But the real joke isn’t that the sluggers revealed to me the date of Earth’s demise; it’s that they offered me the choice to prevent it.
You asked for a story, so here it is. I’ll begin with the night the sluggers told me the world was toast, and when I’m finished, we can wait for the end together.
7 September 2015
The biggest letdown about being abducted by aliens is the abundance of gravity on the spaceship. We spend our first nine months of life floating, weightless and blind, in an amniotic sac before we become gravity’s bitch, and the seductive lure of space travel is the promise of returning to that perfect state of grace. But it’s a sham. Gravity is jealous, sadistic, and infinite.
Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love’s only demand is that we fall.
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Sluggers aren’t gray. They don’t have saucer-wide eyes or thin lipless mouths. As far as I know, they don’t have mouths at all. Their skin is rough like wet leather and is all the colors of an algae bloom. Their black spherical eyes are mounted atop their heads on wobbly stalks. Instead of arms, they have appendages that grow from their bodies when required. If their UFO keys fall off the console—boom!—instant arm. If they need to restrain me or silence my terrified howls, they can sprout a dozen tentacles to accomplish the task. It’s very efficient.
Oddly enough, sluggers do have nipples. Small brown buttons that appear to be as useless to them as most men’s. It’s comforting to know that regardless of our vast differences and the light-years that separate our worlds, we’ll always have nipples in common.
I should slap that on a bumper sticker, ? HENRY JEROME DENTON.
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Before you ask: no, the sluggers have never probed my anus. I’m fairly certain they reserve that special treat for people who talk on their phones during movies, or text while driving.
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Here’s how it happens: abductions always begin with shadows. Even in a dark room, with the windows closed and the curtains drawn, the shadows descend, circling like buzzards over a reeking lunch.
Then a heaviness in my crotch like I have to pee, growing painfully insistent regardless of how much I beg my brain to ignore it.
After that, helplessness. Paralysis. The inability to -struggle. Fight. Breathe.
The inability to scream.
At some point the sluggers move me to the examination room. I’ve been abducted at least a dozen times, and I still don’t know how they transport me from my bedroom to their spaceship. It happens in the dark space between blinks, in the void between breaths.
Once aboard, they begin the experiments.
That’s what I assume they’re doing. Trying to fathom the motives of an advanced alien race who possess the technological capacity to travel through the universe is like the frog I dissected in ninth grade trying to understand why I cut it open and pinned its guts to the table. The sluggers could be blasting me with deadly radiation or stuffing me full of slugger eggs just to see what happens. Hell, I could be some slugger kid’s science fair project.
I doubt I’ll ever know for certain.
Sluggers don’t speak. During those long stretches where my body is beyond my control, I often wonder how they communicate with one another. Maybe they secrete chemi-cals the way insects do, or perhaps the movements of their eyestalks is a form of language similar to the dance of a bee. They could also be like my mother and father, who communicated exclusively by slamming doors.
I was thirteen the first time the sluggers abducted me. My older brother, Charlie, was snoring his face off in the next room while I lay in bed, translating my parents’ fight. You might believe all doors sound the same when slammed, but you’d be wrong.
My father was a classic slammer, maintaining contact with the door until it was totally and completely shut. This gave him control over the volume and pitch, and produced a deep, solid bang capable of shaking the door, the frame, and the wall.
Mom preferred variety. Sometimes she went for the dramatic fling; other times she favored the heel-kick slam. That night, she relied on the multismash, which was loud and effective but lacked subtlety.
The sluggers abducted me before I learned what my parents were arguing about. Police found me two days later, wandering the dirt roads west of Calypso, wearing a grocery bag for underwear and covered in hickies I couldn’t explain. My father left three weeks after that, slamming the door behind him one final time. No translation necessary.