It wasn’t when the alien vessel settled down in the young alfalfa, its hull not steaming from the heat of entering the atmosphere but frosting over. Braden did notice that, though—the large snowflakes spreading across the metal that probably wasn’t metal. At least, not any kind ever seen on Earth.
When the door opened—what else to call it—also wasn’t when things went irrevocably bad. That irregular, not-really-square aperture in what seemed to be the least convenient portion of the vessel framed five figures that had apparently been waiting there. These five aliens, Braden realized, dropping the bag of seed corn he’d been shouldering from the truck to the shed. Real, live, alien aliens.
Things also didn’t go forever bad from the way these aliens moved across the young alfalfa, though it made little sense to Braden. In his defense, it wouldn’t have made sense to any human. The best way to describe the way the aliens moved away from their vessel, their spaceship, was they “mimed” their way: Their hands-that-weren’t-exactly-hands, of which there were too many and not an even number, sort of clapped repeatedly against the wall of a long, narrow, transparent hallway they were both keenly aware of and so used to it was second nature. As they didn’t have eyes, just a slightly convex smooth nothing where their features could have been, Braden wasn’t sure how they saw this hallway, or tunnel. But, he reminded himself in the same instant, it was an invisible hallway or tunnel. So, even if they had eyes, they probably still couldn’t have seen it?
Either way, that invisible passageway delivered them to within speaking distance of Braden. This still isn’t where things went bad. Thus far, really, things were going well, so far as interspecies contact goes. But that was soon to change. Disastrously so.
“Um, um, yeah…what?” Braden managed to get out.
It wasn’t good or timeless, as far as these things go, but it didn’t ruin anything, either.
When the aliens started hesitantly bobbing on their lower appendages, which it would be a reach to call “feet” or “legs,” Braden had to acknowledge that he was bouncing on the toes of his boots, probably from a combination of excitement and terror.
Trying to be polite, perhaps, the five aliens were mimicking him.
He stopped, shrugged something like an apology, and wanted to make a joke about getting off on the wrong foot. Except that might be rude, taking into account their whole foot-situation, there.
“Cindy!” he called toward the house instead, but his voice was sudden enough and loud enough that the invisible box apparently encasing the five aliens contracted, so they all had to shy down, away from its invisible hardness, shy down and huddle together, turning their blank faces around apprehensively.
It was a fraught moment, but Braden mollified them with a series of soothing noises and out-held hands meant to calm things down degree by careful degree. One of the five aliens, perhaps the leader, stood slowly, uncertainly. The other four aliens followed, the carriage of their shoulders—where their various limbs came together, anyway—suggesting embarrassment.
When the fourth of the five aliens spoke, it wasn’t with words so much as a wave of mist or breath emitted in irregular pulses from vertical gills on its neck.
Braden, inhaling these words, coughed them back out just as fast, his right hand attempting to wave their sweet taste from the air so he wouldn’t choke. To him, this scent was in the family, roughly, of the Glade air fresheners he remembered from his grandmother’s house. The air fresheners she would always spray in any room he was in, or had just been in.
Had his grandmother been an alien?
He didn’t think so, but he supposed, since there was now a spaceship leaving a crop circle in his young alfalfa, he could no longer rule such things out, either.
Whether she had been speaking an alien language with her compulsive air freshening didn’t matter in the end, though, as things were about to go horribly, permanently bad.
It started when Braden coughed again from the scent, from the words, only this cough was deeper, the kind where it felt like his lungs were about to turn inside out.
“Cin!” he called toward the house again.
His wife Cindy couldn’t be bothered, though.
Still coughing, Braden held a finger up to tell these five aliens to wait, just give him a moment, please, he was sorry, this was so rude. But also unavoidable, not a thing that was going to stop on its own.
With the five aliens standing there in their invisible box, one of them leaning on it to better watch him—“sense” him?—Braden staggered over to the garden hose on its rusty, creaky wheel. He hauled the loose end of it up, his other hand already twisting the spigot open.
The hose filled on the reel, becoming more circular from the pressure, a small but intense tidal wave surging through it, looking for escape. When it found it, Braden let it run for what he considered a hose-length and then a smidge—once when he’d turned the water on, a small frog or toad, he’d never known the difference, had come tumbling out, and he considered that a lesson learned.
When he was confident the water was toad- and frog-free, he held it up before his face, drank from that flowing arc, and for the briefest sliver of a moment, either the air pressure changed around him or the world hushed itself, like he was in a balloon, inflating—these gulps of water were that important, that good.
He didn’t realize his eyes had been shut either from pleasure or to defend against stray droplets until he opened them, saw five sets of alien not-exactly-feet crowded around him, and realized what that balloon-feeling might have been: He was in their imaginary box with them?
He stopped drinking, left the water still splashing across his closed lips, wetting his chin and the front of his shirt.
Things were about to go very, very bad.
“Um, yeah,” Braden said, standing nervously, the water spurting across two of their lower appendages, which made those appendages shift into a color Braden could only see the edges of, where that new color met the color those lower appendages had been, pre–getting wet.
Then he wasn’t sure if it was that he couldn’t see that color, or if that color was too slippery to remember, to hold in his head.
It was about to not matter.
“Here?” he said, holding the hose out in the least threatening way he could, which was with the silvery water shooting sideways, past the alien he considered the lead alien.
The five aliens stepped away, conferred, their gills fluttering fast, their words visible in the air, and, because of the slight breeze, particulate against Braden’s wet lips, and eyeballs.
He wiped his eyes with the side of his hand, but, before he could tell himself not to, he’d already licked their words in.
They numbed his tongue, and he felt himself relax, like he was just getting to the end of a six-pack, and his football team was winning.
He could get used to this.
The lead alien mimed his way back to Braden and, moving delicately, took the hose that was still out, still offered, and its fingers, or what served as fingers, flattened from the contact and some of them rotated around to the other side of the hand-that-wasn’t-a-hand, such that, now, this alien had a series of thumbs, the better to hold onto this hose with.
“Neat,” Braden mumbled, dully, grinning.
The second of the five aliens flinched from him saying that, pressing itself back into the corner of the invisible box, its arm, or close enough to an arm, actually flattening from what was apparently actual contact. With something invisible. Something not imaginary?
Braden told himself not to concern himself with that. It was beyond his understanding, didn’t make any kind of sense, so wasn’t something he should concern himself with.
Instead, he studied the lead alien, holding the hose so firmly and twitching it slightly, as if testing how the water shooting out reacted to its hose moving this way, that way.
This is almost the moment where things go so, so bad.
This lead alien, mimicking Braden’s urgent slurping of moments ago, delicately lowered its smooth, blank face to the spurting arc of water. At the last moment before the water would have splashed uselessly off, the alien’s face split longwise, chin to forehead, if it had had either of those, and inside it was membranous and crawling, not threateningly so, but in a way that told Braden these aliens’ heads, if you could call them that, were shells—that they kept their skulls on the outside, the same way a beetle did.
Fine, good, whatever, Braden told himself. He was sure he was just as gross to them, with his bones on the inside.
He licked his lips again, ready for another taste, more of that good numbing agent, and watched the water rush into this alien’s head, a sphincter in there opening to drink, drink, not a single droplet wasted.
It made the alien stand suddenly up to its full height, which was nearly twice Braden’s, its invisible box going with it, apparently, and fast enough that it didn’t have time to stay completely invisible for a tenth of a second, its shimmery walls there and gone. The hose reel creaked with the hose being yanked up, spun fast, trying to keep up with the pull.
From its new height, and not using its gills but something deeper, more at its core, this alien made a sound that didn’t just vibrate the air, but made the air visibly ripple, or shimmer. It was like being in a cat’s purr, Braden felt but couldn’t quite articulate.
The other four aliens fell in with it, amplifying it, adding harmonics, one of them going low to provide a stable base. Or, bass, Braden supposed with a drunken grin.
“It’s good, right?” he said about the water, sort of wavering back and forth on his feet.
As one, these five aliens clicked what felt like yes, yes, which is the last moment before things went terribly bad for Planet Earth. When life, if that’s what it was still going to be called, changed forever.
What happened was the alien holding the hose, perhaps finding purring and gill-words made of pheromones or particulate thoughts or whatever insufficient, passed the hose to the next-closest alien, who opened its face and drank deep, very much as if this “water” thing was wholly new, as if it had never suspected such a thing could be real.
“I mean, don’t bogart it, man…” Braden said, nodding to the third alien in line, so they could all have a taste, and, while the hose was being passed, he, pleased with himself, surprised that this was going so well, him being not exactly trained in situations of this sort, stepped over to his truck to look up to the night sky these aliens had dropped from.
“Hunh,” he said, squinting.
“So, who are they?” Cindy said then about the aliens passing the hose in the shadows. She’d come around the side of the house, had her rubber boots on from whatever she’d been doing.
“Friends, I think,” Braden said, and chucked his chin up at the southwest corner of the sky. “That look weird to you?” he asked.
Cindy, annoyed, followed his gaze, made a questioning sound in her throat, then turned around to study the northeast corner of the sky.
“It’s like the dentist office,” she said with a shrug, dismissing it.
“Dentist?” Braden said.
“She’s got that big aquarium in the middle of the waiting room,” Cindy said. “When you look through it to the front desk—it’s like that.”
Braden looked from southwest to northeast, then to what he realized, or was now realizing, were the other two corners of the sky.
Which shouldn’t have had corners at all.
Where two of the sides were meeting, though, the stars were lensed, were sort of scrunching together. And then, ninety degrees over: same thing. Then back around to where he’d started.
“You know they can’t come inside, don’t you?” Cindy said about the aliens she was only seeing in shadow, as she was walking around to the back of the house.
I think they already did, Braden said to himself, though, and, seeing the last tatters of an alien word wafting his way, some part of him realizing things had already gone bad, so very bad, he stepped into that word’s path and wet his lips, shut his eyes.
© 2026 Stephen Graham Jones
