The Landing

“Supervision” by Sewkhy Tan

Nina was staying at the Chicago Hilton for a conference when the aliens landed. Invaded? Visited? It was hard to find the right verb for what was happening, especially at the beginning. Hard for Nina, and for everyone else. For the country. The government. The world. There had been talk of UFOs for a few weeks by that point. It had been in the air. The acronym had shifted from being a joke to being something people used every day. Oh, another UFO was spotted? UFO, UAP, whatever. The airspace above Spokane Washington, the airspace above the Great Lakes was cordoned off? Another unidentified flying object was shot down? Cool cool. The Chinese spy balloon spotted over Montana had started it all, so it was natural to conflate the spy balloon with the UFOs. High ranking government officials claimed the skies had been cluttered for decades, that this was just the first administration to talk about it openly. Some conspiracists, or enthusiasts, talked about the bogies the Air Force had reported only a few years earlier, claiming things were about to get real, but most people, prior to the landing/invasion/visitation, weren’t too concerned. They figured it was just another blip in the newscycle.

Nina, likewise, was not too concerned. She was more concerned about her paper on “Teaching Milton in a Time of Post Apocalyptic Panic,” thinking maybe she was overstating the “panic.” Her generation had grown up concerned about the twin scourges of greenhouse gasses and nuclear war. Now these scourges had morphed like a multi-headed beast into climate collapse, weather catastrophes, China, misinformation, AI taking over every conceivable occupation before taking over in general, mass shootings, and on and on. But maybe they weren’t scourges; maybe they were just concerns. Maybe there were and would always be concerns. Such was life. Maybe they were simply living  on the perpetual edge of catastrophe now and had to get used to it; that was kind of what her paper argued. That, and how Milton, who’d been able to understand and articulate his own apocalyptic world, could help them navigate theirs: a specious claim even to her. They were all anxious about what was coming next. Impossible to believe it would be anything good.

Despite her best intentions to sleep in while she had the chance, Nina woke at five a.m., breasts tingling. She’d been weaning Gregor for the past month but still woke every morning at five to feed him. What she was feeling couldn’t really be called letdown anymore, was more like the ghost of letdown. She lay on her back in the little room in the Hilton—not quite what she’d expected; a narrow space with tan-gray wallpaper and the ugliest art she’d ever seen, including one painting over the bed that looked like an irradiated post apocalyptic city beach scene, buildings in the distance, an atomic red sky, figures on the beach, to all appearances melting. She was sure that wasn’t what the artist intended, or what whoever picked out the art had seen in the painting—unless they were real mindfuckers. She tried to will herself back asleep, knowing no one could will themselves to sleep, then she said fuck it, got up, went down to the fitness center on the 8th floor, worked out with all the other professional people who couldn’t sleep at this hour, men and women with hair up in messy buns, yoga pants and running shorts.

Her mind went into spin cycle as she worked out. She thought of Gregor, of course, growing his first tooth. A sure sign: no more breastfeeding. He bit her, the little bastard. She loved him, of course, thanks to the biological imperative and all that, yet… he could be hard to handle. His intense bouts of colic had not endeared him to her. She anxiously awaited the time he could talk and function independently. This intense, all-consuming neediness was just not her thing. Let’s get on with it already. Gregor was smart and curious (as far as she could tell), but looked too much like his father, The Deadbeat. The Deadbeat had left her when she was still pregnant, moving cross country to be with someone else. How does someone do that and live with themselves? Apparently, it was no problem for The Deadbeat. He acted all torn up about it when he told her, but he was a professional actor, though not a terribly successful (or good) one. She couldn’t believe she had ever believed in him. She watched him performing contrition, performing regret, performing the role of a man carried away by true love. The fucker.

The paper she was giving later that day also washed through her mind. It was far from her first paper, but the first one she’d presented since they’d more or less (supposedly) come back from the pandemic. She was rusty. Not that it mattered. All she had to do was read the thing. The hard work was already done. But how she did mattered in her mind, a lot. She mentally ran through the paper once again. She wasn’t sure she believed it anymore. At all. Everyone at the conference was arguing that their own particular thing was important. They protestethed too much. Deep down they knew none of this was meaningful. At least Nina did.

She showered, dressed in black tights and a black dress with a faint hieroglyphic print, did her eye makeup, wore her most daring glasses, an asymmetrical pair with one round frame, one square frame. She knew she would see pictures of herself in the future and wonder what she’d been thinking wearing those ridiculous glasses, but didn’t care. That was part of the point—to be jejune in the face of the future. The glasses were both fun and severe, a fun severity, a severe fun. No one would fuck with her while she was wearing those glasses. She took the elevator down to the lobby, bought an egg sandwich wrap and a coffee, then made her way into the big ballroom where the morning session was being held. She had not been to a morning general session since grad school days, when she’d assumed every part of a conference was important, before being quickly disabused of that notion. The large room was outlandishly ornate, with gilden frills. Gilt frills? Whatever. This was where gangsters and molls and pols had danced back in the roaring ‘20s. It was the set for some movie taking place in that time period, more than an actual place. The chairs were all set close together. One out of every twenty people wore an N95 mask, while the rest acted as if the pandemic had never happened. Pandemic, what? That was what they all desperately wanted: for those troubled days to recede as quickly into the past as possible.

Gregor, her dear annoying squirming package, was a pandemic baby. She’d never intended to have him. She was way too old to have a kid, especially a first kid. In fact, she hadn’t thought it was possible. She had known, theoretically, that it was possible because her cycle was still going strong, despite the fact that some of her friends were always kvetching about perimenopause. No, Nina flowed as regularly as the Danube. The Deadbeat had lived with her throughout the pandemic, probably because he was… a deadbeat. Lockdown had been intense, the two of them together all-the-time. Fucking was one of five activities they could think to do together, so they found themselves doing it more often than ever before, even when they didn’t necessarily want to. Fucking and taking random drugs The Deadbeat scored from old friends. Edibles that left her paralyzed. Mushrooms that had her seeing things. Cocaine that had her heart exploding in her chest. What did it matter at that point? They were all going to die anyway. Might as well experiment with all the drugs they’d failed to experiment with in their teens.

Seated on a bench—all the tables taken by conferees—she balanced her breakfast wrap on her lap, ate, drank coffee, looked around. They were literary theorists, scholars, academics, philosophers. Some looked like the most stereotypical versions of those things. She saw two older twins, in their early seventies probably, wearing identical long dresses, dyed hair stuffed under berets. There was a retro vibe to many of their outfits, as if they were trying to fit the Hilton’s decor. They all, even Nina, looked ridiculous. Some of them knew they looked ridiculous and tunneled into the ridiculousness. Essential workers they were not and had never been. They were not even essential cultural workers. They had carved out tiny niches for themselves and told themselves their work mattered for at least a dozen other people, but really it barely mattered to them. Or maybe she was just being cynical, an occupational hazard. She had been doing this for too long. She was sure the work, the conference, mattered to the grad students, who were in abundance here, at the very least. They were hip and messy, beautiful and nervous. Like aquarium fish. She had been one of them once, not all that long ago. A lifetime ago.

It was while the conference organizers were giving their thank yous and preparatory speeches that she looked at her phone and saw the alert about the aliens landing. Looking around, she saw others with their heads angled downward, eyes on the tiny screens of their phones, fingers caught mid-poke, faces frozen. They were the most rational beings. They were familiar with the Drake Equation. They believed that maybe other life might exist elsewhere, but they did not believe in aliens coming to visit them. Aliens? For real? Space was too vast, the possibility of traveling those distances so far-fetched it strained credulity. “Aliens Make Definitive Contact,” The New York Times. Reuters. The Atlantic. Not fringe publications, but the standard-bearers of the news, at least for this set. CNN and Fox were in on it, too. NPR. Some people were casting furtive glances around them, trying to gauge how others were taking the news so they could calibrate their own responses. Ironic detachment? There were smirks, sneers, widened eyes of surprise, almost fear, smiles of childlike wonder. They’d all seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the movie a hallmark of their generation. They’d been basted in belief in the supernatural, in aliens. They’d watched Contact. Some of them, in their teens, had read Streiber and gotten off on the reverse engineered plans of spacecraft supposedly captured in Area 51, interests they’d left behind when they became more so-called educated but which were still stuck inside them.

Nina scanned the article. The aliens had touched down in various parts of the world. One “delegation” had landed in Chicago. She saw the placename and thought nothing at first, until remembering she was in Chicago. Like a lot of people around her, she looked toward the windows to the left, where another winter snowstorm was blearing up Grant Park. She could see the black statue of a horse and some soldier intermittently through the windblown snow. The park looked cold, wet, miserable, and beautiful. She wondered what an alien lifeform would think of the park, of the tall buildings all around, of the river. Maybe not much.

It was almost impossible for them to continue with the conference, but continue they did. The keynote speaker gave a talk entitled “The Antiracist Medievalist.” Nina listened with one ear while scrolling on her phone for all she was worth. There was very little information, until she had crawled all the way to the edge of the internet and reached the fringe publications, the blogs, tweets, and posts of individual conspiracy theorists. Some people in the shallow depths of the internet had many details about the aliens, though the details conflicted. They came in peace, they came to take over, they came simply to visit, they had been shot down, they were being welcomed by the governments of the world, they were being quarantined because they carried a disease previously unknown to man that had the potential to wipe us all out, they were humanoid in shape, they were like nothing anyone had ever seen before, they could shift their form from gas to liquid to solid, they had come from Alpha Centauri, they had come from a distant planet we had not even detected yet, they were mocking our technology, they could teleport and communicate via ESP. Nina was fascinated by the ability some people had to convince themselves they were experts in something they couldn’t possibly know anything about. There was something so deeply human about it.

She, and all the other attendees and presenters, did not exactly ignore the fact that something momentous in the history of humankind had happened, but they downplayed it. They hinted at it, especially in the intros to their papers. They made pithy jokes, references to obscure or less obscure sci fi classics, then bulled on, talking about medievalism and early American literature and sestinas. The audience members nodded or blurred out in front of their laptop screens, pretending to listen, sometimes actually listening, the papers all virtually the same. Only the most naive grad students thought they could benefit intellectually from the conference. They listened for the names of theorists repeated more than once: that meant they were someone to be listened to. Zizak was still big. Harraway (who probably had a lot to say about alien-human interactions). Jorgenson. They did the work of conferencing diligently, writing down those names for researching later.

While presenting her paper, Nina looked out at the heads of the audience members. There were fifteen, all dressed more or less like her. Degrees of ironic frumpiness and haute monde. They all wanted to look like they didn’t care what they looked like, but all cared desperately about how they presented. She imagined what an alien lifeform would see in this room. Strange rituals. Clothes were not absurd in and of themselves, but the variety? The means of expression? They made themselves into birds of paradise or baboons with glowing red asses. Their heads were absurd: all those holes. The aliens, whoever or whatever they were, would not be impressed. Or cowed. Then again, the people the aliens were seeing were not literary scholars but either military people in heavy gear and/or government people. Men, mostly, still, wearing suits and ties. It was easy to separate humanity according to the ways it adorned itself. We self-classified ourselves. Nina talked about Milton and the possibilities for Miltonesque philosophy in a fraught world, but suddenly the world had become much more fraught, her argument absurd to the extreme. Not that anyone noticed. All arguments had become absurd. The buzz in the corridors of the Hilton was like the buzz of any conference, only more intense. People bought food, fed their faces, and talked about unthought-of possibilities.

Nina answered some of her mother’s many texts, reassuring her she was fine, just busy with the conference, not to worry, commenting on the pics of Gregor her mother sent almost by the hour.

Maybe they would be taken over and colonized. Or maybe they would find common cause with the aliens. Maybe the aliens were just here for a short visit, to dip in and say hello. It was absurd to even think about, to consider the possibilities.

At 4 o'clock the President held a press conference, and the presentation schedule was modified, on the fly, to accommodate the speech. Every breakout room, every ballroom, every salon featured the President’s talking head on screen. The President had a square head and squinty eyes, and he sat behind a desk, hands crossed in front of him, radiating calm. Switch his head out with the head of LBJ during Vietnam or George W Bush on 9/11 or Barack Obama after the killing of Osama Bin Laden and you would have the same person. There was comfort in this continuity of catastrophe. She liked the phrasing, wrote it down in the notes on her phone, where she kept random phrases she might be able to use in her writing or lectures. The President told them the bare facts: several objects had been spotted just outside the atmosphere, the vehicles had landed in various places on the earth, and delegations from a star system a hundred billion lightyears from earth were now being negotiated with. He urged calm and claimed there had been communication between the two civilizations for some time prior to the landing. She imagined other leaders in other countries talking to their citizens in a similar manner. The conferees looked at each other and shook their heads, raised their eyebrows, engaging in a whole series of pantomimed expressions.

“So, it’s really happened.” She only realized the man was speaking to her when she looked around and saw no one else in the vicinity..

“I guess it has. Whatever ‘it’ is.”

“‘It’ is always in the process of being defined.”

“Always already,” she said.

“Always already.” He smiled. Messy hair and a nice though generic smile. He didn’t wear a mask. She knew the instant their eyes met that she was going to fuck him. She was not usually so forward, but she bit the bullet and showed him her key card, made a motion up the stairs, and, strangely, even miraculously, he read her gesture in the spirit in which it was intended, following her into the elevator and down the winding hallways to her room. They didn’t talk; there was no reason to. They got right down to business. This was something the aliens should have seen, too: the mating rituals of the intellectual classes. The man had a thin chest, furred in the middle, but a surprisingly strong lower body, as if every day was leg day for him, and he fucked her with a vigor proportional to her need. She fucked him back the same way.

Afterwards they told each other their names—his was Todd—and talked about things they wanted to do, as if the end of the world were nigh.

“I want to take DMT.”

“You never took DMT? I want to get another tattoo.”

“I want to go to an orgy. I want to be in an orgy. Not right now, but maybe tomorrow.”

“I want to see Tibet. I’ve always wanted to see Tibet.”

“I want to eat sushi.”

“You’ve never eaten sushi? I want to fuck you again.”

“I want to fuck you again, too.”

They fucked again, took showers, went down to the night entertainment, a drag show, featuring a performer named Penny Awful, who was fairly awful but also very fun. They had somehow become something together—not a couple, oh no, not that at all, but a couple of people connected by this strange new event in the world. She pictured them in twenty years, fat and married and retired somewhere on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which was stupid. The world might not last that long. Humanity, that is. Not the world. The world would get along perfectly fine without them.

They went out for drinks at a bar with an oversized jenga set and a basketball machine, and they played all the games and drank all the drinks and found themselves among a hundred or two hundred other conferees, talking to people in a heated manner that went against their common MO. Ironic detachment was difficult to maintain in a situation like this. There were no ironists in an alien invasion. She realized suddenly that she hadn’t thought of Gregor back in Benton once in hours, not even when Todd was sucking milk out of her breasts. Strange. She felt bad, but she was thinking about him now, wasn’t she? She most certainly was. She missed him the way you miss a routine you don’t particularly enjoy, something you’re so used to there seems to be no other option for you. She knew she loved her son (did she? DID SHE?). Of course she did. She wondered what would happen if she never came back to care for him, if the alien invasion precluded return. He would be just fine with his grandmother. Better, probably, than if she did come back. Her mother’s love was better, purer, more healthy, than her own.

The next thing she knew the bed was spinning and she barely remembered walking through the snow laughing and singing with Todd and four other people they kind of knew, and Todd was trying to convince them to come up to their room and have group sex, but no one was taking: they laughed it off like it was a joke. She might have done it if they were willing. She’d thrown her shoes and clothes around the room, and he had nuzzled against her, his dick too drunk to tumesce. Spin, spin, spin. Like she was in a flying saucer herself. She wondered what their vehicles looked like. “Vehicle” a strange, somehow clinical, word to use. She pictured the President communicating with creatures with gray, mucusy skin. Who was going to translate? This would open up whole new career avenues. Interstellar liaisons.

In the middle of the night she heard sounds from the sky. An all-pervading, gradually intensifying hum. Like a dryer, only a thousand times louder. Somehow familiar. She stumbled to the window, gazed out at a numinous sky, which looked like the moments before a blizzard. Like a whole different sun was threatening to break through the cloud cover and shine on them all. She threw up all over the window, then washed it off.

In the morning, Todd was gone, leaving no trace. They hadn’t exchanged numbers or talked about meeting again. He was probably on his own personal hedonistic journey. Which was fine—that wasn’t what she wanted to do at all, really—but still she felt stood up. Was she not good enough for empty hedonistic fun? Was she not orgy material? She felt unsteady and bleary, and she dressed—jeans, black turtleneck—and ate a plain bagel with cream cheese from the bakery downstairs before walking out alone into the city, which was bright and cold this morning, last night’s snow crusted on the sidewalks. She wore boots with sharp toes. The sidewalks were full, at first, of undergrads from the three or four colleges in the area, pushing forward, all wearing backpacks. Square backpacks were apparently a thing now.

Then the sidewalks were crowded with tourists as she walked closer to the Art Institute and Millennial Park. All of them looked up now and then, though there was nothing to see in the sky but sodium blue. She felt men looking at her, greedy and grasping, and, instead of being annoyed as she would usually be, she almost welcomed their unwanted attention. Almost. She was aging out of socially-sanctioned desirability. It was inevitable for all women, aside from a miniscule percentage of women who somehow retained desirability even into old age. She had held on to it longer than some but could feel it fading, the looks of men not as greedy or grasping as they’d once been. They were more curious, tentative, now. Though maybe that had to do with what was happening in the world. Distracted by the landing. She doubted it. Men were not distracted by anything.

She walked past the large bust of a man she didn’t recognize, head immense and stately. She passed most of the morning with nothing unusual happening, the usual chatter of tourists, the usual bustle of a big city but with a new quality now. She could sense it just beneath the surface of every face she passed: imminent freakout. They were holding it together only because there was no other choice. They were depending on each other to act as if everything were still normal.People clumped. Did humanity really deserve longevity? Was there any real reason to keep going as a species? It seemed strange that some among them did important things, built things, designed buildings, did cutting edge science, were trying to figure out ways to save the species from itself, were curing cancer, while the vast majority were just glomming through life pretending to do things. And here she was promoting Milton as an antidote to apocalypse. What a fucking joke.

She ate a hot dog at a little hole-in-the-wall place, onions and pickles and slices of tomato on a seeded bun, a strange delicacy, then she walked back and sat in a few more sessions. This was her life. It was beyond strange. She wished the man, Todd, if that was his name, had stayed with her that day, that they had sunk deeper into hedonism, kept developing whatever kind of relationship they had, but that seemed stupid now. It had been just a fling.

Half the people in the sessions listened to the presenters; a quarter did their work; the other quarter scrolled the news sites and Twitter. They all needed news now. Too bad most journalists had lost their jobs long before. People were hungry to read something, anything, concrete about their intergalactic visitors. Nothing trustworthy was forthcoming yet, but conspiracies were madly proliferating. There was no stopping conspiracies, which were becoming more and more ludicrous. Traction was gaining on the idea that we were already in a zoo, watched at all times by someone above us, that our day-to-day struggles were entertainment for aliens. We were essentially a TV show. As if that would make life any different.

Nina sat through a mildly interesting panel on Elizabeth Gaskell, something she would have found riveting at another time. The speakers were dexterous with theory, bringing in unexpected voices. One of the women was about Nina’s age, dressed in a similar manner, wearing similar glasses, and Nina wondered whether the only reason she found the woman attractive was because they looked alike. After the panel she approached the woman, ostensibly to ask her about her use of indigenous ways of knowing, and found herself returning to her room with her. Housekeeping had come and the bed was made, and they quickly messed it back up. The woman had toys in her purse, and they went at each other with vigor, comfortable enough with each other, or let loose from the confines of social expectations enough, to make all the noise they wanted. She clutched the sheets and cried out, and she worked objects into the woman, hitting just the right spots. Once naked, the woman looked very little like her. Their bodies were vistas, landscapes to explore. The woman, like Todd the night before, also liked to suck on her milk-filled breasts. Go figure.

Afterwards, the woman packed her things and left her alone. Alone, Nina wanted someone to curl up against. It had been years since she’d had sex two days in a row.  She got a text from some old grad school friends going to a meet-up at a local bar, and she went, caught up with them, laughed, got drunk but not as drunk as the night before, returned to the hotel room and watched the Home Network, a couple relocating to Ireland looking for a home for 300k, then a family of seven moving to an island off Virginia’s coast, the shows having identical plots, which was comforting.

In the middle of the night the same sound woke her. She looked out the window to find the sky throbbing with milky white light. The intensifying hum. So familiar. Like something she had lived through already. She wondered why no one was talking about the noise at the conference—when she went online there were all kinds of tweets about the oddities of the night skies. Different phenomena in different parts of the world. Borealis where it had never existed before. Oddly shaped clouds barely discernible in the dark. People used special night vision lenses to illuminate faces and shapes in the clouds. New configurations of stars. And, around all of the cities where the aliens had landed, this ominous nightly numinous buzz.

Finally she gave in and video-called her mother in the morning, Gregor’s fat face filling the screen. Strange how distant she felt from him when she wasn’t with him. Did she miss him? At all? She felt keenly that she was supposed to. His face on the screen made her feel things, but could those emotions be classified as maternal? It was more than possible to be a bad mother, a mother who felt no love for her child, but she didn't think she was that. God, she hoped not. Gregor frustrated her; that was all. Even through the screen, blubbery face drooling all over the place, the main emotion she felt was frustration. She just had to get used to his limitations. Give him a little grace.

“Hey, Baby!” she said. “Mommy’s coming home later today.”

The face seemed to smile, though maybe he was just passing gas. Finally the face was replaced by her mother’s, who asked her if she was sure it was safe to fly, if she was really coming home that day, if she was safe in Chicago. She’d heard such horrible things. Why hadn’t she answered any of her texts?

“The flight’s still on,” she said. She hadn’t heard otherwise; the Southwest website didn’t have any updates.

She got an Uber to the airport outside the Hilton. The driver was listening to a podcast about Alexander the Great, something called Hardcore History featuring a man who compared historical events to more modern ones. He referenced an 80’s video from the band Genesis while talking about World War II. When he read source materials relating the battles of Alexander the Great, he narrated them in a breathless way, as if they were scenes in an exciting movie. The words and the voice of the man got so deep inside her she was afraid she would never get it out. She wanted to ask the driver what he thought of the aliens, what was going to happen next, but he obviously didn't want to talk. She wondered if he even knew what was happening in the world—how could he not? She watched the drivers in other cars as they drove on the crowded highway. It was all as it had been before the aliens landed. She hadn’t expected that. Same as it ever was. With the same telltale signs of suppressed panic as she’d felt the day before.

A massive jam snarled traffic on the road to the airport, but Nina had left herself plenty of time. She scrolled through her phone, trying to find more information about the woman she’d fucked the day before. An associate professor, she taught at a small private liberal arts institution in the Midwest. Nina figured she would probably never see the woman again, at least not until the next year (if there was a next year) at the same conference. She sent a message to her work email, giving her her personal cellphone; before even reaching the airport she got a text.

I shouldn’t have done that, but I couldn’t resist.

I can’t stop thinking about you, Nina wrote. She wasn’t sure whether it was true until she typed it, then she knew it was. Even as she’d been thinking about the aliens and (dreading) going back to Gregor in Benton, she’d been thinking about the woman, whose name was Juliana. She waited a few breathless seconds before the reply came.

Samesies, it said, with a heart and a winky face emoji. Strange how an emoji could make her feel one of the strongest, oldest, most powerful emotions known to man. The promise of requited interest.

She engaged in textual repartee, emoji-driven flirtation, ignoring the battering ram of the man’s voice coming through the speakers, going on and on about the Persian king and his retinue. She wondered how real the feelings were, before realizing the folly of that question. Did it matter? Feelings were feelings. They were all real. She thought of the emotional ecological theories of Scott Slovik. She was pretty sure she knew what was going to happen next: she was going to fall in love with Juliana. They were going to meet somewhere, at some point, maybe in Juliana’s southwest, maybe in Nina’s Massachusetts, and they were going to fuck and fuck and fuck. After that, who knows. Maybe it would work out, though probably it would fall apart. Everything tended to fall apart. In either case there was now a future for her.

Finally the Rav4 pulled up to the departure gate. She gave the driver a maximum tip, despite the annoyance of his podcast, and went into an airport that had transformed since she’d arrived. Now it looked like a third world outpost, jampacked with people, armed military personnel everywhere. She had no idea what branch of the military. They wore black uniforms and bulky riot gear, automatic weapons in their hands, and they all seemed to be talking into devices velcroed to their shoulders.

Maybe she would not get back to Benton.

Several flights had been canceled.

The security line to the gates, though hella long, moved fairly quickly. None of the TSA workers laughed. They were stern and serious and looked upon everyone with suspicion. Nina, dressed in sweats and a t-shirt under her bulky winter coat, felt like cattle, one of the unwashed masses. The man in front of her wore a red hoodie on which was screen printed the words: I Know Plenty Of Broke Bitches Who Can’t Get Near This. He had a tattoo of a moneybag on his neck. His jeans sagged. What would the aliens think of him? Probably nothing different than they would think of her. The differences between them paltry now. Interesting how another lifeform could encourage solidarity across lines of gender, race, class. Maybe the aliens were just what they needed at this troubled time in history.

“I didn’t expect it to be so busy,” she said.

The man—really just a boy, maybe twenty, the age of one of her students—turned to look her up and down, then turned around again. Well fuck you, too. Nothing had changed. They moved like cattles in cages. She thought of Temple Grandin’s invention, a more humane way to kill cows so they didn’t feel fear before the final act. Wondered if that was what was happening now. Maybe they were being loaded into spaceships and would be brought up to some distant planet to be experimented on. Poked and prodded. She’d seen too many science fiction movies. The image of the alien was too pervasive in culture. She could only get so creative with it, even in her own mind. Tropes upon tropes.

The woman at the checkpoint ran her ID through a machine, looked at her, waved her through, then they were taking off their belts and shoes. The whole process was harried, everyone on the razor’s edge of panic. In addition to the regular TSA, black-uniformed military personnel stood around the checkpoints with eagle eyes. Small drones flew here and there, making scans of people. Every third bag was being checked, which meant someone was going through Nina’s bag. Fine. What did she care? There was nothing in there but clothes and a little souvenir, a stuffed hot dog, for Gregor.

It took forever, but she made the flight, which was only half full. She got a window seat and was beyond relieved when no one sat in the two seats beside her. She could have cried from joy. The air staff all seemed jittery. There was the usual feeling of giving oneself over to the process of travel, only now with an added edge. The edge of the unknown. After what she’d seen the last two nights from her hotel room, the hum and the glow, was she really willing to enter into that airspace? What other choice did she have? She wasn’t going to abandon her son and wasn’t about to rent a car and drive halfway across the country. If it weren’t safe, they wouldn’t be doing it. Would they? If there was any real danger all planes would have been grounded. That’s what she told herself.

The only book she had with her was a recent bestseller set in the apocalyptic near future. Unable to keep pace with the actual dystopia they were living, it now read as quaint historical fiction set in a time period that had never existed. She looked out the window to see drones zipping here and there, looking into the plane. She felt unsettled. The book featured a woman about ten years younger than her, an astrophysicist picked to be one of the first colonizers of space. She goes through a rigorous training process, falls in love with a woman who is the citizen representative for the trip, falls prey to hallucinations somewhere midway through the book, when it became dreamy and laden with language that seemed unnecessarily syrupy. Nina wondered about the author of the book and kept going back to the book flap, a young Chinese American woman smiling sweetly.

She wasn’t sure whether she was dreaming or daydreaming or hallucinating several hours later. She felt strange in her body, ill-fitting, as if she could slough her skin and leave it behind, as if whatever was her was something beside her body. Not as if she had a soul, but as if she had a body made of something other than bone and blood inside her body. She leaned her head on the window and looked out. Remembered that Twilight Zone episode with William Shatner, where he looks out at the wing of a plane and sees a hairy beast in a rainstorm. No rainstorm here, but the sky was lit like the inside of a lightbulb. She could see the curvature of the earth.

Then everything was white and she was swallowed up. At first she heard nothing, saw nothing. She was not floating, but her body was not exactly there. Slowly, sounds came to her out of the white. Rustlings. Settling. The sound of a scream in the far distance that grew louder. Then she was walking through the whiteness but there were others around her, maybe human maybe alien maybe angel. It was like death as she’d imagined it as a little girl, but it wasn’t heaven. She had worked so hard to forget her past, to not remember anything about growing up in Benton, to leave everything behind her. The figures at first had no shape, no substance, but gradually they took form, though Nina still couldn’t see them. A screaming came again from the distance, and she was walking toward it—she couldn’t stop herself from walking toward it. She was determined not to panic.

The next thing she knew she was coming out of the ramp leading into Logan. She was no longer worried about what would happen next, what the aliens would do, whether they were there in peace or to take over—who would want to take this place over? She barely remembered what had just happened to her, what she had just experienced. It was already only as real, or exactly as real, as a dream. She wondered if she would ever tell anyone about it

Gregor was in his car seat, waiting in her mother’s Kia. She took him out and held him against her. He was bloated and gooey and gross, but she felt a little sliver of something like maternal love worm its way through her heart.

After Gregor was in bed, she texted her new lover furiously into the night, like a teenager. Juliana had made it back to the southwest safely. Nina wondered if she had lived through the same thing as she had on the plane. Someday they might be able to talk about it. For now, it felt like a warm white light was spreading out from inside her, through her pussy, up into her abdomen and arms.

About the Author

Jamey Gallagher lives in Baltimore and teaches at the Community College of Baltimore County. His stories have been published in many venues, including Punk Noir Magazine, Poverty House, Shotgun Honey, Bull Fiction, and LIT Magazine. Look for his collection, American Animism, published by Cornerstone Press in 2025. 

about the artist

Sewkhy Tan is a 21-year-old Cambodian mixed media artist born and raised in Phnom Penh. His art is versatile, vivid, playful, and often surreal or dark. It addresses issues including mental health, living in a developing and rapidly-changing country, and other things that live in the dark recesses of his mind. Sometimes it fuses traditional Cambodian techniques and topics with modern approaches, and at other times draws on his love for anime, fantasy and storytelling. His work has been exhibited locally and showcased internationally. While he is a skilled traditional artist and can sketch, draw, and paint, he increasingly utilizes digital techniques.