Supersonic

There are small eggs planted under my scalp. They hatch at night, when I'm asleep. Tiny black monsters crawl all over my face. They molt, and I often find the remnants of their exoskeletons in my nostrils, my ears, occasionally on my lips.

When I was nine years old I was hit by lightning. I was hiking the Appalachian Trail with my father. In New Hampshire. A storm rolled in and we were out in the open. I ran when Dad ran, but I wasn't fast enough. I got hit by a bolt. I can never call it a strike, because that's what happens in baseball when a batter misses, and that didn't miss.

I fell down beside a tree. Nine weeks later, I left the hospital with a brain full of soupy memories and a left thigh with a scar that looks like someone rubbed a chunk of charcoal over it.

Everything has been hard to figure out since then. My dad died when I was thirteen, but from what I'm not sure. My aunts said he had a heart attack at work, but my uncle Morey said he put a gun in his mouth and painted the off-white wallpaper of our living room red.

I was on the news. For surviving the lightning bolt. They asked me how I felt, and I said I felt okay.

There is a shadow slowly creeping onto this table. The sun is going down, and now is the time for sinister activity. They will find me. They have been searching, and they will find me.

Two. Two of them. Glowing indigo eyes. Four now...no, eight. Jesus, they're all around me.

This isn't happening...My imagination is running amok...I go into the bathroom to calm myself down. I fish a handful of Xanax from the medicine cabinet and swallow them dry. Then I sit down on the toilet.

Now what?

A centipede slips under the door. It's as long as an index finger. There are miniature warriors on its back, holding spears and other weaponry.

"Fuck off!" I shout.

That seems to work. They go away. So do I.

---

And then he said, 'Stop,' and I listened. He made a place to get away. No machines, no boundaries. How is that?  Do you have any code names? Are any of your ancestors pine cones? What does dolphin meat taste like? Can leather fuck leather?

Can leather fuck leather?

I don't know, man!

I have been questioned for eight-hundred years. Their medicine has kept me alive that long. I have no intelligence to provide this alien star ship, so now I have been defiant, insisting that they go back to Earth and put a basketball team back in Seattle.



A word when people start to listen.