Don't Talk to Aliens
A short piece I wrote to explore a first person style for a novella I’m working on.
Don't Talk to Aliens
I’m the reason the aliens are here, and everyone in my county knows it by now. Hell, probably the whole world. Before satellite and civilization came crashing down, the internet sleuthed out who (and what) lived in the house beneath the aurora spirals, uncovering a video series detailing: amateur telescope, satellite snooper, and alien communicator. Nothing serious– the ‘alien communicator’ was just a cobbled together radio transmitter, and not a great one. Alongside each bespoke contraption: grinning, double-chinned– a prematurely gray-bearded fellow, of whom the previously mentioned accusatory fingers of god will soon point. Me! If papa could see me now…
Hard to say exactly when they arrived. At 5:34 PM I was in my shed, sweating through a NASA t-shirt and trying to fix my radio telescope. The signal chain had announced its ruin by the acrid fumes of a cast-off amplifier, so I was playing mix and match with some spares out of the reclaim bin. There was hot glue and fiberwood everywhere, and an aged TI-84 Plus calculator was covering up my notebook. I’d given up the math hours ago. It was too hot for math.
Right, sorry. Aliens.
I was half out of the shed door, trying to get a breeze while I worked, when the sky went a shade darker all at once. I looked up, and there an aurora borealis shimmered starkly, snaking down through the new evening. In Missouri. Pretty rare, you could say.
I wobbled around the scattered debris of many unfinished projects to my laptop, puffing away a layer of sawdust thrown by earlier cutting. I’d never seen an aurora in person, but I was only half as excited to see it as I was to figure out why it was showing up over my particular latitude. The easy answer was solar wind, which is pretty apocalyptic if you watch enough videos about it, and they’d brought auroras as far south as Missouri in the past. None, however, had looked like this one.
Several excited keystrokes later I navigated to the local news. A video box appeared under the searchable headings, outlined prominently in red with the word Live! blinking excitedly over the top left corner of the image. I clicked unmute, restarted the segment from the beginning, and leaned back. The chair squeaked nervously.
“Tonight across the Heartland: a spectacle unfolds right above our heads— a daytime Aurora Borealis— and, ope— ok, so, new info coming in—” the local news anchor sat behind the sorta gauche TV dais found within every bottom chain Midwest news room and spoke from beneath soft-sheen hair white as a bed of cotton. “—looks like the aurora is centered over Joplin, Missouri in what our science editorial staff is calling ‘highly irregular spirals’ which— ahuh— yeah, so they seem to converge on a home just west of Missouri Southern State University.” A street view image of my house appeared in the corner of the screen.
Another news anchor broke in, offering an anecdote of a time when her family had gone on an Alaskan ship cruise and seen the northern lights, and how they looked completely different from what was going on now, she could tell you that much for a nickel.
Anyways, it was 6:21 PM when all of the satellites came down. And yeah, I do mean all of’em. At once. It was a nightmare, in a very rounded sense of the word. I remember that night being one of delirium, choked by late-night summer heat and black smoke. My brain was in ruins, exhausted from the half hour of sleep I’d emerged from following days of paranoid net-scrolling and window-peering.
For the first several hours I doubt anyone could be sure it wasn’t the rapture, as the sky painted up with bright streaks of space trash and every available emergency siren rolled off one another in cacophonous waves. I heard later that some places got lit up pretty bad. Guess not everything had burned up in the atmosphere.
Affairs were deteriorating daily from absurdity to metanoia. Emergency alerts stopped chiming, the pockets of internet that hadn’t gone down already disappeared, and even TV broadcast signals were either abandoned or blocked. All we had left was the radio, and– well, I don’t guess I know much about the radio in other places, but in the Midwest AM to FM is mostly biblical, while the local bandwidth pirates are just unique flavors of societal dysfunction.
Didn’t take long for the religious nonsense to quiet down, though. The aliens arrived without warning or vehicle and started killing every human they could find, and even a lifelong southern baptist could take one look at the things and figure Christ didn’t know a goddamn thing about’em. I’ll try my best to paint a picture, but it’s pretty difficult to describe something like this in plain English.
Its body, not unlike a black plastic cabbage the size of a garbage truck (excepting the vines which sprouted from beneath, stretching far beyond their length). Its skin, like extremely hard wood: bullets, fire, chemicals, high-speed trucks— doesn’t bother’em much at all. I saw one open at the top, unfurling like a rotten flower. Yellow light spilled out, and though it wasn’t too bright to look at, everything around dimmed as if under a total eclipse. That’s all I wanna say right now- I don’t like thinking about it.
The aliens don’t eat you, melt you in a vat, probe you for locales unknown- they just grab hold anywhere they can and squeeze until you’re dead. You’d consider yourself lucky to be strangled, which I find plenty horrifying in its own right. That being said, ‘groped to death by the greedy, unsure limbs of an alien’ was beginning to sound like a decent alternative to life in the wide open universe.
Now is probably a good place to mention that people had been flinging radio signals into outer space for well over a hundred years. It made no sense that it was my signal that’d screwed us over. The public remained unconvinced, however.
Nobody in town would sell me food or gas only a few days after that news broadcast (rebroadcast all over the world, to the studio’s very brief elation), and as the virtual sleuths did their duty, most began to scowl hatefully as I passed by. The aliens swept through in waves. The first came at dawn, soon after the fallen satellites (or angels, as the radio preferred) had wound down to cheerfully disintegrating sparkles.
This was a bad time. Marked as my house was, I was certain they were coming straight to me. I only emerged from the closet (where I had sequestered my cats in emergency crates) to peel back the corner of a curtain once. I saw the alien cabbage (I’m not good at names) unfurling then, and—
Wave two came a few days after, I think. The cabbages started entering homes. The following days: panic of radio broadcast, stench of overused cat litter, yowling in ears from said cats in caged angst which— did it blend seamlessly at times with the warbling howls of the radio? Did even the radio jockeys in their signal-boosting fortresses come under invasion and gurgle, howl wordlessly until strangulation ceded to dead air?
Ok, so it was mostly panic in the closet.
My neighbor Bob hollered over his fence the last time I went scavenging in my shed. Said a group at the food bank had been talking about offering me up to appease the aliens, only nobody wanted to face down an alien for any reason. He reckoned I had until they found out about drawing straws. I imagined myself chained like Andromeda, awaiting the divine punishment of crushing tentacles.
I thanked him sincerely. He told me to go fuck myself, which I figure is probably fair dues. He’d been a real nice guy, and only accused me of spying for the Chinese once after I put up an obnoxiously large dish for my telescope. The situation had evolved with the aliens, so to speak.
Guess that meant it was time to leave. I never was much of a socialite— not a bad public speaker, just not great at small talk. Anyway, I can read a room just fine. Even the empty walls of my single-occupant single-family home were beginning to jeer.
Yep. Definitely time to leave.