From Out There

From out there it came. It was ancient and beautiful.

Aurelia thought her grandmother was also ancient and beautiful. She was old for a grandmother. Women in their family tree for some reason tended to have children after 40. 

Aurelia sat in the spring air that was somehow neither warm nor cool. She could surmise that it was a strange day. Earlier in the day, there had been a shadow around her grandmother. She was content with the shadow, but Aurelia wasn’t. The shadow made her look even more ancient, but also beautiful.

The news on TV was the same, but the anchors delivered it with dead eyes. Come to think of it, many of the townspeople had dead eyes. It was as if everyone had it programmed in them that it was coming, but if they were asked, they wouldn’t know what to say.

“How are you today?”

“I’m… alright. How are you today?”

“I’m doing just fine.”

No one knew what it was, or even that something was coming. They were like a flock of migrating birds. Why did they fly? Do the parent birds teach the young birds to fly hundreds of miles every once in a while? Do the young birds question authority and argue about the benefits of staying put? They don’t, it’s simply one of those incontrovertible truths.

The same was with the townspeople and, little did Aurelia know, the entire population of Earth. But the problem was, there was no migration to be done. There was no… anything to be done. 

If the humans had something to do about it, or if they didn’t have anything to do about it, it came nonetheless. Aurelia didn’t feel any different--or, she did, solely based on how she sensed others were feeling. It was like some unspoken disease.

Aurelia’s grandmother, seated on the garden bench with her, suddenly spoke for the first time all day: “The sunshine is lovely today.”

She was right, Aurelia thought. It was as if it had rained 93 million miles away, and instead of the light particles having to travel all that long way to get to the water droplets, the light particles conserved their energy, came straight from the source, and right to the water.

The word to describe it was, Aurelia thought, dazzling, but of course there was no word in the English language to describe such an event.

Aurelia went inside to the news on TV. The camera was pointed at an empty anchors’ desk. She turned to the baseball game. The eyes of every player and onlooker were pointed at the sky. There wasn’t a sound. 

Aurelia didn’t have to peer over the picket fence to know that the eyes of the townspeople were oriented the same.

As the light came closer, and the young girl of just 10 years looked on, she was able to distinguish more of its features--particularly, that it was some sort of animal. Of course, that was the only word she could come up with, other than--

“Is it an alien?”, she asked her grandmother. She shook her head. “An alien comes from somewhere in particular. In the ‘out there’, things are different. Things don’t have to belong to a certain place or time.” 

Aurelia understood.

The creature came into full view, still coming from the direction of the sun, but perfectly visible. It completely overpowered that ridiculous ball of gas; it seemed to carry the light of a thousand suns.

The creature was the presence of all light, and Aurelia had recently learned in science class that this phenomenon described the color white, which is what she supposed she would describe its general color.

It must have been the size of twelve Earths. It had the tongue of a snake, a tongue that looked able to scoop up the Pacific Ocean--if that’s what it so desired.

The head was simply a skull, possibly of some cow or ox. Its eye sockets weren’t empty; rather, they were full. Entire galaxies seemed to reside in those sockets.

Aurelia’s grandmother reached into her shirt and pulled out her necklace. It was of course, the creature. Well, the creature’s head. The rest of its body couldn’t be formed into any proper shape.

The rest of its body could only be described as a millipede, Aurelia thought. A millipede where each leg was light itself, light that was ever-prismatic, ever-iridescent.

“I made this myself.” And that was all that was said about the necklace.

The creature stopped, having completely surrounded the Earth. Aurelia supposed that the entire Earth, everyone at once could somehow see its planetary head.

Her grandmother turned to her. Her eyes now were the eyes of the creature, full of galaxies. She opened her mouth. Aurelia didn’t want her to, but she did anyway. Her snake-like tongue flickered. The shadow she had worn throughout the day turned to that prismatic light.

Aurelia shut her eyes, wishing she could be back to living her basic life. She wasn’t popular at school, but she had friends. She wasn’t picked on, and didn’t pick on anyone else. She wanted to be eating that mediocre school pizza, or doing her homework while listening to the music that everyone else listened to. She was completely ordinary in every way and wanted it to stay that way.

As she opened her eyes, her grandmother had nearly completely transformed into the creature. Those galactic eyes seemed to shed a tear. Maybe it was for Aurelia, who remained ordinary.

The young girl walked back inside the house to the TV, still on the baseball game. The players, the onlookers--they were creatures, just like her grandmother. Hundreds of them. She didn’t turn to any other channel. She knew they would only show more of them. And if the channel was something pre-recorded, then it was now an irrelevant remnant of the past, when humans were how they used to be.

Except for Aurelia, who remained the same. She went back into the garden, where her grandmother had risen a hundred feet off the ground. Everyone had.

As Aurelia sat on the garden bench, flowers and fruits of every color all around her, she could see the entirety of the human species join the creature, as if it were a mother dog, each member of the litter wanting to get as close to her as possible.

This beautiful creature finally released its hold on this equally beautiful planet. 

It, and its adopted sons and daughters, departed.

Now more than ever, Aurelia was left to her own thoughts, and nothing else. She was never one to panic, but even if she was, there was nothing to panic about. It had come, it had left, and that was that.

Perhaps she wasn’t the last. Perhaps there was someone else out there, someone who had to be ordinary like her, and the human race could live on. Perhaps not.