Tomorrow, the world ended. Or is it yesterday when the world will end? I have no idea.
I was abducted by aliens. No crop circles, no fancy flashing lights, no bright beam that levitated my body up into some massive, high-tech flying saucer. Nope. I was casually walking down the street, just coming back from my favorite sandwich shop, when next thing I knew, I was in total darkness. Nothingness. I noticed that my sub was no longer in my hand.
Anyways, I was in this dark, empty space when I started to hear voices.
“Did you get her? Can we see?” And once again, I just suddenly ended up somewhere else. Except this time it was a somewhere. A room in fact. And there were many people standing around, watching me.
“That’s Beyonce? I thought she would be taller.” They were all staring intensely at me, the way you stare at the mold on your bathroom ceiling, wondering how many years you’ve been breathing it in. It made me very uncomfortable.
Just at that moment, the door swung open and a tall, very official looking female walked in.
“What is that?” She glared at me as if it was somehow my fault I wasn’t as tall as Beyonce. Also, quick side note, I still had no idea that this was an alien abduction. They looked human. Though I guess the strong woman in charge was a dead giveaway that I was among a much more advanced species.
Her long hair caught me right in the eye as she spun to face the small crowd.
“You wasted our only abduction on this mediocre human? You were supposed to pick up the most ideal specimen from Earth to represent the human race. Not this.” Her disappointment was oddly familiar. “This is all we’ll have to show for the Earth mission once we’re done.” Her long hair whipped me again as she twisted back towards me.
“Have you ever had any responsibility?”
“Um, well, I guess that, maybe the time with the leaf blower at my cousin’s wedding, which is actually kind of a funny story… I mean...”
I trailed off, realizing it was rhetorical. Ignoring me, she barked at everyone to get back to work and stormed out.
I don’t know if it was my nerves or the sheer absurdity of my situation that turned my body into a writhing amorphous blob of uncontrollable laughter. Unimpressed, everyone slowly trickled out of the room until it was just me. And then it wasn’t funny anymore. I stood there for a good five minutes waiting for something to happen again, but it was pretty anticlimactic. So I walked out the door and into a busy control room that looked like it came straight out of Star Wars.
I think this was the moment that most people would’ve accepted that this was an alien abduction. I didn’t.
I weaved my way between people crowded around various control boards. A few yelled at me as I fumbled around them. Everyone was so busy. I finally found myself in front of a huge screen displaying the solar system. There was a loud beep and an image of Earth popped up.
“Would you please step out of the way?” There was a tall, geeky man glaring impatiently at me. His receding hairline made it impossible to ignore the small button-nose barely supporting heavy-duty circular glasses. His shirt was from The Beyonce Experience tour.
“Oh, sorry.” I shuffled into a tight corner on the side and a faint metallic odor wafted into my nose. The alien-nerd tapped a few buttons on his tablet and then a huge red X and a timer counting down an hour appeared on the Earth screen. That’s when the whole alien abduction and destruction of Earth thing finally hit me. Being the monstrously incompetent human being that I am, I burst out laughing again.
Alien-nerd sneered at me, shutting me up like a zipper. I stood there, hoping some part of me would rise to the occasion and somehow save the day. I’d drop-kick the captain, commandeer the controls, and heroically fly the ship into a black hole, sacrificing myself for the good of mankind. Instead, I slouched in a dusty corner in desperate need of a shower.
I decided to crawl out of my little haven and do some investigating, as if I was capable enough to stop the world from ending in the next hour.
I slid against the wall, out of the way of the aliens, until I stepped into a new section of the room. I tentatively crept around a large coffee machine and zigzagged through a maze of toasters. Then I tiptoed over what had to be a crock pot, only to find myself standing beneath a huge fridge that didn’t even have any magnets. I looked up and saw rows of spatulas hanging from the ceiling. For some reason, my stomach began to growl.
I continued to expertly sneak myself between alien-nerds and weird complicated kitchen appliances until I banged my shin against a large beetle-shaped contraption on the floor. I yelped as pain shot up my leg, and I started hopping around. And then all hell broke loose.
It all happened in slow-motion: I jump like an idiot. I bump into an alien-nerd who stumbles into a big red button on the wall. Sirens go off and all aliens and alien-nerds alike begin freaking out. Everyone runs and screams, including me.
This chaos lasted a good two minutes.
Very eerily, the captain just stood in the middle of the room, still as an icicle. Maybe it was some weird captain-watching-the-Titanic-fall-apart thing happening. Whatever it was, it was really creeping me out.
A few aliens ran up to her, begging her to do something.
“How do we stop it?”
“Please help us!”
“This is all your fault!” That one was yelling at me.
Despite their pleads, she wouldn’t budge. So they all went back to running and screaming with the others. The ground began to shake and a high-pitched whistle blasted through the air.
Suddenly, I was back in that empty void of nothing, alone in the dark.
“Excuse me, miss? Miss?” I was on the street, right where this whole fiasco started. There was a tall old man, vaguely resembling Uncle Sam peering intently at me. I half expected him to point accusingly at me. Instead, he just shrugged and said, “You dropped your sandwich.” I looked down to see my sub laying there, alone and forgotten. I kept staring at the wreckage at my feet as the old man wobbled away.
“Well that sucked.” I said to no one in particular. A few bystanders averted their eyes as they passed around me and my ruined sandwich. I looked around and saw that literally nothing had changed. Everyone was so oblivious to what just occurred… or what would’ve occurred. That really sucked. I just saved the world from an alien attack, bruised myself in the process, and it cost me five bucks. What a scam.