A Story of Space, left.

“They’re not how I thought they’d look at all,” said Rachel, reflectively. “You just assume they’ll look like all the pictures we’ve seen.”

“If you went to Biblical times and saw Jesus, you’d probably think the same thing. People make guesses at things, but they’re usually wrong.”

“It’s hard to be accurate about something you’ve never seen.”

“True,” said Kerry, sighing. “We were lucky not to know anything then - they’re coming in droves now.”

“Yeah, it might take a while, but I think they’ll eventually completely take over.”

“What was wrong with their home planet?”

“I guess they’re like us. They can’t leave anything alone and just been satisfied with what they have.”

Kerry gazed out the window and thought about all the shut down possibilities of the ever-expansive world they’d once had. Since their arrival, everything had taken on a different tone.

Florida looked changed now, even whenever the aliens weren’t visible. You never knew when you’d run into the next one. She would always remember with glassy clarity the day they first arrived. They’d come in something that was less flying saucer and more space bubble. It looked like it could have been popped with a pin prick. If only. They’d survived and traversed the galaxy in it, and they’d made good time too. They couldn’t communicate the details, but their return trips showed just how quickly they could go there and come back. They hadn’t brought any physical items with them, but they took up a lot of space.

The streets were mostly bare, the beaches emptied. Kerry had always been used to the coming and goings from the neighbouring beach at Clearwater. People had stopped swimming and they’d stopped sunbathing. She didn’t know why everyone had; maybe it was just because word spreads and people unthinkingly copy each other whenever they’re scared. Kerry had thought she was brave until the aliens’ arrival. It’s hard to be brave when faced with the unknown and they had looked much different to a friendly ET. They were larger than humans and grotesque to their eyes. They didn’t have smiling faces. They didn’t really have faces – just holes for seeing and feeding. They were charcoal grey in colour, with long, spidery limbs. The first person that had spotted them had allegedly dropped dead, dying of heart failure from the sheer shock of the vision before them. They’d found her soulless body, but it had taken a while to attribute it to that. They mightn’t ever have connected the two events had they not had recurrent encounters in that very area.

Sometimes Kerry wondered why they hit that area first - of all the places on the globe. Was it just a coincidence or did they intentionally select it? It was a place of beauty, but Kerry wondered if it was the most appealing place from bird’s eye view? Maybe they had heard reports of life on Earth before they’d even come in to land. They were a form of intelligent life – more intelligent than humans everywhere – even though humans thought themselves the cleverest of species. If they were, they could have done more to fend them off. It felt like the human population was dwindling and there was no single event they could pin it on. The aliens were taking over in a slow, insidious way. The buildings were being razed to the ground. Kerry hated looking at the rubble. It was unclear what was being put there as replacement for them. The aliens didn’t share their plans. Even if they’d had blueprints, they couldn’t have translated them for human understanding. There was a feeling of finality on Earth – a slow surrender that was spreading across the surface of the world. Broadcasting had broken down. The internet was no longer used. Screens were obsolete. There was no way of communicating between different countries anymore. At first, yes, but then they did away with it all, bit by bit. Kerry kept waiting for something bad to come to her, personally; she just didn’t know exactly when or what it would be.

She kept her door triple bolted every night – something she had never felt the need to do before 2035. The place she’d lived in was so poster perfect that it felt like nothing untoward could ever have happened there. That’s what made it more shocking and out of the ordinary. Kerry reflected on the pandemic of 2020. It seemed like a mere blip compared with the Alien Invasion. A decade earlier, people still disputed the existence of extra-terrestrial life. It seemed laughable now – the earthly worries they’d had. There had been nothing of that magnitude then; Purely People Problems: that was what they were referred to now and often scoffed at, labelled trivial concerns.

Every night whenever Kerry went to sleep, she considered the fact it might be her last night on Earth. So many people had disappeared, and no one could say what had happened to them, which made it so much worse. Kerry thought of a few of her closest friends, tearfully. She tried not to dwell on their disappearances too much, because it achieved nothing, and survival had to be her priority. If she could evade the aliens, they couldn’t do what they’d done to the others. But each week, whenever she saw the empty streets, she wondered if it might be better to join the others, wherever they were. She didn’t want to be the last one remaining. That would be petrifying in a way that gathered up every feeling of terror she’d ever experienced and played them out in a single moment. At least Rachel was there too. She wasn’t entirely alone, yet. Her family might have vanished one by one, she might have lost all sense of community and she might have lost every place she’d ever known to the invaders. But she still had Rachel, and each day they met up without anything eventful to tell was a small success.

For weeks, months and years, they escaped it together. Luck was the only thing that could explain it. It was fitting that they were together whenever they finally had their personal encounter with the aliens. They were toasting each other over a quiet dinner, eating some hearty mac and cheese and cornbread when the tendrils appeared around the doorway, coming to beckon them to their shared fate. They were whisked away, so quickly they couldn’t gasp; the evidence they’d lived and dined there removed - apart from a few cornbread crumbs.