The Abduction

by Annie Vitalsey

Honorable Mention, Waasnode Fiction Prize, selected by María Alejandra Barrios

At the end of July, your mom knocks on your bedroom door to tell you she was abducted by aliens. You believe her, because you are about to start the eighth grade and so far in your life, everything she’s told you has turned out to be true, one way or another.

“When?” you ask.

“Last night, while you were sleeping.”

“Where?”

“Right outside,” she says, looking just past your head. The idea scares you, your mother taken, gone, no way of getting her back. “I loved it,” she tells you, her eyes vast behind her glasses. “The colors were amazing. Like I was seeing everything for the first time.”

She shakes her head. She tells you she’s never felt more at ease, more beloved and attended to than when she was up there.

“I realized I needed to forgive my mother for having too many kids after me. I basically had to parent myself, you know. That’s why I only ever wanted to have you.”

Of course you already know this.

She tries to hold your hand then, but because you’re basically almost in high school, you let yours go limp. She tells you she thinks, also, she’s been working too hard. Your mother doesn’t work, though. She stays at home with you. You know enough to take this personally, to think she means that you are too much work, and you pull your hand away.

“That’s not what I meant,” she says. “I’m talking about my songs.”

Since you can remember, your mother has thought about being a singer. She’s had no formal training, but she thinks she’s pretty good. She can stay on pitch and sometimes she does back-up at church. Sometimes she even writes her own songs about God’s love for people like you. She says she thinks she has a gift , that this was a talent she was born with. She wants to use it for something good. Sometimes you hear her in the shower, and her voice sounds high and thin, like a different version of herself that you don’t know.

“Don’t tell your dad,” she tells you, “about the aliens. He wouldn’t understand.”

You won’t. You’ll do as she asks, because you are thirteen, and you trust her more than you trust your own self.

…  

Of course, you start to wonder what happened to your mom up there with the aliens. You start to wonder whether she is, in fact, your mom at all. She could be an imposter—some other entity come down from the sky, wearing your mom like a suit. You observe your mother for the details only you could recognize: the faint scar on her right shoulder the size of your thumbnail, the crimson mole under her left  arm, the singular black hair on her chin she plucks from the root once a week with disdain.

It’s only after she approaches you a week before school starts that you truly know it’s her.

“How about this,” she begins, “I’ll give you ten dollars for every pound you lose between now and Christmas.”

You pull at your t-shirt. It’s a little tight. All summer, you ate buttered toast with cinnamon and sugar for breakfast and lunch. By the end of June, you’d gotten carried away, slathering every inch of that toast with more and more butter, piling on the sugar, as much as you could manage. It was so good, so perfect, that toast. Sometimes, you’d wake up in the morning just thinking about it.

“We’ll do it together,” your mom says. “We’ll be so skinny by December, your grandma will freak.”

You don’t say anything, but you go to your room and change your shirt.

The next day, you eat nothing but a peach. By dinner, you are so hungry that you let yourself have the cinnamon toast just one more time. You’ll change for real starting tomorrow, you tell yourself. This is your way of saying goodbye to the summer.

…

On the first day of eighth grade, you are assigned a seat next to a boy you don’t know. He wears a baggy sweatshirt with holes in the sleeves he poked for his thumbs, even though it’s only August. He has long, rounded fingernails that remind you of almonds. He’s skinny, but still has rosy, round cheeks.

“You could model, you know,” you tell him, hating yourself the second you hear the words come out.

He giggles like you’ve just said the most hilarious joke, and you start to think you might be way more remarkable than you ever imagined you could be.

“Oh my god, that is my dream,” he whispers to you.

“Oh my god,” you say. You touch your face, your hair.

At lunch, a freckled girl from your class who you’ve known since kindergarten waves you over to her table.

“He’s gay, you know,” she says.

“Who?” you ask.

“Him,” she gestures to the boy, sitting by himself.

“How do you know?”

“I mean, I think it’s pretty obvious.”

“No,” you say, “I don’t see it.”

The next day, you sit with him at lunch. You might be his only friend, and you are proud of this. You wonder if he thinks about you after school. You wonder if it could be love.

…

At church, they turn the house lights down low for singing and illuminate the stage in pink and yellow. The space is high and wide—the room seats 500. Th e fog machine generates an extraterrestrial haze around your mother as she sings backup. You turn bones into armies. You turn seas into highways. The song goes on. You stand next to your father who sings too quietly for anyone to hear. When it ends, your mother returns to her seat next to you and she is crying a little, happy tears. She blows her nose.

“You are so beautiful,” she tells you under the prayer. “You are beautiful enough to be a newscaster.”

When the pastor takes the stage, you notice a large guy dressed in all black standing by the stairs, facing out toward the people. This is new.

“What’s that about?” your dad points and whispers.

Your mom tells him to be quiet.

The man stays like this for the whole service, watching.

On the drive home, your mom tells you what’s going on. Th at guy was a bodyguard. They had made an announcement at band practice about it. There was a young man who showed up to the pastor’s office earlier that week with a knife, a young man who called himself a prophet. The young man said he had a message for the pastor, a message from God.

You remember seeing the young man sitting alone the Sunday before. You remember feeling tender towards him—him in his flannel shirt. His brown hair curled under his ears. A young man, alone, at church was a rare thing to see.

Once, your mom told you never to fall in love with a man who didn’t believe in God. When you asked her why not, she said didn’t want to get into it. She said it wasn’t nice to talk about.

“So what if he turns up on a Sunday?” your father asks in the car. “What if he’s armed?”

“I’m sure there’s a plan,” says your mother.

“Well,” your father replies, “I’m bringing the Glock with us next time.”

…

“I don’t believe in God,” you tell the boy at school. You whisper it in his ear like a secret, so close you can feel the heat of him. You aren’t thinking about God at all. You just want to surprise him with how achingly cool you are. He’s the only person you talk to at school now, if you can help it. Everyone else is boring.

“Me too,” says the boy, and this is now a secret you share. His family is supposed to be Baptist. He smiles at you, and you wonder if it’s not just the one thing he’s smiling about, but if it’s also because he’s looking at you, and you make him smile, just the way you are.

That same day he gives you his email address on a scrap of notebook paper and you hold it in your hand the entire bus ride home, thinking about what your first message to him should be. Maybe a photo, you think. Maybe a photo of you.

When you get home, you take the digital camera from its spot on the shelf and bring it to your room. You pull two strands of hair out of your ponytail to frame your face and cock your head to the side. The flash goes off . You check the picture on the camera’s little monitor and your face looks frighteningly white, almost fat. You angle the camera higher and try again. You do this until your mom knocks on the door.

“What are you doing in there? Why is this door closed?” she says.

You hide the camera under a pillow and open the door.

“Crunches,” you answer.

“Oh, good,” she says. “There’s something I wanted to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“I think something bad happened to me when I was a girl. Something really bad.”

“What was it?” you ask.

“I’m afraid you’re too young to understand.”

You stare at your mother. You don’t know what to say. You don’t know what to ask.

“Just please don’t tell your father.”

“Sure,” you say, and your mother looks at you, warmly.

“Do you think—if we weren’t mother and daughter, if we just met in some other universe, in some other life, that we would have been friends?”

“Maybe,” you say. You are confused.

“I think we would have been,” she says, and winks at you.

You look back to your pillow where you hid the digital camera. It was a stupid idea. You’ll never get the right shot.

Instead, after your mom leaves, you turn on your computer and type in the boy’s email address, your fingers hot with each letter. Did I ever tell you, you write, how my mom was abducted by aliens?

…

The boy doesn’t believe you. When you see him in class, he tells you that he thinks you’re messing with him.

“I’d never lie to you,” you say.

“How do you know?” he asks.

“It’s my mom,” you say.

“So?” says the boy.

“Why won’t you believe me?” you say.

That’s when he kicks you in the shin, sharply, with his Birkenstock. They are the same Birkenstocks he always wears, the clogs, the leather stained and curling with age, the soles walked through. The pain is spectacular. You stop breathing. You turn away and bite your lips. You raise your hand to go to the bathroom.

Alone, you run your fingers over the spot on your leg where he kicked you. The skin already feels hot, swollen. It will bruise. You hope it will bruise. It’s the first time he’s ever touched you. You take a deep breath. You can’t sit still.

For the rest of the day, you ignore him, but when you get home, you find your old set of markers and ink the tender spot green and purple and yellow, smudging the colors together with your own spit. You want it to look bad. Really bad. You want him to see it and know how much he hurt you. While you are alone, you let yourself cry a little. You think this must be what it feels like to be in love.

Th e next day, when you slowly roll up your pant leg to show him, he laughs. He tells you he’s seen worse.

You say you want to drop it.

“Sure,” he replies.

“I’m not like the other girls,” you tell him.

At lunch, he lets you have one of his Doritos.

…

Before church, you watch your father pose in the mirror with his gun, cradling it like a baby, stroking it like a cat.

“I could have been a marine,” he says.

“You are an accountant,” says your mom. 

“I am a man,” he replies.

“You’re not the man you used to be,” your mom tells him.

He puts the gun in a holster around his chest. The holster wrinkles the bright Hawaiian shirt he has tucked into his khakis and while he’s in the bathroom, your mother tells you she thinks he looks ridiculous.

Still, when you get to church, you see the respectful nods he gets from the other fathers. This is nice, maybe. After all, it’s you who he’s protecting. You wonder if the boy at school would do the same. You picture him throwing his beautiful self between you and the man with the knife. You picture him taking off  that baggy sweatshirt he always has on and giving it to you, just to keep you warm. You look up to the projector screen and witness a flash of watercolor Jesus on the cross.

Now that’s love, you think.

Your mother sings the songs like normal, but during one of the transitions, something happens with her microphone, and a vicious screech rings out in the room. Everyone flinches. Your dad puts a hand on the Glock. You look for the bodyguard, standing up there in the shadows. The guitar player, a man with tight jeans and miraculous sideburns, laughs it off. Everyone around you tries to relax again.

When your mom comes down to sit with you for the sermon, she puts a hand around your shoulders.

“I wish you could worship with your whole heart,” she tells you. “You never look like you enjoy it enough.”

You want to say something mean back to her, something horrible, but you are so angry, you can’t even think of any words. Instead, you stand up and walk out. You go to the bathroom and linger there at the sink.

The bathroom at church is really nice. The countertop is white and glittery. The lighting is immaculate. It makes you look thinner than you are. More toned, maybe. The pastor’s wife buys special soap for the ladies’ room: Sunshine & Lemons, Champagne Toast, Crisp Morning Air. She wants all the women to feel pampered while they pee. One after the next, you try all of the soaps. You pull the two strands of hair out of your ponytail and pose in the mirror for a while. If you lost enough weight, maybe you could model too. You decide you’ll stay in the bathroom until the service is over.

When you hear the closing music play out over the speakers, you leave the bathroom and wait for your parents by the door.

“Where were you?” your mom asks when she sees you.

“Just here,” you say, smugly, not looking at her.

“You shouldn’t have done that. It’s not safe for you to be out here on your own.”

“I don’t care,” you say.

“You’re turning into such a bitch, you know,” she spits.

“I hate you,” you say.

“No you don’t.”

You know she is right, but you don’t tell her that.

…

That night, you hear your parents fighting. They don’t fight often, but when they do, it’s impossible for you to ignore. You go to your room to lay down, and still, you can hear your mother crying from downstairs.

“Do you even still love me?” she says.

“Don’t be silly,” says your father. His voice is calm, tender. “Of course I do.”

“But do you still think I’m beautiful? Do you still find me attractive?”

“Yes,” says your father. He sounds empathetic, but also almost annoyed.

“Sometimes, it’s just hard to believe you.”

“What’s this really about?”

Your mother doesn’t speak right away. When she does, her voice is quieter. “It’s just, I can feel myself changing. And it’s wonderful, actually. I feel confident, I mean. I feel so powerful. For the first time in a long time, I know exactly what I want.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“But what if we don’t have anything in common anymore?”

This time, your father pauses. You can feel him thinking through the walls.

“I love you,” he says finally.

“I know,” says your mother.

You hear your mother’s footsteps on the stairs. You hear her knock on your door, softly, waiting.

“It’s unlocked,” you say.

She comes in and lays down next to you. You can hear her breathing. You can smell her perfume. 

“Why don’t you just tell him?” you whisper. “About—you know?”

“It isn’t worth it,” she says. “He’d ruin it for me.”

There are times when it’s impossible not to notice everything that’s wrong with your mom. The way her ankles fatly tilt towards one another. The way her breath smells after she eats a hardboiled egg.

You decide that when you get married, you will make sure to choose someone who loves you more than you love them.

…

“I can’t wait until I grow up so I can move away from this stupid town and all these dumb people,” the boy tells you at school.

The teacher has just handed back your math quiz, which you have passed and he has failed.

“You don’t need polynomials to model,” you say.

“I’m going somewhere so far away that I never have to come back here again,” he goes on. “Maybe Tokyo.”

“Tokyo,” you say. “I could see myself liking that.” The boy crumples his quiz into a tiny ball.

“I’m gay, you know,” he says.

He’s looking right at you. His face has never been more open, more serious. It is a shock, seeing him like this. You don’t like it.

“So?” you ask. You roll your eyes. Your face is hot.

“I just wanted to tell you.”

“I mean, it’s pretty obvious,” you say. You can’t look at him.

“Well,” he says, balling up the paper even tighter.

“Yeah,” you say.

You look back at your own quiz. The teacher has written Excellent Work! in red marker at the top of the page.

By the end of the day, you think of something else to tell the boy.

“You should really wear something different if you want to be a model,” you say, looking him up and down. “That sweatshirt is so ugly.”

“Whatever,” he tells you, and turns away.

That night, your mom makes a lasagna, but you don’t eat it. You skip dinner altogether and your mom gives you a nod of approval, as if this impresses her. You go to your room and switch on your radio to the station that plays all the hits. You turn on your computer and open your email and start typing. I never liked you like that anyway. You delete the message after you write it and climb into bed.

All night, your body shakes. You can’t catch your breath.

…

The next time you are at church, the young man is there. You are the first to see him, during the opening song, after the lights go down. He has come in the back somehow, and is now standing in the aisle in a flannel shirt and jeans. He’s younger than you remember him being. Seeing him sends a bolt of lightning down your spine. You squeeze your dad’s arm as hard as you can.

“Look!” you whisper through your teeth.

The young man is not holding a knife that you can see, but your dad pulls the Glock out of his holster anyway and yells, “Stop right there!”

People start to notice. The men in the sound booth see what is going on and cut the music. Someone turns the lights back on. The pastor is quickly escorted out of the room by his bodyguard. Your mother, from the stage, holds a hand over her eyes to gaze out into the audience.

“Get out of here,” your dad shouts. He shoves you behind him, and your body goes awkward and stiff , less like a girl who needs protecting and more like you’re just in the way. People dart and duck out of your dad’s range. You peer over his shoulder and see his hands are shaking.

“I’ll shoot you, I mean it,” your dad says. Your dad, the same guy who you hear snoring in the living room every day after seven. Your dad, who once modeled your mother’s green swimsuit for you when you were sick, doing a little dance just to get you to smile, the straps cutting violent red marks in his bare shoulders until your mother shooed him out of the room, telling him you needed your rest.

You look back at your mom, still on stage, the air smokey around her from the fog machine. With the house lights on, it makes the room feel dirty. She is standing, feet firmly planted, both arms outstretched towards the crowd. Nearby, other people on stage look around, bend down, cover their heads, but not your mom. Up there, she looks taller than you know she is. You watch her close her eyes.

The young man starts shaking his head, backing away. He raises his arms. Your father steps into the aisle, the gun still pointed at the young man’s chest. The young man turns and runs, back through the doors, into the lobby, and out to the street.

“Hallelujah!” someone shouts from the crowd.

“Praise God!” says another.

The lights go back down.

Your mom stretches her hands high, turns her face up towards the ceiling. She is blue and purple under the stage lights. She is radiant, up there in her slacks. The band starts playing again. She closes her eyes and sways to the music.

After the service, all the men line up to shake hands with your dad.

Your mom puts her arm around you. 

“I think I did that,” she whispers so only you can hear. “I think it was me who saved us.”

You check your mother’s arm for the oval-shaped scar again. It is there, the skin irregular and luminescent as it always is.

…

That afternoon, your mom asks you to help fold the laundry. You follow her to the bedroom she shares with your dad. She empties out the hamper across the big bed, and the clothes are still warm. Laundry is one of your favorite chores for this reason, the three minutes of perfect heat. You drape a warm towel over your shoulders. You reach for a pair of jeans and the zipper is scalding to the touch. You wait, and pull the towel tighter around you.

Your mother takes a t-shirt of yours, then one of hers.

“Look,” your mother says.

“What?” you ask.

She lays her t-shirt on top of yours. “Mine’s smaller.”

You drop the towel on the fl oor and walk out, down the hall, and close your bedroom door behind you. Ten minutes go by before your mom knocks on your door.

“Honey?” she says through the frame. You don’t answer.

“I’m coming in.”

She finds you laying on your bed. You push your face into a pillow.

“I want you to know,” she begins, “I could have left  your father a million times by now. A million chances I’ve had, but I never did. Never. I always stayed.”

You press your face back into your pillow. You’re hot again.

“Honey, you don’t seem like your normal self. Is everything okay?”

You can feel yourself starting to cry. You don’t want to—desperately, you don’t. You take a deep breath.

“You can choose to feel however you want, you know,” your mom tells you. “And everything would be easier if you just chose to be happy.”

She sits with you a moment, then stands up and walks out, closing the door behind her.

…

The boy stops talking to you. He asks the teacher if he can change seats, and he moves next to the freckled girl you’ve known since forever, the one who’d tried to tell you about him from the beginning. The boy lets her finger comb his hair between class blocks. She swoops his hair over his eyes and they both think it’s hilarious. At lunch, he sits at her table, and you sit on your own until another girl comes up to you from their table. “Is it true?” she asks you.

“What?”

“Th at you mom was abducted by aliens?”

“I swear,” you say.

“Oh my god.”

“It’s true,” you insist. “She said it was great. The colors were amazing.”

The girl rolls her eyes. She goes back to the table where the boy is sitting, and they all look at you and laugh.

At home, you open your email again and start typing.

I’m not homophobic, you start, and then delete it.

You close your computer without sending anything. Instead, you take the digital camera again, from its place on the shelf and bring it back to your room.

You snap a photo of your face, then another, then another, then fifteen. You don’t smile, but you don’t frown either. Your face is neutral, the way you must look like when listening to a sermon or walking down the street. You upload everything to your computer, and then scroll through them, one after the next. You hope you won’t be ugly when you grow up. It’s still too soon to know for sure.

There’s one photo that causes you to pause, to look at yourself with your lips closed, your head tilted to the side. Your eyes are downcast, and your lashes look longer than you thought they were. In this one you are less aware of the camera than the others, like you might have taken it by mistake. Since always, you’ve thought your looks favored your father, and you were proud of that. It was the better outcome, you had decided. But in this photo, it’s clear to you that you are your mother’s daughter. It’s something in the curve of your jaw, your forehead, the angle of your nose. You delete the rest of these photos, but save this one on your desktop in a folder called “personal.”

…

It will take you ten years before you even start to question what happened to your mother—whether or not she’d been telling the truth at all. At first, the thought will make you feel bad, like something is wrong with you. By then, you’ll be living in a different city, far away from your parents.

It will take another five years before you’re able to say it out loud. You’ll mention something to your friend about it, both of you half-drunk on cheap wine in your apartment like you sometimes get on Friday nights when there’s nothing else going on.

“Once—,” you’ll start, “my mom told me she was abducted by aliens. Dead serious. I don’t know why.”

“That’s fucked up,” your friend will say. You’ve not ever said to her that she’s your best friend, but you think she must know it by now.

The low light of day washes the kitchen in orange, in purple, in bright hot pink. It sets your cheap curtains glowing, your factory white cabinets. It catches your friend’s face, red from the alcohol. The whole place is like this, alive and in color.

You’d never noticed it before.

Annie Vitalsey is a fiction writer. She received her MFA from Arizona State University and was the 2019-20 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Fiction at Colgate University. Her work has appeared in Reed Magazine, Bennington Review, Bat City Review, and elsewhere. Annie teaches writing at Arizona State University.