ReduxI am sixteen years old. It’s my first day of school - though the school year started a month...

Redux

I am sixteen years old. It’s my first day of school - though the school year started a month or two ago for everyone else here - at the American School of Kuwait.

The location is not what bothers me. The thing that makes today incredibly weird, is that yesterday I was thirty-eight and working for a living making tiny things.

There’s an old hypothetical question, “If you could go back to any time in your life, would you?”

I’ve always answered that question with a ‘no’ to be honest. There’d be so many cruddy things I’d have to go through again, and I’m sure that if I tried to change things I’d miss out on all the really good things I’ve had.

But apparently the choice has been taken from me. Of all the things I wouldn’t mind doing, high school would have been far, far down the list. Here I am, all the same.

The bus ride is over though; that would have been fun. At least, I remember it, unlike the details of my first day. Hareef picked me up by driving the wrong way down a divided highway, and then trundled off through the desert on paths that might have resembled high tech roads a couple thousand years ago. It was hilarious and startling.

From what I recall, I was really depressed and introverted the whole time I was here last; spending my recess/lunch times reading and rereading some favorite books (there had only been so much weight allowance for books after all). I kind of made some friends, but the only one I still talk to, the one I was the maid of honor for and still see once a year, won’t show up for a month or two.

My class schedule is weird. It’s a six day rotation kind of thing, so no two days in a row are the same, and no two weeks in a row are the same. Today is a “B” day. And since weekends in Kuwait are Thursday and Friday, today happens to be Saturday.

More than anything, I feel irritation. Seriously: I didn’t ask for this. There were no weird fortune teller machines, magic lamps, creepy old ladies in alleys, nothing. I just woke up standing here in the plaza, looking at the paint-chipping white and blue buildings and holding a too-full backpack.

I roll my eyes. The school has lockers, but I remember that I carried all of my crap around with me until a month or three in, when I finally got assigned one of them. It was weird starting a school year later than everyone else around me.

I don’t have time for this crap. I go to the office and ask about a locker. I’m sure that that rib that likes to pop out of joint when I’m older is from all that time I spent carrying around a backpack full of books for a couple of years. At least I’ll be doing future-me a favor. They’re out of junior lockers, so I get one in the row with the seniors, at the end of the third floor. I think it’s the same one I remember having, so if the world’s going to explode in a paradox, it probably won’t be from that.

School here starts with a homeroom class that lasts fifteen minutes or so before we go off to our first classes. Mine is with the drama teacher - an american woman who is a lot of fun and has long ginger hair like my friend Jennifer (seriously, if I’m stuck here, at least I’ll get to hang out with her again - maybe it’ll give me a chance to be a better friend). Rats: if I’d just gotten here a couple weeks earlier, I could have signed up for drama class. If you want to be an animator, you should totally take some acting classes. Something I wish someone had told me when I was younger.

Oh well. Maybe I can try out for a play this time.

I have a lot of trouble finding my first class. It’s the first indication something is wrong.

I don’t remember having trouble finding my first class.

Granted, I don’t remember much of my first day. But this seems wrong somehow.

I show up extremely late, but it’s one of my two favorite teachers. I remember how I hung out in her classroom during lunches periodically, talking books and art, and when Jennifer showed up it was the three of us. She goes with it, and I know what she’s teaching (Beowulf), so it goes fine.

But my backpack has a pile of crap in it that I don’t recognize.

I pull out a messy notebook full of doodles and pages hanging out. I don’t recognize any of these drawings, and there are pages and pages of them. The handwriting is mine, but the linework doesn’t resemble anything I’ve ever done. Many are better than anything I’ve ever done.

I don’t know why it hasn’t occurred to me until now that this is probably a dream. I mean, it doesn’t feel like one, but don’t dreams feel real when you’re in them?

I pinch myself. It hurts. I sigh. Nothing for it but to ride it out, I suppose.

In the pile of crap in my backpack, I seem to have lost my class schedule. I have no idea where to go next, and while I can remember many of the classrooms I spent time in at this school, it’s a vague guess at best where to go next.

The throng of people around me breaks around a teacher like a river around a rock, and the teacher grabs me as I try to pass. He yells at me for leaving this mess on the floor and demands I clean it up

The mess on the floor is a pile of garbage; paper with doodles on it that look like what I found in my bag and some kind of liquid substance that looks suspicious.

“I’m not cleaning that up. Are you serious? That smells like pee, which is a biohazard; there’s no way I’m touching that.”

The teacher glares at me. “You’re going to do it because I said so.”

Since I have the experience in my head at least of growing up and realizing that adults are just as fallible as I am, and I don’t necessarily have to do what they say when they’re being completely unreasonable I tell him no and walk off, and try to find my next class.

The day goes more and more wrong, in a way that suggests more that it’s a dream and I begin to wonder when I’m going to wake up. I don’t have any of the work done for one of my classes (it’s my art class, and instead of being the incredibly cool teacher I remember, she treats me like my Oceanography teacher did, which was horrible).

At the end of the day I magically miss both of the buses home, though each of them leave an hour apart and it feels as if no time has passed.

“Okay, okay, I get it!” I shout to the sky. “It’s a dream. I’m not in school any more, I don’t live in Kuwait, and I like my life the way it is, thanks, so can I wake up already?”

Instead of answering, my coworker from the future shows up. “But we’ve missed the buses; how are we going to get home?” he asks.

I quickly do the math. He would have been six when I was sixteen; there’s no way he’d appear the same age as me at this point in my life.

“What are you talking about,” he asks, “are you insane?”

“No. I’m not insane. This is some crazy dream where I go back to my school days and everything goes wrong. I’m just surprised I didn’t end up missing my clothes all of a sudden.” I roll my eyes.

He backs away, looking askance at me. “Do you WANT to end up without your clothes..?” He seems half serious.

“What?” I back away. “No! God no. Ew. Geez. We are not that kind of friends.”

He looks confused a moment. “We’re not?”

“Oh. My. Lord. No. We are not,” I say. “Who are you, because you’re not who you’re pretending to be.”

His look of confusion remains a beat and then he straightens. “Oh fine.”

My coworker’s facade shimmers and a creature stands before me. It looks vaguely humanoid, but not like anything I’ve ever seen before. “This is one of the weirder dreams I’ve had,” I say to it, unfazed.

“Hmm. Yes,” it says, regarding me. “It is. I wonder why it didn’t work this time.”

The question seems rhetorical. “Because I just watched an episode of the X-Files and this is so ridiculous it can’t be real, maybe.”

I’m not impressed. This is by far the weirdest dream I’ve had, and I’ve had some pretty memorable ones before. Aliens aren’t really new, but I wait to see if it has anything else interesting to say.

There’s a pause. I think it’s annoyed at me for answering but I can’t tell. It stares at me for a few moments longer while I wait, eyes half lidded and waiting to wake up.

It makes a few comments into what appears to be a recorder that I can’t quite hear, then takes out another device that looks like a stapler and approaches me. Before I can react with the jujitsu skills I’ve gained since I was sixteen it grabs my left arm and applies the device to my forearm. A burning sensation radiates out from where it hits me and searing pain, many times worse than the pinch I gave myself makes my eyes tear and I try to pull away. The alien’s grip is vice-like though, and I can’t pull free.

He let’s go and makes another note. “Well there you go. You’re out.”

I’m crying, and there is a two inch seal burned into the skin of my forearm. “What the hell, man, that’s not cool!” I shout, or something like it.

“Subject is no longer viable as a test subject. Removal from study pool is now complete.” It turns its face to me. My vision goes white as it continues speaking to me.

I wake up later, in my bed, in my house, with my kitten standing on my bladder as I’ve become used to having in my life so far, well past my sixteenth year.

That dream was the weirdest ever. I reach over to absently rub the cat scratch on my left forearm before actually getting a look at it.

Burned into the surface, and half healed, is a seal; a design I don’t really recognize but definitely isn’t a cat scratch, and the alien’s last words come back to me. “Dream study complete.”

————

@whiskeyandwashitape @artofstevetownsley

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Arrival[I’ve decided to write a short story a week, all year. Here’s my third.] On the day my life...

Arrival

[I’ve decided to write a short story a week, all year. Here’s my third.]

On the day my life changed, it was midnight dark outside when my cousin announced he had to leave for a lunch meeting. I laughed at him from my spot at the table, playing a handheld game. “Where is this meeting, Canada?” I asked, trying to navigate a particularly difficult area of the game.

He looked at me like I was the crazy one. “What are you talking about, it’s noon.”

I looked at my watch and sure enough, it was the middle of the day. He hadn’t noticed it was still dark, and I hadn’t noticed how much time had passed while I played. I’d gotten up early because I couldn’t sleep, the sort of thing that often happens when one sleeps in a bed not their own, and I’d been staying at my aunt’s house for several days now. I was divorced and sad, and not sure what to do with myself since I didn’t think I was cut out for what everyone else defined as a relationship. My aunt and cousin had been a nice escape from my new reality.

“What the hell..?” I said, making my way to the window. “Was there another eclipse today and nobody mentioned it?”

“Uhm. I don’t think so?” he said, finally concerned and confused.

I slipped on my shoes by the front door without adding socks and went outside. It was snowing and the yard and road were covered with a good few inches of the stuff, suggesting my trip home was going to be delayed at least a day. The horizon was lit a little bit, but sure enough, the sky was dark and cloudy; more dark than usual for a snow storm in a place it rarely snowed.

Above us, the clouds seemed even darker than they were on the horizon, suggesting the sun’s light wasn’t even hitting them. There was something up there.

My cousin stood next to me and we stared at the sky. The air rippled a little, as if with a sound we weren’t equipped to hear, and the snow stopped suddenly. Through the clouds the shape that had been blocking the daylight descended and stopped just above the house.

It was larger than anything I’d ever been able to comprehend and still float in the air. In the darkness it was hard to make out details, but the surface seemed industrial; full of pipes and panels and metal. I could feel a slight pressure in my ears, but it was not altogether unpleasant. I looked over to meet my cousin’s eyes and he had the same nonplussed look on his face that I imagined I had.

A soft light shined down and we looked up to see some kind of opening. The light beam ended behind the house, and we saw three dark shapes start to descend slowly. My cousin and I pushed past each other to rush into the house and out the back sliding glass door, rushing around the table and chairs to get our hands on the lock and push it open, getting tripped up by the wooden stick holding the door closed.

I grabbed it and flung it out of the way, knocking over a chair while my cousin slid the door open and flew out onto the back deck.

I arrived a breath after, stopping beside him to see the beam of light ending in the center of the yard, and in the center of it were three cats. A fourth cat, one I recognized as a familiar neighbor cat, jumped the fence to flee at the sight of us.

The remaining three stared at us, and we stared back, and the light faded away.

“Holy crap,” I said, my voice sounding much more calm than I thought it would.

“Yeah,” replied my cousin, equally calm. “Aliens finally arrive, and they turn out to be house cats.”

We hesitated a moment longer, looked at each other as if deciding something, and both shrugged. “What the hell,” I said, and stepped forward gently.

The cats were normal looking house cats. One was an orange tabby, muscly and big-pawed. The second was a fluffy calico, washing its shoulder. The third was black with short hair, sleek and shiny. They watched us approach, their eyes intelligent, their muscles relaxed.

I knelt several feet away from them and held out a hand for sniffing purposes. They all seemed to exchange a look and make a similar decision, for they approached my cousin and me.

The black cat came close and sniffed at my hand, then rubbed its whole body luxuriantly on my outstretched palm. It purred loudly and startled itself and its fellows, as if none of them expected that to happen. The other two cats took turns approaching my cousin and me, and my cousin grew bold enough to pick up the calico. Its eyes widened, but he had many years of cat cuddling experience and the calico seemed to relax after a moment and purr itself.

The air shook then; the unheard hum reaching into hearable range as the ship started to whine. We all looked up to see it start to break apart, but before we could decide to run for cover, we realized it was staying aloft in its pieces. Light started to break through and we could see the dark metal pieces converting to something else and separate from each other, floating off to join the still heavily snowing clouds. They seemed to evaporate. Perhaps they turned to ash and fell to the ground with the snow; neither of us were sure afterward.

The black cat jumped to my shoulder, startling me, but balanced expertly without digging in its claws. The orange tabby jumped to the highest point it could get: the railing on the deck. They all watched in rapt fascination as the ship disappeared. My cousin and I stared as well, the snow falling onto our upturned faces.

“Well. What now?” asked my cousin, absently petting the calico in his arms and meeting my eyes with his.

“I don’t know. We didn’t have a plan other than getting here,” said the black cat, matter-of-factly from my shoulder.

My cousin and I stared. Apparently aliens were less surprising than talking cats, for we were both suddenly speechless and shocked.

“What?” said the orange tabby.

“Oh. Oops. I guess these don’t talk here.” said the black cat. “Sorry, we thought we’d pick a form that wouldn’t scare you, but we didn’t know much about these. What sound do cats usually make?”

My cousin cleared his throat. “Er. Usually they meow.”

The calico tried out the word, “meow.” It sounded very human and not like a normal cat meow. “That’s weird. How do you communicate with them? What does ‘meow’ mean anyway?”

“Um. All kinds of things. Usually it’s just cats trying to get us dumb humans to do their bidding.”

“Meeeow.” said the black. “I don’t like it. What kind of language has only one word?”

“Not a very good one,” I agreed. “We usually spend a lot of time guessing.”

“That’s just silly,” said the orange. “We’ll just keep using this language instead.”

The cold finally registered on me, since I was still in my hoodie and pyjama pants and I shivered. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

My cousin and I had a long talk with the three cats. They had been fleeing their planet, where their population was dwindling for no reason they could understand. What once had been a three planet empire had been whittled down to a small civilization with less than twenty individuals.

These three, siblings it turned out to be, had decided to leave and live their last remaining years somewhere else, where they wouldn’t slowly watch their friends and family die off for no understandable reason.

“And so we came here,” finished the orange, who seemed to be the eldest or the leader of the group. “Cats seemed to be pretty loved on this continent, so we picked that form to use. Seems to have worked.” he licked a shoulder with what seemed like smugness.

“I guess that was a good call,” said my cousin. “Just… maybe don’t talk around other people until we’re sure they’re not going to sell you to the military for vivisections or something. Not everyone likes, al- I mean, cats, as much as we do.”

“True” I said, then remembered something. “Wait, can you pick other forms?”

“No, not anymore. It was kind of a one time thing now that the ship is gone,” said the orange. Neither my cousin nor I noticed the hard look he gave the other two at that.

“How, er,” my cousin cleared his throat and tried again. “How much time do you have left, if you don’t mind me asking.”

The cats did some calculating, figuring out the differences in time from their planet to ours and then agreed, “Probably a hundred years or so.”

“Oh,” I said. I had been picturing months or weeks. A hundred years was a long time to be a cat, I thought.

And that’s the story of how my cousin and I have had between us the same three cats for the last thirty years. The black chose to stay with me, and the other two went with him. We hang out often, since we live in the same town, but Renna had had just about enough of being stuck with her two siblings all the time and was ready to see them only in smaller doses. Being stuck in a ship for a thousand year journey will do that to you, I gather.

He went on to get married and have a pile of kids - all surprises, I gather. The orange and calico were named Daris and Marna, respectively, and they helped babysit that pile of kids every now and again. His wife was ecstatic when she found out they weren’t normal house cats, and they all get along famously.

As for me, I spend my days exploring the Earth with Renna, seeing it and its people through new eyes. I spend my nights writing down her stories and sending them out into the world - her mind and my typing fingers pay the rent and keep us fed.

And for us, it’s enough.

———

@artofstevetownsley @whiskeyandwashitape

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