Great Writers-M

Mandy Ashcraft is from earth. She is a science fiction writer and a clinical psychologist.

 

This Will Ruin Your Life but It’s Not Personal

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He stood at the front door and listened before he knocked. It was small but it had been a decent house in the past, before the incident. Before everything changed. The structure itself had become weathered and strange; it was unrecognizable with paint like a blistered sunburn, and nature had run violating fingers across it in vines. He held his breath to listen for movement inside. There was none. The patio air was a hot breath of poverty; the wind screamed into the cracks of the screen door about how much better life could be, would’ve been, will never be, and about things that should never have been. Somewhere in the house, an oscillating fan was plugged in. The curtains in a window fluttered in brief bursts. The sound of it was a broken defibrillator failing to revive the life of the home. “Are you here?” he called out before knocking. This house belonged to his closest friend. Or, someone who used to be, at one time, before the incident.  

Charles wasn’t sure what had actually happened or why, but it had. His friend had changed. And the explanation he was given wasn’t at all comforting or rational or even something he’d really ever considered considering. His dear friend Rob had been abducted by aliens. And, possibly worse depending on who you asked, those aliens had retuned with him. This was about 8 years ago. Rob had informed him via email. What is the proper medium for conveying such a message? Maybe it’s email. The curtain continued to sway rhythmically into the glass that faced the street as Charles tapped on it. The wooden door itself was open, but the screen door was locked, likely rusted solid, and firmly in place. “Rob, you home?”

Rob had always been the better-looking friend. The friend a bartender would take orders promptly from when others had been there twice as long. Some people have a luminescent personality, and Rob was one of them. He was charismatic and tall and people love the combination.

The rusty lock did open finally. The man who came to the door was Rob and also would have a bartender whispering to security. He looked less like himself and more like a fixture from the rotting home had torn itself from the wall and answered the door in a robe. “Hey Charles,” he said. “Come in.”

Charles followed the robe into the kitchen. It was unsurprisingly just as emotionally distraught as the exterior of the home; major depression in the form of plastic cutlery and bottles and banana peels not from any recent trip to the store. And blood. Why was there— 

“I’m sorry you have to see things like this,” said Rob.

Charles studied the pools of red liquid on jade tile; deep red on pale green. The contrast. In another context, this would be a demonstration of the beauty of humanity in the cracks of society. In the cracks of the tile where it pooled. This blood was too vibrant to be old and this tile used to be new, before the incident. “What has happened here?” Charles asked him. His eyes probed the room for sharp objects. Would Rob harm him? He didn’t know. He didn’t know who this man was anymore. His breath was short. Rob’s was not. Rob took long, laborious breaths. There was life inside his skull that seemed to beg, “But at what cost?”  

“I came to check on you. You haven’t responded to my email and honestly man you don’t look well.” 

“I’m doing what I need to do.” 

Silence. The oscillating fan choked on an insect and resumed its business in the corner. 

“Why is there blood? What is it that you need to do?” 

“It’s what I need to do, Charles.” He didn’t blink. Charles wondered if he could. 

“Are you hurting yourself? …are you hurting someone else?”  

He laughed.  

He laughed. 

“This is not funny, Rob. I’m worried about you.”  

“This is my blood. I am just being studied. You know this.” 

“You’re the victim of—of something, of someone, of whatever is going on here, and you look like you’re an hour away from decomposing. What is happening to you? Do you need to go to a hospital?”  

Charles placed his hand on the shoulder of this crypt keeper who used to be his best friend, who used to be Rob, who used to be human. This man danced at his wedding. This man danced at other people’s weddings, even weddings of people he didn’t know. This man was not this man. Jagged shoulder bones clawed through the matted and unwashed cloth.

“He is being studied,” said Rob, about Rob. “And we ask that you please leave unless you’d like to participate.”  

“...we?” 

Charles’ stepped back from the figure. A black banana peel slumped into the sink in a sweaty slime of fluid. The fan was a metronome of reality that interjected the madness in calculated bursts.  

“This is for our knowledge.” The man who looked like Rob said, finally.  

“Knowledge of what?”  

“Of life on your planet.”  

“This has to be an illness Rob. You are sick. This isn’t right—” 

“Rob is dead, Charles. You must accept this.”  

Rob was there, he was standing there. He was wearing a robe. He was standing in his kitchen wearing a robe. He wasn’t dead. He looked like he was dying, sure. Actually, he looked like he had died already. But he was standing in the kitchen, not dead. “You have to stop whatever this is. I’ve been so worried about you.”

He laughed.  

He laughed? 

“This isn’t about you, Charles. This is about knowledge. We have taken your friend for the purpose of knowledge,” came from his mouth. “We allowed him to live as long as possible. We needed to see what it means to be alive. And what it means to die.” 

“So the blood is yours? Rob’s?” 

“Yes. This man named Rob was selected to provide life, which he did for as long as he could. For knowledge.” 

“So what will happen to him? What has happened to my friend?” Charles pleaded to the manipulated corpse, as the consciousness of whatever thing that had used him plucked a morbid guitar of vocal cords in the key of Rob. They drained his life—they had him drain his own life—and they studied him. 

“We move on. Rob has done his part for knowledge.”  

“You leave him dead, and that’s it? You ruined his life, and now this ruins my life!” 

“This will ruin your life, but it’s not personal.” 

Charles backed into the taught cord of the oscillating fan and ripped it from the wall, inadvertently pulling the life support from the dilapidated home. The alien entity that had suspended Rob’s existence for the purpose of conversation was gone with it. A dead man was in the room. His body leaned onto the pale green tile wearing a terrible mask of stained terry cloth that smiled at nothing. But he smiled. 

“What did you learn, then, about life and death?” Charles asked the body. “What did you learn!?”

Summer sunlight poked around into the gaps in the screen door. The tile was actually a beautiful aquamarine when they met. The pools of blood were suddenly very dry, very brown, very old. The man said nothing because he was dead. When the police took him, one of the officers thoughtfully plugged in the fan to help with the smell. The oscillating hum resumed in the way it always had despite the circumstances. Independent of them. The curtain jumped to life as if it somehow knew the answer to the question Charles never received an answer to but didn’t have the language to say it. And so, it would remain a secret again. And again. And again.

​

Striptease Podcast, Episode #97

 

Wendy had conducted her podcast out of the mop closet of a West Texas truck stop for ten months. She was not from Earth, and her name wasn’t really Wendy, but she did work in a mop closet. She slept there, as well. Most of what she knew about human life she’d learned from conversations that floated through rows of salted nuts and beef jerky. She’d picked up pieces of current events, repetitive chitchat about the weather, and details of the love-hate relationship between intestines and jalapeños. All things considered, she enjoyed her time there. The hotdogs that had been on the rollers were free so long as they’d been there for 12 hours, and the manager allowed her to do anything she wanted in the closet so long as she used the mops on the floors once a day. It was a fair trade, considering she was going to destroy their planet anyways.

The world leaders knew about the fate of Earth. They were all avid listeners of Wendy’s invitation-only subscription-based podcast, STRIPTEASE, which trickled vital information into their brains like a hemorrhage that bleeds in 60-minute intervals. The show was sexual in nature, vulgar, and always fantastically titillating. They knew she wasn’t human; STRIPTEASE was a show about her learning the wide-world-of-sex their beloved Earth had to offer. Her episodes were downloaded almost instantly. They were hooked.

She peppered it with details of the world’s impending demise between graphic anecdotes; a whispered secret from a voluptuous extraterrestrial desperate to learn the Kama Sutra— as she explained—“while there was still time.” What she wanted to determine was which humans were worth saving. The planet itself was not worth saving, but it seemed wasteful not to save a few of its assets. She had slipped details of her X-rated broadcast into the private inboxes of the political elite, and they took the bait; she did this partly for convenience, somewhat for entertainment, and a little bit because West Texas was hot and she’d rather stay inside and not have to contact them in person.

STRIPTEASE brought them like flies to the mysterious puddle of liquid in aisle three. After 96 episodes, her listener rate was at an all-time high, because the listeners themselves were at a frantic personal all-time low having knowledge of the end of the world and no way of publicly explaining how they’d learned of it.

She recorded episode #97 on a Tuesday. The fact that it was Tuesday was arbitrary, really, but it felt like the right time. With her microphone propped on a mop head, she leaned into it and in her most seductive voice, offered them salvation. She dangled her words in front of their auditory canals. She tried to make her breasts sound bigger when she said it. She wasn’t sure if that was a thing, but if it was a thing, she wanted to make sure she did it. There was a large ship, she told them, one single large and shiny ship, that could preserve only humanity’s best and brightest. They had 20 days to narrow it down, and to meet at the ship. Ending the show with a lengthy description of her first time with a pizza delivery guy and arguably too much detail involving garlic butter, Wendy cut the recording off. 

The elite listeners decided immediately who humanity’s best and brightest were: themselves.

There wasn’t going to be any drawing of Nobel Laureates’ names out of a hat. They would wave goodbye to the actual best, the actual brightest, and to those with whom they were having an affair. They would board the rescue ship to New Earth, a lavishly terraformed planet of hope. Population: the original Earth’s best and brightest. Before the episode was over, they’d already fallen in love with the possibilities; this new world, not muddied by the kinds of people who didn’t know what hollandaise was and the people who couldn’t afford open-heart surgery from eating too much of it. They deserved this chance at survival, to sow humanity’s most powerful genetics into the Milky Way. They packed and counted the days quietly, brunching heavily, then lunching heavily, and then drinks-turned-into-dinnering heavily. There was something about leaving everyone else to their demise without warning that brought up a queasy sense of guilt. Beef Wellington absorbs guilt really well, probably because of the duxelles and maybe the pastry, so it was ultimately a non-issue. Life on original Earth continued as status quo. Wendy mopped the truck stop a handful of times, ate wrinkly tubes of meat from the rollers, and watched a woman give birth in the chip aisle (more mopping), but never once clicked the ON button of her microphone. 

When the time came, Wendy left the mops and ventured out into the soft splashes of sun-lit bottle caps, candy wrappers, and condoms decorating the parking lot. The sticky sea glass of truck stops. The ship was where she said it would be, a mile up the road from where she stood. They were already there, her entire listener base, the leaders of the world. Everyone with an “I got an official email” in their grab bag of explanations, high atop a pedestal of squeaky-clean morality, should anyone ask. No one asked. New Earth awaited them; it deserved them, and they deserved it. Daylight slid its promiscuous fingers across the curves of the ship’s metal exterior. It was almost impossibly shiny, sweating bullets of liquid silver into the open air. Wendy had in her hands a pamphlet she had printed in the mop closet. It contained details of their new world for the passengers to peruse. Strapped into their seats, they ruffled the pages excitedly, nervously. The duxelles-to-pastry ratio must’ve been sufficiently absorbent, because no one seemed to ruffle pages with remorse. Wendy watched from the ground as her ship was auto-piloted from the rocky pathway on which it stood ever since she’d arrived in it herself. She blinked and it was gone. 

“The best and brightest,” she said to herself and a small cactus. It was warm, and the breeze was far superior to the fan in the closet. She looked down at the New Earth information, fresh black ink smearing beneath her thumb. These passengers weren’t wrong per se; New Earth would have been a great place for them to coordinate diamonds with DNA, if it existed. It was alarming how little it took to convince them it did. Wendy had given them a photo of Earth from the vantage point of their one moon, just having rotated Australia. She erased Bermuda altogether since it seemed to be in an odd location to begin with. She typed “New Earth” at the bottom of the page, and there it was. They were going to be so disappointed when the ship drifted away indefinitely, irreversibly; a horrifying strangulation fueled by greed would reduce the ship to a frigid catacomb, albeit shiny. Very shiny. 

The best and brightest would never step forward as such, but those standing in the way of them would. Wendy knew that. She also knew that sex was a powerful force throughout the universe, and Earth was no exception to the rule. She fed them information by way of that mop closet production carefully, and in a context that had their brains drunk on a cocktail of hormones and fear; it was like being spooned a nice winter squash bisque through a glory hole. It was satisfying and dangerous and had their inflated egos clenched in a barbed fist. Wendy went back to the truck stop and grabbed a 13th-hour hotdog off of the rollers, with a wink from the owner signifying that if she was brave enough to eat it, then by all means. The true best and brightest were the rest of the people, the ones that had been abandoned by leaders who couldn’t recognize their own world map if Australia was facing the wrong way. Wendy had decided that she wouldn’t detonate anything, around the same time she decided she wasn’t getting on that ship either. The button itself was drowned in electric purple Fabuloso, deactivated and lavender-scented. It was a Tuesday, and she remembered so because it really didn’t matter what day it was.

 

Cabbage of Earth

 

Charlie Mathis took satisfied sips of his morning coffee as he looked out over his cabbages, seeing cabbages and only cabbages which is ideal when you’re a cabbage farmer. His gaze stopped on a strange arrangement of concentric circles burned into his field; the kind you’d see in a tabloid story about UFOs. There was surely a less tabloid-worthy explanation for the symbols left in his field, his personal comfort zone insisted as he scrambled to connect a few logical dots. “Those damn teenagers!” he shouted, not referencing any particular ones as there were none living within 20 miles of his Texas property; just damn teenagers in general. Charlie was in his late thirties but his isolated cabbage-soup-rich lifestyle left him one creaky porch rocking chair short of being a crotchety old man. He didn’t like to be bothered, by anyone or anything.

The optic nerve spasmed in his left eye as it landed on something else. Movement. But it wasn’t teenagers. A small humanoid figure was casually shoving one of the cabbages into a --spacecraft. Why couldn’t it just be teenagers?

“Who are you? I’ll sic my dogs on you! Or shoot you!” he called as he grabbed his shotgun and ran towards it, stopping suddenly when the figure turned to face him. Rather than run, it dropped to its knees and began tugging at another cabbage in the dirt, which in its small hands was comparable to a large watermelon in the hands of a man. It seemed to disregard the farmer, not in a menacing way, more of a “kindly leave me to my task of stealing your crops” sort of way. Another leafy ball was lugged to the craft; shoved into it like the carry-on bag of the last passenger to board a regional plane. The creature wasn’t in a hurry. Charlie would’ve sicked his dogs on it if he had any dogs; the threat alone was usually sufficient, but it appeared that this time he would need actual dogs. He made a mental note to adopt a few beagles, or whatever breed would best respond to “get ‘em boys!” In the meantime, he would have to “get ‘em” himself. He couldn’t risk anyone finding out about such a bizarre encounter; media ridicule could add red ink to his struggling finances. If profits were any lower than they already were, he might have just climbed into that spacecraft and buckled up. 

“I’ll shoot you!” he repeated, to no response. Not that he figured an otherworldly being would have taken English as a Second Language; Charlie wasn’t a brilliant man but he wasn’t exceedingly dense either. He just figured the large shotgun would pole vault over the language barrier. The figure stared at him, at the gun, and slid its slender arm into the ship to retrieve something. Charlie reacted quickly to the possibility that it was groping for a weapon, some kind of laser or anything that could send his house up in flames, and pulled his trigger. A nearby cabbage exploded. He shot a second time successfully, or unsuccessfully from the point of view of the one inhaling buckshot. It didn’t scream, or try to escape. It didn’t wield a weapon of its own after all. It didn’t pop or fizz or explode. Another alien didn’t erupt from its chest cavity. There were no lasers involved. It merely sighed, and rapidly withered to the ground, with nothing but a small notecard in its hand. A 4x6 white index card. Charlie pocketed it as he rolled the craft into his barn, and masked it with an available out-of-sight-out-of-mind shield from reality that could also be identified as a tractor cover. It wasn’t as if he could recycle it. He looked at the card, covered in symbols, one of them the exact symbol that had been burned into his field a year prior. He wondered if it might be a list of directions, and if it was, his seemed to be the last stop before it reached its destination. As he dug a shallow grave for the extraterrestrial sack of Earth bullets, he wondered if he might have eventually been able to communicate with it, or if he’d have been the one being buried if he’d ventured to try. It was too late to find out; at least he was on the winning side of the dirt. Padding back to the house, he decided that what had just happened had never actually happened at all. Maybe it was a dream? The coffee grounds expired six months ago, this could be a bad reaction. Or is there such thing as a hallucinogenic cabbage fungus? He attempted to overwrite his memory of it with the words “it never happened” on a loop. He would adopt some dogs, though, in case it ever happened a second time.

He nearly heaved his expired liquid breakfast onto the index card as he scanned the front page of the newspaper. “Crop Circle Leaves Local Corn Farmer A-Maize-d” was the headline his local paper had decided on, where he just knew they’d genuinely delighted in the idea that their maize joke was also corny, and an acquaintance of his smiled in black and white. In the photo he pointed toward a charred field. An overhead view showed a peculiar symbol Charlie recognized; it was also on the index card. He felt panicked, sweaty, like he’d eaten too many jalapeños after drinking too much caffeine and his organs weren’t sure what to make of the combination without resulting in something biologically volcanic. Charlie walked to the barn and pulled the tractor cover from the small craft. He pressed the door and it opened outward.

“Maybe there’s something else in here, something to explain what’s happening,” he said aloud. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if he found an answer; business aside, going public about alien contact would mean every cashier and waitress and damn teenager in Texas would ask him if he was probed for the rest of his life and it would probably even be whispered at his funeral. Here lies Charlie, who might have been probed by aliens. I wasn’t probed, I was robbed, he thought to himself. The metallic spacecraft was the size of an industrial washing machine, and could accommodate the small humanoid being and about 5 of his largest, most profitable cabbages comfortably. Of those there were two, and also what appeared to be several bunches of carrots. Regular earth carrots. There wasn’t a single useful piece of evidence in the craft; no maps, light sabers, or anything to probe anyone with. Unless the carrots…? No, he decided, that’s not what the carrots were for. It was odd. Cabbage, carrots, and now corn? Were they studying human sources of food? His nerve endings sipped a paranoid cocktail of images depicting humans in a zoo, being fed harvested plants from their native planet, zoologists working had to recreate the human diet to toss at abductees for entertainment. He’d buried one of them, whatever they were, but the newest crop circle meant it had friends. Or at least co-workers. For the first time in a long time, he felt afraid.

“Gary,” he said into his cellphone; Gary was the smiling face who was, that very morning, a-maize-d. “Gary this is Charlie. Can you talk privately? It’s urgent.” 

There was a small bar a few miles up the road that also sold terrible burgers. They agreed to meet for drinks and possibly a terrible burger, depending on how many drinks it took for that to sound like a wise decision, gastrointestinally speaking. That day it took both men exactly two beers before taking their wise decision with extra cheese. 

“Charlie, why are we drinking at 10:30 in the morning?” Gary asked, pulling at something in his burger patty that looked to Charlie like a band aid. “Are you upset about that article in the paper? It’s not going to affect local business—”

“Gary, I had the same thing happen in my cabbage field. It was a different symbol, but I—” he took a swig of beer to loosen gristly meat bits wedged between his teeth, “—I saw the creature that made it. I shot it. And I took this card from it.” He unfolded the index card from his front pocket. Gary reacted all too calmly to the card and the shooting, even for their level of mid-morning intoxication. “Gary, what else do you know?”

It wasn’t a band aid, fortunately, in the meat patty. It was just a piece of plastic wrapping likely peeled from a cheese slice. Not exactly palatable, but certainly more hygienic, and Charlie called that a win. The old corn farmer plucked it from his burger and continued eating. “This has been happening to all of us ‘round here,” he said. “The Jeffreys grow those big fat radishes; their fields were covered in triangles a while back.” He looked at the index card. “These actually, fourth one down.” He pointed. “And those big round circles at the bottom were way out west of town in some tomatoes I think.”

“So this is…a list?” 

“Seems to be.” 

“Each crop circle or symbol was left with a different type of crop. So they were going down this list and taking some of each thing. Why?”

“Hell if I know,” said Gary. “I only let the paper know so I could get that girl JoAnn’s attention. You seen her around lately? Last I saw she was selling some kind of candles—”

“Don’t you care?” Charlie was not a patient man. 

“‘Course I care, JoAnn got a boob job.”

Gary was a dead end. But he’d figured out one thing from their conversation; the creatures burning symbols in their fields were following a list, marking the items they needed, and then simply hauling them off later. He flashed back on his earlier idea of human exhibits. If they were taking things they needed to sustain human life elsewhere, the next logical action would be to take the humans themselves. Or had they begun that already? Come to think of it he hadn’t seen the town’s only attractive female JoAnn in a while; she was worthy of being beamed up for display purposes. This human comes with enhanced features!

Parting ways with Gary and his regrettable plate of crumbs, Charlie headed out to the Jeffreys’ property. The ones with the triangles and big fat radishes. They lived at the edge of town and everyone knew their name. A massive wrought iron gate with JEFFREY welded into it and solar-powered accent lighting ensured you weren’t accidentally unaware of them being the fanciest growers of radishes in all the land. It was unlike anything else in their humble hometown, and the locals had taken to pretentious whispering about their alleged pretentiousness. Turns out, the flavor of irony is masked well by beer. Charlie pulled up to the gate and found it open, so he continued up the dirt road that ended at the house that root vegetables built. 

A middle-aged man in shorts and a bathrobe sat on the front step reading their local paper. Gary’s smiling face looked up at Charlie in black and white from the front page as he approached the man, presumably Mr. Jeffrey. He didn’t look especially fancy. Maybe his robe was cashmere? Charlie wasn’t sure he knew what cashmere would look like. 

“Can you believe all that? About the crop circles?” Charlie asked. The man looked up at him. “Name’s Charlie Mathis, I live across town. I don’t mean to bother you.”

“Sure I can believe it. I had crop circles. Actually I had crop triangles,” he sighed. “Is that a thing? Crop triangles?”

“I suppose they could be any shape. The things making them left this card, and these symbols on it.” He extended the index card. “It seems to be a list. I came to see if you had any more information.” 

Looking at the card, Mr. Jeffrey bit his lower lip, perplexed. “I wonder if they got all of these things yet, if it’s a list like you say? Maybe they’re not done?”

“You mean maybe they have other things to get on this list? Maybe some of the symbols mean— I dunno, weapons? Cows? People?”

“Could mean anything. Maybe weapons, cows, and people.” Mr. Jeffrey laughed. “Or maybe the last symbol means ‘you can only destroy the human race after you eat your vegetables’.” 

“Doesn’t this worry you?” It was beginning to seem like the meeting with Gary all over again; a cholesterol-free version.

“Oh sure it terrifies me. But I’m not about to go to war with them, whatever they are. Let them have the crops. They grow back.” There are always options when faced with unusual circumstances, and Jeffery seemed to have taken the “horse blinders” approach to facing this one. Don’t look at them, don’t look into it, and water your big fat radishes; ostentatious gates don’t pay for themselves.

After about fifteen minutes of small-talk about radishes and cabbages and the weather, and also a brief mention of JoAnn 2.0, Charlie convinced Mr. Jeffrey—whose first name was Jeff which was unfortunate but easy to remember—to assist him with one thing. He asked that he simply help him make a list of what symbols locals had already quietly mentioned and strategically downplayed or, in one instance, had photographed for the front page of the local paper. They spent the afternoon calling around and drawing symbols based on verbal descriptions. The too-early beer and too-terrible burger Charlie had consumed that morning made his brain feel like it was marinating in lukewarm drippings from the meat patty. 

“It looks like everything on this card matches up with something grown around here, except one. Four circles in a row. No one has seen that one, at least no one in this area that anyone’s talked to.”

“So there you go,” said Jeff, “the symbol that means blow up the cows or whatever you said earlier.” He smiled. 

“You won’t be laughing if it means blow up the cows.” 

“So long as it doesn’t mean blow up the radishes. Come on Charlie, what are you trying to do here? Stir things up? Leave it alone, maybe they’ll go away.” 

“I want to know what’s happening in this town. They seem to have targeted us for a reason. What if we could warn people?” His previous concerns of negative press and/or having to watch his CPA keep the subtract button warm on her calculator had been dropped the moment he’d realized he wasn’t alone in his experience. The town in which he was born, and the one he hoped to die in but not too soon, could be under attack. It was hard to tell; what he did know was that their properties were in something’s scope. There was even a handwritten list. So what was their next move?

Jeff Jeffrey tied his potentially-cashmere bathrobe around himself as he walked quietly to the kitchen. Charlie could hear him slide a wooden drawer open. He returned with a long rectangle box labelled Aluminum Foil.

“Here’s your hat,” he said. He tossed it down in front of his visitor. “At least that’s what the rest of the country will say. You gotta let it go. We can’t be known for stuff like this.” 

“They could be dangerous! And they know how to find us!” 

The man in the bathrobe sat down. He sighed, heavily. With his right hand he picked at a label on a jar of pickled radishes. It took him several minutes to respond, in an uncomfortable silence for Charlie who was also desperately wading through a hangover.

“Do you really think we need to warn people?” he asked, finally. 

“I think we do. So that maybe we can find out what it all means before it’s too late.” 

“Warn people about what?” said a female voice as it entered the room, carried by a woman who promptly booted JoAnn off of her pedestal in Charlie’s mind. Mrs. Jeffrey sat down next to her husband at the table. “I’m Mila, by the way.”

“We were talking about the triangles. Charlie here has had some crop circles himself. He thinks it’s a list of things they’re taking. He thinks they might take people next.” 

Mila looked ravishingly alarmed. Beautifully terrified. Exquisitely fearful. Charlie decided he shouldn’t think of her that way. She was Mrs. Jeffrey and should be merely alarmed, terrified, and fearful. “We’re going to be abducted!?” 

“No. We’re just taking precautions. Letting people know it could happen, so they’re not caught off-guard,” Charlie tried to soothe her with something equally frightening but re-worded. Like putting a big orange safety cone in front of a toxic spill.

________

It didn’t take 24 hours to ignite their quaint farm town with worry. Worry of alien invasions. Worry of abductions. Worry of probing. People never forget to mention probes in regards to anything coming from anywhere that isn’t Earth, where a vast universe of possibilities seems to be whittled away to human colorectal exams. The local paper accepted Charlie’s compiled information and evidence in the same quiet and understated way that a famished lion accepts a zebra. Not only had their a-maize-d farmer had this experience, much of their town had similar ones. Their town was the target of something, or someone, from another planet. Fear was rolled neatly and bound with rubber bands, tossed at the front doors of the unsuspecting locals. The zebra was picked clean.

It had been a week since the breaking news and Charlie sat with Jeff Jeffrey at the same bar he’d first met with Gary, once again eating a terrible burger. Jeff didn’t have one, because he was pretentious. Or maybe because they were terrible. On an old television set, a local woman revealed to a journalist that her carrots had been dug up about eight days prior, with four circles burned into her land, and thus the last mysterious symbol on the card was identified. 

“Mila wants to move,” Jeff said. “Doesn’t want to sit around and wait for them to come.” 

“That’s a little extreme, I think.” 

“Extreme?” Jeff looked at him. “We just told the entire town to be afraid for their lives. And now it’s ‘extreme’ if they’re afraid for their lives?”

“We don’t even know if they’re coming back. We just told people to watch for them.”

“Yeah, but you tell people to watch their backs and they panic,” said Jeff as he watched Charlie mop his wet plate with the last piece of hamburger bun. “We weren’t even sure we were in danger at all.”

“Isn’t it better to be safe than sorry?” Charlie felt a pang of guilt, scrambling for the comfort of a classic phrase generally held in high regard. Was it not always better to be safe than sorry? 

“But what if we’re safe and sorry?”

________

Two thousand light-years away, a small humanoid creature shuffled through a box of index cards, pulling a few out and glancing over them, and every time replacing them in the box. 

He sighed, annoyed. He rifled through cards again. 

“I guess 86 the imported cabbage salad,” he said to his sous-chef in their native language, who took a dry-erase marker to a white board in their kitchen to notify the waitstaff that it would be unavailable. “We never received the cabbage of Earth.” 

He pulled another index card from the recipe box. 

​

Utopia

 

She was on her way to the funeral of a family friend who had passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was 117. She drove the speed limit, as she always did. Everyone always did; it was considerate. 

​

Her dress was long, form-fitting, and black, as if she were wearing her own shadow in hand-sewn lace. She smiled to herself. The funeral was not to be a somber event; he had lived a long life, free of complaints, free of regrets. She figured his body was merely exhausted from 117 years of laughter and champagne toasts. 

​

In fact, in Marcy’s town, people rarely had a complaint about anything at all. She thought about her own life as she drove. Her workplace was a convenient distance from home, and her job pleasant. Her boss was kind, and she worked hours that tipped the work-life balance in perpetual favor of the latter. Her parents loved her, and each other, and the highlights of her childhood were often revisited in a glittering snow globe of memories. She had borne a healthy baby boy and girl to the man of her dreams, and prided herself in this decidedly balanced family structure. It warmed her to see her friends, co-workers, and acquaintances do the same. Residents of her town held the same political stance, same religious views, and the same socioeconomic status. They had no debates; there was nothing to debate. They had no fights; there was nothing to fight about. Everyone was respected and respectful. It was what they’d always fought for, in the old days, long before she’d been born. She had only heard rumors about the way it used to be, but the past seemed to be this haunting entity in the room you were forbidden to acknowledge. It had piqued her curiosity, and yet she’d never dared ask questions. The entity whispered softly only to those who cared to wonder, and so few ever did. The past was meant to be shameful.

 

What she had gathered was this: The people had felt tension between opposing views, a strain between widely varied lifestyles, and a reason to debate when jagged-edged political or religious views were coarsely mixed. It was in the past that they’d ever felt a reason to threaten or feel threatened, and had then agreed that any threat at all was inherently evil. They, as a society, went to war against such evil. There should be no winners, nor losers, they’d said. Control all variables and you eliminate any tension, they’d said. There should be no grades in school, there should be no scores in sports; these numbers were emotionally crippling. Fair meant fair, and they banded together to achieve it. And they had! It was utopia, they’d said. Finally, it was what they’d fought for. There was never a reason to feel anything but happy, joyful, grateful. That’s what they always said.

 

It had been decades since someone had committed a crime; there never seemed a reason to commit one. The prison had been turned into an art gallery, one Marcy often visited. She’d always been drawn to it, even as a child. It had been decades since someone had the desire to create anything new, because art is a manifestation of deep emotion, and often some degree of discontent. The paintings there were quite old and some were in need of restoration, but the gallery itself was pristine. It was nearly impossible to tell that it had ever been a prison, although she wasn’t at all sure what a prison would have looked like. The concept of incarceration in its entirety was a hushed subject of the old days; another relic buried by an idyllic victory. 

 

The locals enjoyed a sip of wine on an occasional stroll through the displays, where vintage canvas pieces from the pre-utopian days were neatly arranged, and they always politely commented on the lovely color schemes. They were remarkable to look at, full of emotions the people there had never had a reason to feel, and so their brush-stroke language was foreign. It didn’t translate. The pieces hung on the walls, screaming a history that no one could understand. Something in Marcy could hear them, though; distinctly, in an otherwise deafened room. She’d discovered this at a young age. She returned to the gallery often, without explanation, to quietly share in a sensation otherwise confined to its own timeline. This way of living was better, they’d said, because everything is perfect when nothing is ever unbalanced. When nothing is ever wrong. When no one is ever cruel. There was no paint color that quite resonated with the innocence of having felt nothing. Virgin brains were carried by the people of Marcy’s town, with untouched neurological receptors. They knew how to love, they experienced passion, in the same way a greeting card expresses such things. Flat. Superficial. 

Well-intended, of course, but lacking a beating heart. The paintings on the walls sobbed alone. 

 

What was sadness, in Marcy’s town, anyways? It was utopia. They were not immortal; death stalks even the happiest man in the world, but in that town, no one’s obituary was ever embellished. A creative literary sanding and refinishing of a person’s life story was no longer required, because polish is wasted on what is already flawless. 

 

Marcy arrived at her destination. The local cemetery plots were manicured daily, and the markers equal size and shape. The afternoon service began on time. Death was a greeting card just as life had been, and as Marcy stepped into the building to attend the funeral, she became acutely aware of the watered-down emotions of those around her. It seemed strange; full of people and yet somehow vacant. Sterile. She noticed there was nothing on the walls, with eggshell paint offering a lukewarm embrace of the casket. She stepped into another room of empty walls. Another. She paced slowly throughout the home, which smelled unwaveringly like vanilla and not a single wooden board creaked on the floor. She heard the silence, the cleansed sound of utopia. She’d been there before but this time she stared at the emptiness; this time it felt different. The walls were bare in the last building your body would ever belong to, and its tragic symbolism stung her eyes. Sadness crept into her as if it was provided intravenously. It overwhelmed her. It was the smashing of protective ice to reveal an entire ocean below, full of consciousness in its entirety. She had been conditioned to dance lightly on that ice, for her own protection. Utopia was fragile; you could never question it or it would cease to exist.

 

Marcy sped away from the funeral home above the speed limit. Her adrenal glands injected pure energy into her veins. The lace on her black dress tore as she pushed her way past a family into the current art gallery, former prison. Broken strings hung from the dress, exposing raw, delicate skin. She ran through the hallways. She ran until she found it, her favorite painting in the entire collection. It was not a portrait of anything in particular, but contained several colors, light and dark. Some of the strokes were violent, and others appeared sensually applied. It was the artist’s soul dried onto an old piece of canvas; it was an amalgamation of whatever they felt when they painted it and whatever you felt when you looked at it. She pulled it from the wall, and damaged lace clung to it as she carried it away from the gallery. There was no guard; there had never been a reason for one.

 

She returned to the funeral home and carried the painting down the center aisle in the middle of the funeral service. Faces turned, and eyes carefully followed her. She moved forward, the dress ripping at her side. The attendees were a silent cloud of dark fabrics. The speaker at the podium seemed unsure whether to continue. Marcy dragged an antique walnut table to the wall behind the casket, and hoisted the large painting onto it. It loomed above the body. It represented the totality of life, because it was itself a piece of human existence that could never die. Marcy lowered herself to the floor and said nothing. The strained fabric of her dress tickled and tugged at her skin, but she didn’t adjust it. 

 

The guests appeared uncomfortable and confused. They stared at the vibrant window into eternity that she had provided that 117 year old soul from his box in the last room he'd ever enter.

 

Marcy stood. “Life is bittersweet, a flavor we’ve not tasted before,” she proclaimed. “We’ve been cocooned from the truth. The fight, the debate, the tension throw sparks at the dry leaves of evolution. Paint stirred with tears, with blood, with intoxicants meant to drown out the world if even for a moment, with anything that ever captured undiluted awareness of what it is to be human; that is a medium that preserves what matters.”

 

The stolen painting stared down at people who had never clung to another human being, not once, for the sense of safety and relief it provides.

 

“It is the claws of despair that rip depth into what it means to truly love. It is the corrosive way that grief carves itself into the human psyche that defines it, reshapes it, strengthens its bonds with the things around it. If you are numb to the negative, you are also numb to the positive.”

 

The people stared at her. And then, for the first time, they reacted as individuals. Some laughed, others cried. Some reached out and hugged the person next to them. Some ran to the casket, others to the painting. Some came up to Marcy. Others were angry. They stormed from the service. Marcy felt they’d not even realized the shallowness of their pool until given a glimpse into the ocean. She felt she hadn’t just shown them how, she’d shown them why.