written on a whim. so i have no idea where this is going, if anywhere. i would still like some reviews, though...

On the morning of his twenty-second birthday, Ferguson Myles woke to realize that he was no longer human.

On the night precisely one week before his twenty-second birthday, Ferguson Myles listened in earnest to Roxanne Calvin’s deepest secret as they sat on his apartment floor, sharing a bottle of wine.

“I’ve been abducted by aliens.”

Ferguson leaned back, blinking.

“Aliens,” he repeated. She nodded heavily. He couldn’t help but notice the way the candlelight played soft shadows across her dyed pink locks and made her hazel eyes seem infinitely deep.

“They’re…” She motioned in the air, molding it in her mind. “…tall, and sort of like praying mantises.”

“Where are they from?” Ferguson asked, not really caring, only wanting her light voice to keep speaking forever.

“I don’t know. Far away, I’m sure.”

She cocked her head and stared at the ceiling, past the ceiling, toward the stars that were there despite the cloud of city lights.

“When did they abduct you?”

He splashed the last of the wine into her glass. She didn’t notice. She leaned towards him and bit her lip before speaking.

“A few months ago. April. That time I went camping. You remember?”

He nodded. He remembered.

“Their ship was…” She sculpted a large seed in the air. “…huge! Like a giant cardamom pod. You know what they look like, right?”

He nodded. He’d never seen a cardamom pod.

“It was very…organic looking, very natural. But huge, I mean like five stories high. At least!”

She paused, marveling at the memory of it.

“They found me by the lake. It was the middle of the night. It felt like I was dreaming, so when they told me to come with them, I didn’t argue. They were…graceful…slow— but the kind of slow where you know they can move like that! if they want to. I never actually went into the ship, they just led me next to it. There were a lot of them walking around it, looking at the trees, the ground, the sky…

“There was one that they took me to, and he looked me all over, like a doctor. I think that’s what he must have been, a doctor. He was—well, maybe she, but I think he—He was really interested in my face. Which actually makes sense, ‘cause they have faces like insects, y’know?” She molded an imaginary bug mask around her face. “But he ran his hands over my face a lot, and sort of…matched it up with a picture he had. It was like out of an anatomy book. He had them laid out on the ground, all these papers with anatomical drawings on them, and he’d match them up with my body. He seemed really excited, but of course, I don’t really know. I’m just guessing. He took a blood sample, too. That scared me a little, because I could feel it and suddenly it wasn’t like dreaming anymore…”

She looked down at her crossed legs, her bare feet. There was silence filled only by the ticking of the wall clock.

“And after that?” Ferguson prompted, feeling acutely the absence of her voice. She looked up.

“After that I don’t really remember much. The doctor, he was really nice, he calmed me down when I got scared. He told me I’d be fine and I’d be back at my camp when I woke up. And I was. I would have thought it was all a dream, but I still had the prick mark from where they took the blood.”

Silence fell again, brief this time.

“So what do you think?” she asked.

“I think you’re beautiful,” Ferguson replied. She giggled.

“About the aliens,” she amended. “Do you believe me?”

“Yeah, I always believe abduction stories.”

“Well, not all of them are true.”

“Yours is.”

“Yeah.”

She picked up her glass and took a sip, closed her eyes.

“I’m not sorry it happened,” she murmured. “I’m glad, in fact. It haunts me every day and night, but I’m glad it happened.”

“Why?”

She opened her eyes and looked at him, really looked.

“Because it means we’re not alone.”

He shifted slowly and placed his cheek next to hers.

“We don’t have to be alone,” he whispered across her face and felt her smile. “You don’t have to be alone…”

And as her arms wrapped gently around his body, he kissed her.

“Roxanne, Roxanne, I love you…”