american gothic

transmission #X

the brief tale of us, translated from a deep space radio transmission:

This was the life I knew. Post apocalypse, somehow we survived the end of the world. Cockroaches don't know how to fly away anyway. The skyline was spilled ripples of brandy like the fuzzy VHS sunset in an 80's movie, fallen skyscrapers just scattered toys. Dirt in our ears, you're gonna end up just like your father, wrong side of town, spilled 7/11 slushies in parking lots filled with the smell of 3 am and gasoline, skin the color of the black edges of the Milky Way. This is how we live, after the fall.

This was childhood as an alien, blurry like I lost my glasses. The Martian language I hid under my salivating tongue like a flashlight under a bed my best friend wet beside me. Humans make horror movies about being scared of the dark. We lived with streetlights burning out every time we walked outside.

This was the strange plant the cyclops girl in gym class hid beneath her shirt, of blue capillary and crime, and crushed between her fingers to rub the turquoise smell on her wrists, her neck between her thighs, she says, when she's ready for it, and she's gotta be. On this planet there are three icy moons, there is so much gravity it caves your chest in if you can't take a punch.

This was my crush on the white skin space cowboy who copies my algebra homework with the red rockets painted on his chuck taylors. My junior high skinned knee, jawbreaker crush; I picked at it until it bled, I hid it in my cheek until my teeth broke. He rides falling stars to school at the speed of light but still gets to class late, he looks so cool, he sneaks the burning hot Mercurial water humans swallow down with a grimace and call a good time, don't you know that stuff's toxic, aren't you afraid to die? I know the answers no, oh God he looks so cool. His only concern is the intergalactic broadcast from his sweetheart of a different star system, Milky Way whiskey for a nickel, and superman comics for a dime.

This was the summer before my brother started high school, July, or August, whichever sounds heavy and naive enough, cause we sure were. We ran so fast our uncombed curls tangled together we stayed that way for days, those long spider legs daddy gave us don't ever give in they make crop circles then buckle into chlorophyll heaps watching starbursts of black holes; God doesn't care enough anymore about our side of town to hide the truth, the flaws in his science experiment. I was breathing heavy grinning wide, you grabbed my chin, I said if you're gonna slice the moon open you better have a good reason. You told me you were scared. You said we needed to go somewhere safe. I said we were.

This was 6 years later and we were not. The last time I saw you was in a crowd downtown beneath a saucer, a green column of light you floated in, the people cheered. You dissapeared. Mom was crying, pushing through the the crowd with her bra strap falling off her shoulder. Now I'm strapped down to a metal table in a crown of electric thorns, live wire electrodes gnawing my shaved scalp, and clear fluid pumping through needles in my arms, tubes down my throat, I can't tell what floods more violently, the liquid or the memories.

The sitings, they trickled into police radios with autumn, at hours when eyes were easily tricked, at dusk, moving shadows on the hillside, headlights coyote eyes in the street. I think it was just a plane, there's a military base around here right? Just breathe kid what'd you see?

The lost dog fliers smearing the street caking telephone poles; symphonies of police sirens. Reporters on a grainy TV screen, we interrupt this program for, fizzing out, white light, where's the goddamn remote, click, Big Bang, we're getting word the world is ending. Pixelated flip phone clips of geometric patterns in the clouds. Mom driving me to school with the spilled coffee on her sleeve, the radio is on, her knuckles tightening around the steering wheel as the morning report whizzes past the names of 8 black men missing in the past week, quickly moving on to the traffic update. (alleged, unexplained, unidentified flying object). The TV screen suddenly gone to static, power outages in the slums, compasses spinning in reverse so fast your eyes can't follow, silverware levitating in the middle of the night. Schools of dead fish washing up on the beach.

I sleep on the couch in itchy blankets headphones stuck between the cushions, dark and quiet (like his skin before you plunged your metal fear inside) except for mom sitting on my ankles contorting the TV antennae (I used to think the static came from the frizz in her worried hair) my brother barefoot on the porch with our lost dogs leash in his hand three moons orbiting magic eight balls in his eyes, the future is dancing around this planet singing ring around the rosie. My brother, clicking his tongue, cooing come home lullabies in Braille, the goosebumps on his dark arms are spelling SOMETHING IS COMING.

The lights in the sky, moving in elliptical patterns, hovering, vibrating over the grasslands.

Staying up late watching Star Wars turns into missing three weeks of work sticking pins into 36 newspaper clippings about Area 51, bold print blurry heads of beings not quite like yourself, sticking pins into what might as well be your skin, string theory tied in a noose around your neck. The paranoia coating the pink inside of your mouth is the only thing you've eaten in days.

The Sunday that they came down. Oh God, Sunday, it just had to be Sunday.

The Evangelicals awestruck red faced as the angels swarmed above the steeple shining their lights down for the rapture. Bible in one hand with the screaming infant on her hip, the moving lights of UFOs in its drowning blue eyes, hallelujah to the heat lighting. The church bells rang. The people twitched in white ready to be stained to the organ player as the hooded Holy Ghost with 3 black eyes came down from the sky and probed their willing mouths.

The abductions. They took some white kids too, but us first. Dark skin, wrong side of town, crying angels of Chicago type kids went first. Where's my son, where is my son, they took my son, they took my boy. The missing kids on everyones milk cartons, my mom has to bake cookies with that shit. My brother gulps down with his man-of-the-house knuckles around the refrigerator handle. The brown boys in hoodies ran down suburban streets their dirty shoelaces did not belong on just to get away from the spinning lights pouring down their necks like the scraping fingernails of God.

No one cared about us. No one cared about the boys in hoodies, with thick black skin, the color of the infinity, no we were dropped in the middle of space like gambling dice, well let me tell you you've hit a lucky pair of snakes eyes, they cluster in threes on the strangest shade of skin, my skin, the color of black sun spots that melt satellites and disrupt radio transmissions.

We were the first. Rolled from mud dough to a planet so young it couldn't stop crying, and bleeding magma, and cutting itself into a sore volcanic supernova. To a God so young he knew nothing but playing with dinosaurs and dolls, but they came to us. They. Hands like ours, but green and skeletal. They're hearts not in the same places as ours. Maybe they built our pyramids. Maybe we drew their idols in our red earth. They drew geometric patterns, sonic waves, in our crops for when they would come back for us.

This is now. 9 pm, cocooned inside hair i can't rip through anymore, growing like moss, my toes stick out, its becoming hard to breath in here. I have screw holes in my hands and feet, lacerations across my forehead from all the purpose they left inside of me.

They took our spit, our blood, our hair, the galactic melanin spilled like nebula clouds in our skin, they took pieces without ripping us into pieces. They designated our guts for sour blue fruit, like the cyclops girl gave me, forbidden love grown beneath a different sun, milk without my brothers school picture on the side, they didn't not designate our stomachs for the unripe metal fruit of a 9 millimeter and maybe that is not very much but to me that is enough and I have not stopped dreaming about being strapped down like the son of God being cut open just to have my blood compared to the color of the red dwarf star they live beneath, not swabbed into evidence bags, burnt into ash in an urn on my mothers mantel piece. Maybe that is not wrapped like a gift but we get our forks and knives and dig into that ugly brown cardboard box because we have nothing else. Nowhere else to go.

Mom is this what it's like is this what it feels like mom is this what it felt like when I was in your stomach, invasion of the body snatchers, teeth clenched around your right to cut me out of your stomach if the color of my skin took me from you anyway? At least this would be your choice. Someday I'll get to choose, orange grove with no shoes, so do I let him bloom or do I chop him at the roots. Mom, I don't know if you should've let go, so ok, let's just go, yeah let's just leave, somebody told me there's water up on Mars. Well there's water here too, it's just that down here I can't breathe.

We stand out in the cornfields, arms outstretched, curls uncombed. You said you would come back. Take me with you, take me with you. They wouldn't miss me if I left.