Ruth Writes

A blinding white light accompanied by a piercing siren floods her living room, bursting her bulbs and extinguishing her television. She rolls her eyes and heaves her tired body out of her armchair. She falls behind it just as her windows explode sending glass shards flying in every direction. She peeks her head over the arm of the chair and shields her eyes. Squinting to see through the brightness, she can just about make out the outline of the spaceship.

Once landed firmly on her grass the beaming light turns off and she blinks a couple of times. The spaceship is not quite what you’d expect. It looks much like a helicopter but with ten times as many rotors that power it. She leans on the arm of the chair to stand herself up and walks towards the blue alien descending from it. She throws her arms up in the air and lets them slap against her thighs on landing. She tilts her head to lean on her shoulder, too tired to keep it upright herself.

‘What the hell, Randall? I just got those fixed after the last time. Are you taking the piss?’ she shouts, over the faltering noise of the engine. Randall, the smallest of his kind, looks like a blue snowman with the face of a human. He totters over to her, clipboard in hand, sunglasses that she gifted him for Christmas, falling off his tiny nose.

‘No, no, I need no urine samples from you today, Lisa,’ he says, not understanding her turn of phrase; they’re working on it. ‘We are going to need you in the offices today, though.’

Her whole body starts to ache with the thought of it. The transformation experiments they have her trying out in the office take their toll on her human body.

‘I was only in last week. I don’t know if I can handle it,’ she says. Randall’s forehead raises in a way that if he had eyebrows they’d be nearly in his hairline. His quick eyes flick over his notes, and he looks at her, trying and failing to hide his concern.

‘We have no record of you coming in last week? Are you sure you’re not confused?’ he says. She laughs, unamused.

‘Yes, because it’s so easy to mix up the dates of when your body spends twenty-four hours transforming itself into a different lifeform. No, I’m not confused.’

Randall’s eyes roll into the back of his head, and she waits as he communicates with his planet. Thirty seconds later, the alien mothership comes roaring into view. Lisa’s jaw drops. She’s never actually seen it before. She has only ever travelled on Randall’s little spaceship. It’s magnificent. Under her awe, her sleepy brain sets off alarm bells. The mothership’s presence suggests something is wrong. She looks at Randall, a little frightened. He has increased the distance between the two of them.

‘You may have been compromised, Lisa.’

A beam covers her and then everything goes black.