The True Meaning of Smekday

For days afterward, nothing seemed right. I didn’t comb my hair or brush my teeth. I never even opened my Christmas presents. Why bother? Now there were aliens. I wouldn’t listen to music. It made me cry. All of it, it was too beautiful. And I’m not just talking about Beethoven or something. Old *NSYNC albums made me cry. The song the ice-cream truck played made me cry. I couldn’t laugh, and hearing other people laugh made me angry. It was selfish and sick, like burning money. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The ship landed. There was no landing gear. The six hoses just spread out like legs and held the ship’s weight. Then it…walked. There’s no other way to describe it. The whole great thing walked on hoselegs like a beetle toward us, picking its way through monuments and headstones.

I looked around for help, but there was no one else on the street.

“Mom! Wake up! Wake up wake up!” I screamed. She was standing still, and I ran to her side, clutched her leg. “Mom! I love you! I’m sorry! Let’s go home!”

The ship raised a leg, and it flexed out like a worm toward us. And as it got close…I let go. I let go of my mom. I let go and hid behind a mausoleum. Because I was scared. And I know I deserve whatever you think of me for that.

The hoseleg pulled itself over Mom’s head and half swallowed her, down to her waist. She didn’t move, or make a sound. She still had my Christmas stocking on her arm. Then there was a noise like:

Foomp

and she sailed into the air; she sailed away, sucked like soda into that big humming head.

I don’t know if I can write about everything afterward. It’s going to sound like I’m trying to be dramatic, but it’s not like that. It isn’t for anyone else. You only fall because your legs stop working. And you don’t fall to your knees, you fall on your ass into a patch of crabgrass like the Idiot of the Year. You scream for your mom because you really think it will bring her back. And when it doesn’t, your skin feels too tight, and your lungs are full of cotton, and you couldn’t call her again if you wanted to. And you don’t get up, and you don’t think up any clever plans, because you’re only waiting to burst like a firecracker and die. It’s the only thing to do.

That’s all. There’s more, but that’s all I’m going to write about it. You asked me to write about the days before the invasion, so there’s my answer, though it was sort of a personal question, and you maybe shouldn’t have asked it. But that’s all.

Anyway.

I wrote “ass” a couple paragraphs ago. Pardon my language.

So I sat in that graveyard for a while. I don’t remember getting up and I don’t remember going home, but there I was. I made myself a sandwich, and afterward I sat in a chair. I forgot to breathe. I didn’t know you could do that. From time to time it came to me that my chest was empty and my head light, so I gaped like a dying fish until I was full again. Then I stared and I thought about nothing. Nothing. That got boring, and I felt my stomach growl, and I thought, Wasn’t there a sandwich? So I returned to the kitchen to find it still on the countertop, a cockroach sitting right in the center like a baseball pitcher.

And this is when I finally started to plan, but all of my plans were stupid. I think there’s a part of the brain, probably somewhere in the back, that won’t give up believing in magic. It was the part that made cavemen believe that drawing elks on stone would make for a good hunt the next day. And it’s still chugging along, making you think you have lucky socks, or that your kids’ birthdays will win the lottery. It made me think I could stop time in the cemetery with a wave of my hand, or summon Mom to my side with her name. Currently it was very busy, thinking over and over about how to go back in time, and what I should do when I got there.

The spaceships, by the way, didn’t stay secret for long. They were all over the television, every channel, except for channel 56, which was still showing reruns of The Jeffersons.

There were news stories about the ships, and there were stories about how people were reacting to the ships. Some people were happy, and that made me nauseous. Folks everywhere shot their guns up at the sky in celebration. Most people were panicking. Some were looting, because I guess they thought that with aliens invading they were really going to need new DVD players. I suppose nobody knew for sure then that the Boov were bad news, because they hadn’t had their mothers vacuumed. I might have gone out and told them, but I was pretty sick. It seems you can’t really go for a walk to the graveyard in the middle of a late December night with bare feet and no coat without spending the next few days sweating and shivering and kneeling in front of the toilet. I tried to reach 911, the FBI, the White House, anybody I could tell about Mom, but the phone lines were pretty much worthless. My guess is a lot of folks were calling their friends and family and saying,

“Have you heard about the aliens?”

And then their friend would say,

“What aliens?”

And the first guy would say,

“Turn on your TV!”

“What channel?”

“Any one but 56.”

And as a result, I couldn’t warn anybody. But they figured it out soon enough.

As it turned out, the ship that took Mom was one of the little ones. There were ships the size of Rhode Island in the skies over my city, New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas, not to mention London, Tel Aviv, Moscow, and about a hundred other places. At first they just hung there like jellyfish. But then the jellyfish began taking bites out of things.

Nobody understood at first. I sure didn’t. We didn’t know then about the guns. The crazy Boov guns that don’t make a flash or a sound. We only knew that, hey, the Statue of Liberty’s head is missing. So’s the dome of the Capitol, and the top of Big Ben. Oh, look, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is now the Totally Unremarkable Stump of Pisa. The Great Wall of China is the Great Speed Bump. The Boov ships had big guns. And the Boov themselves had a knack for knowing just what to shoot. They were pushing our buttons.

I have to talk about this. I can’t get it out of my head. You future people, you probably don’t remember the invasion at all. You weren’t even born. But maybe something else really bad has happened since then. A hundred years is a long time.

When it happened, I’m sure you felt terrible. You were probably scared, and sad, and you wanted it to stop. That’s how I felt during the invasion—that’s probably how everyone feels. But were you excited, too? Just a little? Were you on the edge of your seat, wondering what would happen next?