by Avalon King

‘Okay, I’m turning in. Don’t stay up too late, and make sure to turn off the porch light.’ I felt like I was nagging, and I guess I was. It’s a dynamic that added a feeling of weight that grounded the day to day routines in our relationship.  According to him, I was projecting my anxiety and I needed to deal with that. 

On my way up the stairs to our bedroom, I sighed out of self consciousness. He was probably right. Why didn’t the familiar routine that had developed after our years together comfort me? As I asked that question of myself I knew those same routines would bury it deep in the mundane processes of our life as we tried to avoid creating overt discomfort.

In the ensuite bathroom, I yawned as I washed my face and put on some moisturizer. The lights overhead started to flicker. I looked up as they stopped and then went back to massaging my face.

The lights began to pulse rhythmically and when I looked in the mirror it was as if I had added a spotlight filter to myself. A loud buzzing began like huge insect wings accompanied by the smell of ozone and something intimate, organic, wet, and rotten.

A sense of dread came over me and I instinctively looked down at my feet and cringed as if someone was about to start hitting me there in my bathroom. My stomach started to churn and kick acid up into my throat. I couldn’t look up. I had to look up. 

I did look up. They were there. Them. The ones the crazies believe and the normies laugh about. Impossibly lean, dark grey, and wet. Four of them stood there silently staring out of large iridescent blackout eyes in wrinkled dripping faces. 

My screams were loud enough to tear my vocal cords but the sound that came out was even softer than if it were let out underwater  The beings jerked forward as if not governed by any worldly physical law, and I blacked out.

When I came to I was face down looking at the tiles on my floor. The blue tiles fascinated me as they undulated and danced to the buzzing rhythm in my ears. I felt like I had been drinking tequila all day and didn’t notice anything wrong until I realized that I was floating four feet above the floor face down.

My nose dripped sweat onto the floor as if I had been sweating for hours and then I noticed the feet. These feet were elongated, gnarled monkey feet in gunmetal grey that had a repulsive sheen. I craned my neck to look up and saw craggy alien faces looking down. I couldn’t speak and they told me without moving or making a sound that I was coming with them now.

As we phased through the wall of my bathroom like ghosts and our bodies reformatted onboard their ship I worried, irrationally, about what he would put in our daughter’s lunch bag the next day. Then I felt a sudden hot stabbing pain in my lower back and lost consciousness again.