversations carried on until closing time. Before I could think of what we should do next, Elizabeth Polly began slowly walking back to her cold statue. Almost regrettably - like a child waiting to walk into a punishment they don’t deserve. Or like a newly-widowed man having to walk into his newly-empty house for the first time. 

She didn’t speak for the rest of her time back in this realm of existence. 

It made my eyes well-up a bit once I realized our time was already almost over. It may have been because I knew her healing nature (the true “Blue Light”) was also having to return to the land of the dead. 

In a town that celebrates gun-toting lawmen by giving them the Main Street statue treatment, I guess there just wasn’t room for healers. Who needs a nurse who literally died for her country when “Wild” Bill Hickok and “Buffalo” Bill Cody can take center stage? She already has a worn out sign, a small marble brick, and a butthole of a park. 

In a city riddled with ghosts from a questionable past, she’s a spirit of compassion and sacrifice. And those spirits should never be feared or forgotten. 

Elizabeth Polly was one the founding mothers of the city of Hays, Kansas. Only for her true self to be discarded and distorted like the litter that now surrounded her.

Through my broken voice, combating crying, I tried to tell her how much she should mean to more than just me. And as she began to return to her statued state, her light began to dim and a few of my tears touched the crabgrass. 

But before her hue was completely lost in the shadows of the night, I made her a promise: I promised to bring her flowers back. And whether it was the lotus or my own quest for inner-self satisfaction, I swear her statue seemed to smile just a little more after that.

After that, the only blue light came from a neon fixture from the Dairy Queen right across the way. 

• Justin Sabata, 2025