She routinely had these kinds of thoughts but hoarded them, little secrets never to be shared with her brother. She lay back down on the bed, content with imagining a deity actually from her era, who’d been to the dentist or eaten a burrito. Lit by Gabe’s desk lamp, the ceiling appeared warm and splotchy, an ocean of shadowy and then brighter yellows. Gabe sat cross-legged on the carpet flipping through the CD booklet with photos of the band wearing leather jackets and no shirts, finding them gross and compelling at the same time. Then he cocked his head. A loudness, distinct from the music and morphing from lawn mower to helicopter to something with magnitude, overtook the music, and when the song ended and the speakers were silent, the loudness remained—a mighty roar from the outside.
Alison started to say something as a NyQuil hue poured in from the window. One saturated shaft lit up the bed, her arms and shoulders. The two kids ran to the window. “Oh man,” Gabe said, laughing. “I—shit.”
A flying saucer, dead center in their backyard, lowered into the space, the walls of the house shuddering. The pure green of the lights, switching to white and then back again, overwhelmed their eyes. A number of small birds scattered out of the weeping willow, which now appeared dwarfed by its new neighbor. Somewhere in Alison’s amazement, in the awe that ricocheted and collected strength, she registered the look of ecstasy and fear on her brother’s face, fighting for dominance. They quickly cut out of the room and banged down the stairs.
In the kitchen, where the view of their new visitor was the best, Cynthia wiped her soapy hands on a dish towel, a frantic look in her eye.
“I didn’t know this was coming,” she said, shouting to project over the motorized roar of the spaceship. They all stood at the picture window. Something like an airplane takeoff, the spaceship’s noise was occasionally punctuated by a musical exclamation point appropriate to 1950s cocktail records with boomerang shapes on the cover. Every three minutes or so, it climaxed with a saccharine pop—effervescent and thunderous—that made the spacecraft vibrate. The hysterical searchlights roiled in the silvery skull of the ship’s top. They beamed in through the window every few seconds, lighting up Cynthia and then plunging her figure into darkness again.
“This is amazing,” Gabe shouted.
“Can we go outside and see this thing?” Alison asked.
“Let’s wait a little bit until it calms down.” Cynthia stared out through the glass where she usually watched cardinals hopping from branch to branch, their little speck brains chittering instinctive code. On one occasion, she spotted a lone deer that had wandered far off course standing in the light cast from an outdoor bulb. When they looked at each other—the deer’s eyes were soft and beyond fright, almost paralyzed—something passed between them, the mutual acknowledgment of imminent death. It ran out of the yard and then stood gawkily in the center of their suburban street, seemingly confused about which way to go. It was a long journey back to the woods.
Several minutes passed and the spaceship showed no signs of retiring for the night. But it was firmly planted now.
“OK, let’s go out there, but I want you kids to hold my hand,” Cynthia said. Both kids began to complain. “Hold my hand!”
Gabe and Alison each grabbed a palm. Together they climbed down the back porch steps. They stepped carefully around the machine: Cynthia’s loafers, Alison’s Mary Janes, Gabe’s sneakers. Up close, the sound of the ship was deafening—whirring, vrooming, pop!—so they cupped their hands over their ears. There was so much to look at: the swooping saucer shape, the dark glass windows they couldn’t see through, the magnesium noxiousness of the lights. Where it wasn’t obscured by the spaceship, the grass appeared phosphorescent and nearly liquid in the light.
The aircraft seemed more familiar than not. In some ways, it appeared to be little more than old airplane parts repurposed into a saucer, the same sharkskin metal bolted together. The material was sturdy and impenetrable but also weathered. In some places, the surface buckled a bit or was scratched. The legs (each one was two tentacles bound together and then jointed in a few places for flexibility) looked like standard tubing from a hardware store, though with a silkier sheen.
On all sides of the Allen house, neighbors appeared at their windows or in their backyards. Mrs. Chang, a quiet widow next door, surveyed the spaceship from her rarely used guest bedroom. Olivia and Tom, good friends who lived on the other side next door, weren’t home tonight or surely they’d be coming over right now, knocking at their door for the inside scoop, Tom toting his video recorder. Instead, Ernest walked into the backyard and joined his family. With deep annoyance etched on his face, he craned his head back to take in the whole sight. What was the threshold figure again for hearing loss? Something above 2,000 hertz?
Ten minutes before he entered the backyard, he’d been watching the spaceship from the Aurora Park lawn with the rest of the Earth Day committee. They’d broken from their meeting when one of them noticed the spaceship flying overhead. As it raced across the sky, throwing beams of light, Ernest had a foreboding sense that the flying saucer was headed for his house. Confirming his suspicions, the spaceship first paused behind the dark thumb of his chimney and the slanted roof he’d recently patched, and then lowered itself down.
Ernest wanted to hit the reset button on reality. “Maybe it just looked like it landed in my backyard.”
The excitement of his peers told him otherwise. After a moment of stunned silence, Jean said: “My god, did you, of all people, just have a spaceship land at your house? You’ve gotta go, Ernest.”
Ernest took off, running in the moonlight until he turned down his driveway. He had to slow down now so that he wouldn’t trip on the oak tree roots that were rupturing the concrete slabs. The disk was confounding, impressive, and dinged up all at once. He met Cynthia’s eye and said breathlessly: “Told you the things were overrated.” For a moment, they both laughed hysterically from shared nerves and shared thoughts: What was this thing doing here? What the hell set of mistakes had conspired to drop this B-movie contraption onto their private property? Ernest fought off the urge to hustle the family inside so they could figure this all out, but of course he understood. Who could tear themselves away from this hypnotizing spectacle?
He left them to walk around. From every angle, he inspected the spaceship until it became like some Picasso contraption, a cubist repeat and not-repeat of the same curves and slopes. No matter where he stood, he could never take in the whole circumference—always a part of it unavailable to the eye. The unknowable magnitude made him uneasy. He knocked on its legs a few times, but the underside was too high to reach without a ladder. Then he noticed Cynthia, who’d snuck back inside, waving him in from the kitchen window.
The kids sat around the table, Gabe almost squirming from elation, Alison still watching the ship with obsessed focus. Cynthia leaned her hip against the counter. Her arms were locked across her chest, her face a rictus of tension. For now, the funny moment had passed and stress had set in. Ernest forged ahead in the only manner that made sense to him: they would talk logistics.
“Do we know how long this is supposed to stay?”
“Approximately nine months,” Cynthia said. “Kind of like a really weird pregnancy.”
“Nine months?! How do you know that?”
Cynthia handed him a pamphlet. “I just opened it a few minutes ago,” she said. “Guess who it was addressed to?”
Too engrossed to answer, Ernest read aloud the print across the front page: “Congratulations, your friends from Jupiter have arrived!” The printing quality was fairly good; the paper stock was glossy and thick, but it still looked tacky. The illustration on the cover bugged him. It was of a much mightier alien ship than the one currently