We Are the Ants(2)

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.

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I’ve never grown comfortable being naked around the aliens. Jesse Franklin frequently saw me naked and claimed to enjoy it, but he was my boyfriend, so it doesn’t count. I’m self--conscious about being too skinny, and I imagine the sluggers judge me for my flaws—the mole in the center of my chest shaped like Abraham Lincoln or the way my collarbone protrudes or my tragically flat ass. Once, while standing in the lunch line waiting for shepherd’s pie, Elle Smith told me I had the flattest ass she’d ever seen. I wasn’t sure how many asses a twelve-year-old girl from Calypso realistically could have been exposed to, but the comment infected me like a cold sore, bursting to the surface from time to time, ensuring I never forgot my place.

Part of me wonders if the sluggers send pervy pics back to their home planet for their alien buddies to mock. Check out this mutant we caught. They call it a teenager. It’s got five arms, but one is tiny and deformed.

It’s not really deformed, I swear.

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When the sluggers had finished experimenting on me that night, the slab I was resting on transformed into a chair while I was still on it. During previous abductions, the aliens had locked me in a totally dark room, attempted to drown me, and once pumped a gas into the air that made me laugh until I vomited, but they’d never given me a chair. I was immediately suspicious.

One of the sluggers remained behind after the others disappeared into the shadows. The exam room was the only section of the ship I’d ever seen, and its true shape and size were obscured by the darkness at the edges. The room itself was plain—a gray floor with swirls that gave it the impression of movement and that was illuminated by four or five lights beaming from the shadows. The slab, which had become a chair, was obsidian black.