Prized Pets

The first thing I learned about alien captivity was that grass still itched.

It looked soft from a distance. Lush, even. The sort of grass people in gardening advertisements rolled around on while smiling at each other for reasons I had never understood. But lie on it for more than ten minutes and it worked its way under your loincloth, into your hair, and beneath the strip of fabric holding your breasts in place.

The second thing I learned was that all those alien abduction stories and conspiracy theories about life on other planets that I had dismissed throughout my life?

Yeah, it turned out they weren't a lie.

There were little green men in space.

They did suck up people in a burst of bright light.

And then they apparently dumped them in what was the equivalent of a human petting zoo.

I sat up and scratched my ribs.

Beside me, my fellow captive and best friend Wesley glanced over and followed my line of sight.

“You’re doing it again,” He said.

“What?”

“Looking at the viewing windows like you can make them feel guilty.”

“I’m looking at my reflection.”

“Why?”

“To see whether this outfit has improved.”

“And?”

“No.”

Wesley rolled onto his back beside me, smiling slightly at the ceiling.

He had always been annoyingly handsome, even before we were kidnapped and made to dress like extras in a prehistoric school play.

Several months of living under whatever artificial light the aliens used as a sun substitute had given him a tan, longer dark blonde hair, and the kind of cheekbones I found deeply unfair under the circumstances.

My own reflection, faint in the glass across the enclosure, told me that I was also tan, although my former short and curvy figure was leaner now. My dark hair was wild and I had a smear of dirt on one knee.

I had stopped trying to get the knots out of the hair weeks ago.

Or months ago.

Time was difficult here.

There was no real sun to follow, only a broad panel of light high above the enclosure that brightened and dimmed at roughly regular intervals. Wesley had scratched a line into a rock for every time it went dark. He had reached seventy-three before the rock vanished during one of the enclosure’s cleaning cycles.

We had not started again.

Beyond the glass, three aliens watched us.

One had its six-fingered hands pressed against the window. Another was speaking to the third in that soft, rolling language none of us understood. Occasionally they would also trill, which we assumed was their way of expressing excitement.

They were tall enough that even Porter, the biggest captive among us, would have had to look up to meet their eyes.

Their skin, disappointingly, wasn't green but was pale blue. Their eyes were dark and so large that I could never tell exactly where they were looking.

Wesley and I had nicknamed them glitters because they often looked sparkly in the shifting light.

It was a ridiculous name for a ridiculous situation but neither of us had the energy or care factor to think of something more clever.

The only saving grace about the aliens was that they didn't seem to be violent.

None of us had ever been hurt.

Or even really touched beyond the initial abduction and now just an occasional pat on the head.

They just seemed…curious.

I lifted a hand and waved.

The alien at the glass lifted one of its own, and I swear his wide mouth almost stretched into a smile.

“See?” Wesley said. “You have a friend.”

“I have an audience.”

“That one seems to come by a lot. He might like you.”

“They all look alike to me.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say about our captors.”

“They could wear name tags.”

Wesley laughed. It was a small sound, but I held on to it.

There were sixteen of us in the enclosure at the moment. Not all of us spoke English. We seemed to have been plucked from every corner of Earth.

Some had been here when Wesley and I arrived; others had appeared since, blinking and frightened, still dressed in the clothes they had been taken in. Those clothes never lasted. The aliens collected them and left folded strips of lightweight fabric in their place.

Nobody had been able to keep a shirt.

Nobody had been able to learn why.

The enclosure itself was bigger than my first terrified impression of it had allowed. A field of grass curved around a shallow freshwater stream. There were smooth stones, a few broad-leaved trees, and an indoor shelter with blankets spread over the floor. The shelter had the largest viewing windows. On the far side of the glass, aliens came and went, sometimes alone, sometimes in groups, always looking in.

At first, I had tried to tell myself we were being held somewhere while they worked out what to do with us.

Then the months had passed.

No one interfered with us.

No one left.

They just studied us while we remained in some horrible alien limbo.

I watched one of the aliens make a mark on a thin, glowing tablet.

Porter saw it too.

He seemed to be the oldest, with a large bulky body covered in tattoos and a rugged face broken by a large scar running down one cheek.

His dark shaggy hair was faintly silver at the roots.

I guessed he was somewhere in his late thirties.

At first, I had been terrified of him, sure that he was going to murder all of us in our sleep simply for something to do.

He was never still, always pacing, always scowling, always furious.

But he hadn't proved to be a killer.

At least not yet.

He mostly kept to himself...unless he was trying to piss off the glitters.

Which today he was once again trying and failing at.

“Oh, fucking excellent,” he shouted from the stream. “Write this down.”

He raised both middle fingers. It took effort, given that the audience had more fingers than he did, but he made his meaning clear.

The alien with the tablet tilted its head and made another mark.

Porter swore at it.

Another mark.

“That’s probably going in your file,” Wesley murmured.

“Good,” Porter called back. “I hope they spell my name right.”

He had been here longer than we had. He claimed he had tried every wall, door, window, tree, and stretch of ground in the enclosure to find a way out. I believed him. There were scratches near the shelter door that matched the stone he carried around, and he tested the edges of the viewing glass almost daily.

That morning, he was wet to the knees and working a fist-sized rock against a seam beneath the window.

A few feet away, a woman named Lena sat with her feet in the stream, crying quietly. She cried most mornings. Across the grass, two men who had stopped telling anyone their names once they realised no one could understand them lay beneath a tree and stared at nothing.

Wesley and I stayed together.

It was the only part of our old lives we had been allowed to keep.

We had grown up in the same small town together.

Laughed constantly about getting out and seeing the rest of the world once we graduated from high school.

When that hadn't happened because it turned out that seeing the world actually cost money we didn't have, we promised each other we would save and leave when we turned twenty-one.

Neither of us could obviously predict that a few months after my birthday we would actually leave town...and the whole freaking planet.

I leaned back against him, and he rested his chin on top of my head. When we were children, he used to do that to annoy me because he grew taller first. Here, it reminded me that someone knew who I was.

On the other side of the glass, another glitter joined the group. This one carried a shallow tray.

Every human in the enclosure noticed.

“Food,” Wesley said.

“I have eyes.”

“Your eyes were busy trying to intimidate the window.”

A panel in the wall slid open. We had learned that things appeared through those panels: water containers, blankets, food we spent the first month inspecting for poison. Today’s tray held the usual pale fruit, round loaves, and a handful of orange pods that tasted like salty custard.

No one rushed for it anymore.

We waited until the panel closed, then began to gather.

Porter abandoned his rock. Lena wiped her face. Wesley stood and offered me his hand.

One of the aliens tapped its own tablet as we moved toward the tray.

I stopped.

“What?” Wesley asked.

“They’re watching who goes first.”

“They always watch.”

“Exactly. Maybe this is some sort of human science experiment.”

“Who the fuck knows, Odessa.”

I shrugged, trying to focus on what I did know.

I knew when we slept. I knew when Lena cried. I knew how many orange pods Porter took when he thought nobody was counting.

I knew that somewhere beyond the glass, someone had been writing down just as much about us.

Wesley looked at the food, then at me. “I’ll go first if it ruins their study.”

“I don’t think it will.”

“Shame. I was ready to make a sacrifice.”

He picked up two loaves and passed me one. The alien made a mark.

Porter came up behind us. “Anything new?”

“Bread,” I said.

“I meant at the window.”

I glanced over my shoulder. The alien Wesley had pointed out earlier nearest the glass was still looking at us. Specifically, at Wesley’s hand around mine, I thought, though its dark eyes made that impossible to judge.

“No,” I said.

Porter took an orange pod and split it with his thumbs. “Then eat. You can glare at them after though it's not going to do any good.”

We sat by the stream with our food. Wesley gave me the larger half of his fruit because he always did, and I gave him my orange pod because I hated them. We had performed that exchange so many times it took less thought than breathing.

The alien at the window raised its tablet again.

Wesley followed my gaze. “Maybe it’s impressed you’ve trained me to share.”

“I wish it would ask. I have other requests.”

“Such as?”

“Clothes. A calendar. One answer to literally anything.”

“And a hairbrush?”

I pulled a leaf from my hair. “I’d settle for a comb.”

Wesley’s smile faded as he looked at the glass. “I’d ask how long we’re staying.”

I took a bite of bread. It was warm, as it always was when they brought it, and I hated being grateful for that.

The light above us brightened another shade. Soon it would be as close to midday as this place ever got. Lena would walk the length of the stream. Porter would return to his rock. Wesley would ask me to help him invent increasingly ridiculous names for the glitters who visited us. I would probably laugh.

Then the light would dim, and we would sleep on our blankets beneath the viewing windows, and tomorrow we would do it again.

Beyond the glass, the alien with its hand against the window lowered its tablet.

It touched six fingertips to the place where Wesley and I sat reflected side by side.

I stared at it.

The alien spoke. Its voice was muffled by the glass, the words as meaningless to me as every other word I had heard here.

Then it turned and walked away.

“What did it want?” Wesley asked.

I looked down at our joined hands. His thumb moved once across my knuckles, a familiar little reassurance.

“I have no idea,” I said.

That was the answer to nearly everything now.