Alien Virus Love Disaster

by Abbey Mei Otis

  “Maybe it’s someone’s tumor.”

  Time swims through the emptiness of the warehouse. Maybe I should make us get up, but I don’t. I wonder if something amazing is going to happen.

  Eventually Creigh and Marko drift away. Creigh’s got some girl. Marko I think is buying drugs.

  People here don’t really hang out with each other. There are the ones passing through, whom don’t want to get to know you. There are the ones who have been here way too long, who you don’t want to get to know. Then there are all the ones who don’t know when they’re leaving or where they’re going. But none of us wants to admit that. We all smell like low tide.

  We spend our days filling out job applications for the night shift in biofuel stations and demo crews. No one’s hiring. We sit under overpasses and wait for religion to find us, but the roads are empty.

  There’s a metal staircase bolted to the side of the store so you can get up on the roof. One time I dragged a mat up and tried sleeping there, but I got all this black moss and roof tar on my blankets. I worry I’ll have dreams about mildew, or about the people I love getting crushed in a whirlpool. You’d think these things would consume me. But I hardly ever dream.

  You’d think more people would jump off the roof. Mostly they just stand and stare out. The view isn’t great. Wheat fields, gray trees. Convenience stores and laundromats and self-storage parks with most of the units holding families. One day I can imagine standing up there, squinting at the seam of Earth and sky, watching the sea rise come over the horizon like cavalry.

  Sea rise. What an idiot word for something so huge. But you can’t call it a hurricane, or a tsunami. You can’t even call it unexpected, since it just creeps up year by year. Sea rise. Like someone snuck in your house and cut your balls off, and then said, also, I’m sorry, but you can’t live here anymore.

  I think I’m going out but I end up kneeling by the wading pool again. The thing hasn’t even rolled over. I plant my hands in the water. Cold laps at my wrists. I make fists and watch my knuckles rise out of the water like two archipelagos. Flatten my hands and they sink back down.

  I lean in so close to the thing that my nose almost touches it. It smells like cold sweat. It shines like it’s been cut out of some larger animal. I think about the shamans who licked toads and understood the future. I imagine my limbs flooded with visions of warmth and glory.

  I press my tongue against its flesh.

  Creigh says, “Asa?” and I leap up and splash water on both our shirts. He looks at me, then at the thing. He wants something so badly that I can’t tell what it is. “I kind of feel like it has a message for us,” he says.

  Sometimes I hate how Creigh says things out loud.

  Marko’s sitting in our sleeping space, hands planted on the floor, high out of his skull. I sit next to him. I pretend I’m high too. His skin is turning the color of concrete. The warehouse ceiling rises three stories above us.

  “It’s like a cathedral,” I tell Marko.

  “It’s an old Walmart,” he says. “You’re full of shit.”

  “I mean, the space inside is like the space inside a cathedral. It’s so big.”

  I don’t add, and all those people clutching shopping carts, wasn’t that a kind of prayer?

  “You can’t have the space inside a cathedral without the cathedral, idiot.” Marko tilts away from me. “You can’t just compare one volume of air to another volume of air.”

  I always forget how pills turn him aggressively rational. “What would you know about cathedrals anyway, Friday? Cathedral would’ve just sunk your island faster.”

  He shakes his heavy head, keeps shaking like he forgot to stop. “Home didn’t need a cathedral.” He speaks like he’s watching birds take flight. “Didn’t need any fucking cathedral. You have no idea.”

  People come to look at the thing. Some girls no one likes. A mom and dad and three kids, dressed like they must have divvied up the same 5-pack of undershirts. The kids lay their shitty limbless action figures in the pool. “In case it wants to play.” Kids who live here have more shitty limbless action figures than they could ever want.

  One of the girls dangles a necklace over the water on a limp wrist. It’s made all of feathers and faux old coins. She smiles nervously as she drops it, watches it settle under the water with wide eyes like it’s a thousand fathoms away.

  “—not a sea creature!” Marko is saying to someone. “Why would we keep that around?”

  I walk over and he turns to me. He turns to everyone. “Doesn’t it bother you? Eels wiggling around the bathroom where you learned to piss in a pot? Bigass crabs on the sofa where Pilar let you touch her tits the first time?”

  No one meets his eyes.

  An older woman and her husband kneel by the pool. She’s holding a souvenir mug with Sunny Key West! emblazoned on its side. She sinks the mug into the water, dips up a cupful, pours it over the thing’s back. The water unfurls in a glassy ribbon, sluices over and makes the thing shine.

  Marko stands watch over the people drifting in and out, his body hunched in a shape I recognize from somewhere. The man and woman take turns pouring. When they go they leave the mug behind. Marko crosses his arms, sets his feet wide, watches them leave. I realize he looks like my dad.

  Someone mentions that there’s a woman out front looking for day laborers so I go outside. There’s no one there.

  I feel an ache to go back to the thing, which seems weird so I resist. Instead I lean against the wall of the warehouse. Big plastic letters are tacked up on the wall. They used to say something more but all that’s left is MART. Someone added words with yellow spray paint so now it says, Saint MART’s Home for Flooded Children. Back when this was a store, the letters would glow at night. If I were standing here then, I’d be bathed in light.

  Creigh comes out waving the secretary like a surrender flag. No signal, no signal. I’ve seen commercials where they take people a mile underground and their secretaries still plug them into the world. Not in Saint Mart’s.

  “Ugh.” Creigh folds the secretary into an airplane. “Wanna go fly it off the roof?”

  On the roof we sit with our legs over the edge. Creigh’s knees are scabbed like a kid’s. The secretary sails on the breeze for a moment, creased screen flickering. Then it takes a nosedive and crashes into the parking lot.

  For a while we stare at the tiny dot of it on the pavement and don’t say anything. I bite my lip.

  “I couldn’t wait to get out of Norfolk,” I tell Creigh. “You’re not supposed to miss places you couldn’t wait to get out of.” I hold up my bandaged hand. “This? It wasn’t cause I saw some dude hitting on Cheyenne. She’s trash. I don’t even care anymore.”

  Creigh feeds the silence. I’m surprised he doesn’t ask what the real reason was, and then I’m angry at myself for wanting him to ask, and then I try to let it pass but the words bust out. “I went by this building. With a sign. It looked like, I don’t know, it looked like this dance studio where my little sister took ballet. That was it. So I punched it. The wall. Really hard.”

  The silence grows and grows. There’s a breeze. There’s a sunset so chemical and resplendent it’s hard to look at. My ass starts to hurt from sitting on gravel. “She wasn’t even good.” I don’t know why I add this. “My sister. She sucked at ballet.”

  More silence, and all of a sudden I get up and take the stairs really fast, because I have this feeling that Creigh is crying and I don’t want to look and find out.

  I walk straight to the back of the store where the wading pool is. The people have drifted away. I think the thing is alone, but coming around the partition I hit Marko. He looks like I caught him with his dick out.

  He swallows and says, “It keeps getting stiller.”

  There are times when I can feel water rising through my skull, lapping at the top of my brain. Until I take a d
eep breath I’m not sure that my throat isn’t clogged with brine.

  “Hey, Marko,” I say. “How about you prove to me that magic is real.”

  He smells like Natty Ice. “Fine.” He sighs. “How about, you tell me the name of my island, I’ll give you all the magic in the world. Hell, I’ll give you the first spells the wind gods used to sing land up from water.”

  I clench my teeth. I look at the floor. I kick the partition shelf and it clangs so that someone yells at me to quiet the fuck down.

  “Huh, Asa? What’s the name of my island?”

  I glance at the wading pool, but it’s so dark I can’t see the thing. Probably it couldn’t give me an answer anyway. Marko sighs and walks away.

  Creigh pokes me awake the next morning. His fingernails are so bitten they leave blood on my sleeve. “The thing,” he says. He looks at me but not at me. “I think it’s dead.”

  I walk with him to the wading pool. The thing has curled itself on the towel. It’s shrunk down to a quarter of its former size, skin wrinkled and split like chapped lips. The face is unchanged, same sickened grimace only now in miniature. It’s kind of crusty. A great cloud of mucus has oozed out of it, soaked the towel, slicked the water surface with iridescence. Swirls of purple, turquoise, gold. Marko plunges his hand into the water, retrieves his Trudy Keane novel. His arm comes out sheathed in rainbows.

  I poke the thing. It’s like poking a dried apple. I wonder if it will start to smell. I wonder if I should call my sister and tell her how beautiful she was when she danced.

  “We should bury it,” says Creigh.

  “My book,” says Marko. “Fucking weirdo ruined my book.”

  We take it out to the strip of dirt behind the warehouse. There’s a chain-link fence separating the parking lot from the highway, and shrimpy trees and vines and stuff hug the wire. We pick a spot under some honeysuckle.

  Creigh goes at the dirt with a pickaxe as long as he is, flailing so hard I can see the muscles of his back through his T-shirt. He looks animal and full of rage. I’m scared to interrupt him so the hole gets bigger and bigger, way bigger than the shrunken thing needs.

  I hold it against my chest, wrapped in a pillowcase. I’m holding a husk. Everything that gave it weight and substance has run out in a thin layer, dispersed by the water. I lower it into the pit.

  We stare down into the hole and I ask if anyone wants to say anything.

  Marko tosses the book in, shrugging. “Shit was ruined anyway.”

  Creigh looks like the only words he wants to say are in languages lost to him.

  We pack dirt into the hole and stamp it down. Marko goes inside. I kind of think Marko’s on those pills too much, and I wonder if I should say something to him. Maybe tomorrow.

  Things aren’t going to change. We aren’t going to get jobs. Animals aren’t going to pad through our dreams and whisper the answers. The sea will keep creeping. The Earth will grow smaller and shiver in its sleep.

  Creigh works his fingers into the chain link and rattles it so honeysuckle leaves leap off and flutter to the ground. Sometimes Creigh surprises me.

  “It was stupid anyway,” he says.

  “You don’t know that. It could have been some kind of extraterrestrial genius. It could have been the second coming of the goddamn Messiah.”

  “No.” Creigh invents an alphabet in the dirt with his shoe. “No. I mean. It was stupid to think we could save it.”

  Sweetheart

  Paxton is your baby boy, born just after you got out of the army, your peacetime child. He turned six last month but already he’s got a sweetheart who lives next door. He makes her crowns out of dandelions and shares his FruitBlaster cups with her. She brings him marbles that hum and lets him position her antennae into funny shapes. He has a lisp that the speech therapist has given up on, and she has clicking mandibles, but in their invented language of coos and giggles they are both poets. They sit out in the yard and very seriously lay grass on each other’s arms, and the sunlight cocoons them.

  You and Denise watch them through the kitchen window. Denise is an old army buddy and she gets it. All of it.

  You say something like, No surprise he’s got a sweetheart already. Just look at his daddy.

  Denise laughs rough and loud. Regular little Casanova, isn’t he? Regular little intergalactic Casanova. Damn. And I can’t even get a date.

  You want to date an ET?

  She shudders. Lord, girl, don’t joke. Then she bites her lip. Nothing against Pax, of course. It’s super cute.

  You nod. They’re just babies, I figure. Sweetheart’s a good thing to have. And he’s a good kid.

  She agrees with you and pours the dregs of the margarita pitcher into your glass.

  You take Paxton and Sweetheart to the water park and lie in a chaise while they jump off the foam pirate ship. Only ten minutes before Pax runs up sobbing.

  She won’t come up! I yelled and I yelled, but she won’t!

  You fly to the edge of the pool, terrified the little alien has drowned on your watch, but then you realize she has gills.

  Paxton crouches next to you, wiping his nose. Come up, stu-pid, he shouts at the water. Stupid stupid stu-pid.

  Don’t say stupid, Pax. Hush. She’s okay.

  You buy them hot dogs and try not to be disgusted when Sweetheart pincers hers into bits and tucks them into pouches on her sides. Pax trumps her by mashing his entire dog into his cheeks and opening his mouth to display it.

  They whisper to each other the whole bus ride home. You realize you don’t even know if Sweetheart is a girl.

  At night with his voice full of sleep Pax asks you what love is, and you spin out some bullshit about caring for someone very very much. He gets serious in the dark.

  Okay, so then, I think I love Sweetheart.

  You don’t want him to hear so you mouth the word, Congratulations.

  Things start to change. On the radio, on TV. Human Pride is a big deal with advertisers. Coke does a whole, One People One Planet campaign. The pundits start asking why so much tax money still goes to the army. It’s been years since there was a conflict, hasn’t it? And don’t we all know where the real threat is? Their voices purr hungrily and their eyes flicker toward the sky.

  You don’t think Paxton would get what Strategic Containment and Deportation means, but you hide the newspaper headlines from him anyway.

  Jesus, says Denise, it’s happening. Just like that. We spent all that time kicking in doors and we could have just said, look over there, look at the ones with the tentacles! She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. And I know the ones next door seem okay, but I mean, really. You know?

  You do know.

  One night the authorities come banging on Sweetheart’s door. Some of the neighbors go out in the street to watch but you take Paxton into your bedroom and turn the cartoons up loud. He falls asleep with his head on your stomach. In the morning you say, What the heck, huh. Let’s take a day off school.

  It works until six that evening when he gets two Italian ices out of the freezer and says, I’m going over to Sweetheart’s.

  Why don’t you stay in with me tonight? You try to say it nonchalantly but he catches on. His chin starts to shake.

  I’m going over to Sweetheart’s.

  Aliens are in some trouble right now, okay? It’s not safe for you.

  Is Sweetheart safe?

  Something about his look makes you feel guilty, and feeling guilty gets you a little pissed. Look. Sweetheart went away for a while. You can make some new friends, how about. You want to go over to Shira Allen’s? Shira Allen just got a trampoline.

  Pax makes a wordless noise and flies to the front door, but it’s locked and with an Italian ice in each hand he’s stuck. He flings himself against the window and leaves snot prints on the glass.

  Without knowi
ng where the words come from you’re telling him, You’ll understand when you’re older. He stiffens and turns, tear-bright eyes spearing through you. I don’t understand now, he screams. His voice so full of rage it’s like music. I don’t understand now.

  He flings an Italian ice at you, and melting strawberry sucrose bursts across your chest.

  Love explodes in you, how smart he is, how he was once a part of you but is no longer. You step up so close that the red syrup on your shirtfront smears on him as well. You get in your room this minute, you hiss. You never talk to me that way again.

  He slams his door but doesn’t get it quite right and opens it and slams it again. He’s going to hate you for a couple of days, that’s okay. Hate is nothing; you’ve known love. It stampedes through your veins. You could tell him about it. You could tell him you had sweethearts, you had cocoons of sunlight too. You could tell him about his father. You could tell him about the long nights in Delta Company, the dreams and the grit that never came out from under your eyelids. But you won’t.

  In the silent hallway you stare at his closed door. You’d understand if Pax never trusted you again, but also you know he will. He will dry his eyes and open the door. He will take Shira Allen to school dances and eat waffle fries with his friends and make JV football. He will hear talk on the radio of uniting against the alien menace and change it to Top 40 without thinking. Once in a while, he’ll remember Sweetheart and freeze on the sidewalk. Then after a moment he’ll shake his head and keep walking, a song he can’t place running through his head, the sun heavy and warm on his limbs.

  I’m Sorry Your Daughter Got Eaten by a Cougar

  Old man Windson sends me up the mountain with a wagonful of food for Mr. and Mrs. Drake. He tells me that they have not been in his grocery since it happened. He also tells me that last time they were in, they did not stock up on nearly enough basic items to carry them through the past three weeks.

  The weight of canned corn and two sides of bacon and rice and flour and a bushel of peaches has me sweating by the time I make it to their house. I stand on their porch and huff and hope they will not resent my mothering. I know I should not presume, I know I have never been anywhere near where they are now, but I also know that everyone must eat. Everyone must have the strength to continue.