Jessica Hughes

You wake up on a spaceship’s operating table surrounded by strange creatures you’ve never seen before. How did you get here? How are you going to escape? So you know how there’s a crackpot in every significant area of land claiming to have been visited (and generally probed in various, uncomfortable orifices) by aliens? I have been visited by aliens. But I’m not one of those crackpots. Why do I differentiate myself from them, you ask? For a start, I was visited by actual aliens, not government agents dressed in tacky Halloween costumes that they think look even vaguely like the real thing. It is a truth universally acknowledged (and generally ignored) that Area 51 most definitely exists. You know it exists, I know it exists, yet it’s like the drunk uncle nobody talks about or invites to the family Christmas dinner but always turns up at the most inappropriate times anyway. But what is in that warehouse, you ask? As far as I know, it’s boring things like spaceships and spacesuits. The little set used to put Neil Armstrong and his buddies on the moon. Various rocks of strange chemical compositions… I could go on and on. All that and much more reside within that most mysterious of government compounds. There’s definite proof that aliens exist (just look at the pyramids). Still, I believe I am the only human to date who has actually had the pleasure of adequately interacting with them. Yes, I know I’m stalling, but you need to understand something. Everyone who had claimed to be probed by aliens before and since I was, was actually visited by your friendly, neighborhood G-man, trying to work out how compromised Area 51 was. They only call upon those unlucky few who potentially stumbled across their top-secret alien facility, but why they feel the need to stick something up someone’s butt is anyone’s guess. One balmy spring evening, I walked down the road to the bus stop from where I worked as a waitress at a nearby restaurant. It had been a long day of wolf whistles and men hitting on me, and all I wanted was to go home, pour myself a glass of wine and watch some aimless reality show. The Universe had other plans. One second, I was walking down the road, carefully picking my way around the puddles formed during the rain the night before; the next, I had cold metal pressing into my back. There was no tacky white light, no spaceship hovering above my head, no little green man demanding I take him to my leader. To this day, I have no idea what happened between me jumping over a puddle and me lying on what felt like one of those metal tables they have at the vet. To say I was terrified was an understatement. My mind raced, trying to remember where I last was and how I had ended up where I was. No matter how hard I tried, I came up blank. Okay, Jess, the rational side of my brain thought firmly. Don’t panic. TOO LATE!! the terrified side of my mind screamed back. Where the hell am I? How the hell did I get here? The only way to find that out is to keep calm, open your eyes and take in your surroundings, the logical side of my brain replied. Realizing I was right (and then trying not to think too hard about that), I opened my eyes enough to see but not reveal that I was awake. When my stupified brain registered what I saw, I immediately wanted to shut my eyes tight and never open them again. I was alone in a cold, clinical room. Three of the walls were made of metallic purple material that seemed to breathe at the same speed I did, but the fourth was made of some clear substance that shimmered. I could see shapes moving around behind the translucent material, shapes which did not make any sense to me. They were not humanoid; instead, they were more insect-like. Their heads were flat on top and tapered down into a very pointy chin, somewhat reminiscent of a praying mantis. Their backs were stooped like they were double or triple their height, but they had to bend over to fit in the room. “Ah, she’s awake.” The voice was cold, unfeeling, and made me shiver from my head to my toes. The words seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, and I found myself looking around the room to try and find the source of the voice. “Who are you?” I found myself asking, “Where am I?” “All will be answered in good time.” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes and huff in frustration. Clearly, these… things weren’t going to answer my questions, and I had no idea what they would do to me. “Commencement of Alpha Experiment on Test Subject One,” the same voice announced. Before, it sounded almost bored, if it was even feeling an emotion. Now, however, it seemed to be excited, looking forward to whatever experiment they were planning to do on me. I did not like the sound of any of this. With difficulty, I swallowed hard against the wave of panic rising in the pit of my stomach like a tsunami. No matter what, the best thing to do was keep my cool and find a way to escape. A mechanical whining noise caught my attention, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a machine with some sort of terrifyingly sharp, pointed thing on the end of it coming straight towards me. Keeping my cool was getting harder and harder to do with every second. I swung my head around the room once more (it was just about the only thing I could move) but couldn’t see anything that could help me. Meanwhile. the giant machine kept creeping closer toward me. I had an annoying habit that I’d developed as an anxious child in a broken home. Whenever things were getting overwhelming or scary, I would start whistling, and it was a coping mechanism that helped calm me down. Lying on that cold, steel table that had yet to warm up with my body temperature, with the machine creeping ever closer, I found myself starting to whistle a tuneless melody as I desperately tried to keep my cool. A sudden screeching noise stabbed painfully into my ears, and I gasped at the pain in my head. The creatures behind the translucent wall had what I assumed were their hands pressed to an area of their body that I figured could’ve been their ears. If they had been humans, it looked like they were clamping large fleshy appendages to their rib area. When I gasped, it disturbed my whistling, and the aliens seemed to recover from whatever pain I had caused them. Surely it couldn’t be that easy… I started whistling again, this time more of a tune that sounded vaguely like a popular song that often played over the restaurant’s speakers, preparing as much as I could for the possible screeching noise. I watched in fascination as the aliens doubled over more than before, their ‘arms’ pressed to their ‘ears’ in absolute agony. A plan started to form rapidly in my mind. All I needed to do was keep whistling and free myself from the bindings pinning me to the table, and I would be free until the next obstacle. I started wriggling and pulling at the bindings around my wrists and ankles while whistling continuously. Bit by agonizing bit, I managed to free first one wrist and then the other. After that, releasing my ankles was like a walk in the park. I can’t remember how I made it safely off that spaceship and back onto solid ground. I can vaguely recall following my instincts and various signs that made no sense, pressing buttons, and hoping for the best. At least I recognized my surroundings when I jumped into the beam of light that transported me back down to earth. The stupid aliens hadn’t even moved from where they’d picked me up beforehand, and I could even see the puddle that I’d jumped over moments before being knocked out and tied down to a cold steel table. I looked up at the spaceship before it zoomed off in the blink of an eye. Then, I shook my head, shrugged, and continued along my original path back home. There you have it. An entire chronicle of what happened when I was abducted by real aliens. Crazy, huh? But you believe me, right? Right? Hey, where are you going? You haven’t given me a chance to tell you about my second encounter with a different kind of alien! Or my third! Or my fourth!