Clarissa came by this afternoon. She wasn't wearing much – daisy dukes with black sheer stockings and a half shirt – and I tried to keep my eyes in my head. We hadn't really settled anything yet, and I didn't want to let on that I wanted anything.
She sat in my rocker all agog about the craft that had appeared off the coast. We couldn't see it from where we were, ten miles inland, but it was all over social media, not to mention regular media. I kept trying to start flirting and she kept trying to speculate. Like speculating would have changed what was about to happen.
“They're saying there isn't any movement out there, but this one guy thinks he can see someone, or something, standing on top of it. The video he shared, there's just a glimpse, but you can kind of see a figure, or something.”
She was breathless talking about it. She held out her phone to show me. I watched the clip trying not to stare at the line where her legs crossed. There was nothing to see. Just that same mile wide, triangular hunk of black sitting inert like it had since it splashed down in the ocean about a month ago.
“Trump is going to blow it up,” I said. “Start some kind of intergalactic war. You know he wants to.”
But she wasn't having it. Kept on about how they – whoever or whatever they are – were going to reveal our bonds of peace and love and usher in the Age of Aquarius.
And there I was trying to get laid with the end of the world.
Clarissa first came into my experience when I worked overnight at Circle K. She was the too young, semi-homeless chick who stayed with some guys in the moss-smeared trailer across the road. I'd see her at 2, 3 in the morning – knee-high leather boots, miniskirt, halter top, a garland of plastic flowers around her neck – with a pet carrier full of cats, her fur babies. I'd give her an eyeful and her cats a sandwich or two from the hot food we were throwing out. I suspect she ate some of the sandwiches herself.
One time she came in she had made herself up with glitter across her plump cheeks and up around her eyes to her brow. I told her it looked nice, and she was appreciative, said the guys had made fun of her for doing it. That set the tone of our relationship – she a-flutter soaking up my compliments, and me an old simp dishing it out. Of course, as any of the T-fueled dating coaches on YouTube will tell you, simps never get laid.
Even back then, at the end of the first Trump presidency and long before the craft appeared, Clarissa was starry-eyed about aliens. I would see her come rushing up the sidewalk through the storefront windows, leaving her homeless crew on the corner, to come bursting through the doors with news of the lights she had seen in the sky over Beacon Hill. She was always so happy announcing that they were up there, watching over us. I would nod along, noting a paradox in such nice long legs on a crazy chick.
But I guess she wasn't completely crazy. They really were up there.
CNN had reported that two U.S. Navy carriers and a frigate were stationed in the Pacific on the far side of the alien craft. Unbeknownst to us, while we sat in my apartment arguing over whether the aliens intended love or war – and I tried not to drool over her plump legs in that black sheer hose – the long inert ship had begun to show some activity. The side of the triangular craft that faced the Navy vessels shifted color from black to a shimmering pink. The pink began to waft out of the ship like mist, which built into a shimmering pink cloud bank – with sparkles of white light inside it – and rolled toward the Navy vessels.
The two carriers reacted as soon as the pink cloud began rolling out. The Navy had already been maintaining a rotation of two fighter jets in a holding pattern over the craft; then it launched a string of F-35s toward the horizon, where they swept in a wide return arc. Klaxons must have blared on the frigate as the missile launchers lowered to horizontal to aim at the pink cloud. I imagine a broadcast repeating itself over a loudspeaker: “Return to your previous position or be fired upon.”
But the cloud continued to advance over the waves. The frigate fired a warning shot from its bow cannon, then with barely a pause fired a successive flashing of eight pairs of missiles. The missiles penetrated the cloud – but there was no explosion, either within the cloud or the alien craft. The missiles simply disappeared. The F-35s zoomed past in low pairs firing their sidewinders, and missile after missile entered the cloud with no effect, and the missiles that hit the craft itself penetrated the black like it was mist too, and disappeared.
The pink cloud rolled forward. The frigate opened up with every gun it had. The cloud wafted over the three Navy vessels like a fog, building up until all three were occluded. Then it's motion lulled and stopped – it reversed course and began to pull back into the craft.
Revealing that the Navy vessels were gone.
King 5 out of Seattle had a chopper in the air when all of this went down, and within half an hour Clarissa and I were watching clips on social media.
She was so ecstatic she could barely sit still. “I told you, dude, I told you! This is love. That's why the cloud is pink. They're going to take our tools of war and teach us nonviolence.”
I was in shock. The alien craft consumed some of the most advanced ships and weaponry in the world with impunity. We're powerless.
Clarissa slid off one shoe. Actually ran her stocking foot up the inside of my leg. “We should celebrate,” she said.
But I was too freaked out to get hard.
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