Everybody knows that Rosie thinks she was abducted by an alien. She works it into every conversation even if the topic has nothing to do with outer space or planets or Martians. I listen through the chain link fence between our houses while the garbage man asks her how her day is going, and she tells him it would be going a lot better if the alien would come back to pick her up like he promised. My mom yells at me to quit eavesdropping and to stay away from Rosie because she’s off her rocker. Mom doesn’t approve of all the alien talk, she’d much rather hear about angels and prophets and arks and covenants, but sometimes I think maybe it’s all the same thing, something to believe in when you feel down like Rosie does, or like my mom gets, for that matter.
I know a lot about U.F.O. sightings from documentaries on the Discovery channel and I even watched that old Sigourney Weaver movie where she gives birth to a terrifying, slimy extra-terrestrial. I know most folks around here are pretty frightened at the prospect of an alien abduction, but not Rosie. She lets her grass grow really long and then mows a circle pattern right in the middle of her yard because she hopes this way the spaceship can easily locate her exact whereabouts.
Rosie says her alien was beautiful, and when he put his green arms around her, she felt like sunshine and rainbows and the ocean and love and lust, sadness and death and life and every feeling there is to feel all at once, and now she’s convinced that she can’t survive without him. She’s hooked on that alien like a drug, obsessed with what she’s missing out on just by being here on earth. That’s why she cries at night under the moon and the stars, sits out there on her crop circle in her Sunday’s best like a sacrificial offering to the solar system.
Once I asked Rosie to tell me the truth about what happened. She said she woke up in her bed in the middle of the night and saw a gorgeous creature floating in her room, and he scooped her up in his arms and carried her outside onto a glowing white hovercraft. I wanted to know what he did to her, but all Rosie would say is that he told her wonderful secrets that no one would ever understand. Told her she was chosen, that he would come back for her. That’s when Mom grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me in the house to my room and shut the door. I closed my eyes and pictured Rosie’s alien boyfriend and said a little prayer in my mind for him to come get her. It’s probably wrong to pray to aliens but like I said, I have a few theories on that.
This morning when I come down for breakfast Mom is outside with the cops, and police dogs are sniffing all around Rosie’s property. I sneak out through the back and hide in the bushes to hear what’s going on. Rosie’s missing, they say, gone without a trace. The cops ask my mom if Rosie was acting strange or if she seemed depressed. If she hung around with any suspicious characters as of late. Mom starts crying when they say they are looking for Rosie’s body, which makes me angry because it’s not like Mom ever cared about her. She used to say that no one would ever marry Rosie on account of her limp leftover from a cycling accident, and also because of her corrective lenses that make her eyes look too big, which is plain mean if you ask me.
The cops can’t find hide nor hair of Rosie, it’s like she vanished into thin air. I want to tell them they never will find her, because she’s a billion light years away by now flying around in some galaxy scientists haven’t discovered yet. She’s in the arms of some gentle being who wants her, feeling like the most special lady in the whole universe. Either that or she’s dead as a door nail in which case she can’t feel a thing, and for Rosie, either scenario is like heaven.
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Biography: Sara Dobbie is a Canadian writer from Southern Ontario. Her stories have appeared in Milk Candy Review, Fictive Dream, JMWW, Sage Cigarettes, New World Writing, Bending Genres, Ghost Parachute, Ruminate Online, Trampset, Ellipsis Zine, and elsewhere. Her chapbook “Static Disruption” is available from Alien Buddha Press. Her collection “Flight Instinct” is available from ELJ Editions. Follow her on Twitter @sbdobbie, and on Instagram at @sbdobwrites.
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Image: unsplash.com
