How to Tell You Were Abducted by Aliens

There’s the easy stuff like flashing lights in the sky or a fresh crescent scar around your navel. But they don’t tell you how your fingernails start to hum. Real harmonious shit. It’s nice.

They don’t tell you how when you call 911 all you got is your old neighbor’s voice from when you were a kid, saying, “Let me in the shed. This isn’t a game.”

You start to pray again but you’re starting to wonder if God may be in on this and maybe it’s best you leave your communion rituals to the ring of worshippers flailing around the local state park, chanting how this is it. This is the one.

You’re so hungry you could eat an adrenal gland, you think. But you have to look up where to find it in the body.

You drape yourself in a fur coat, looking for compliments in the summer months. When they comment on its thickness for the weather, you say, “A good sweat is good faith.” You show them your scar.

You start to think of yourself less as being part of a whole and more as the whole itself. This is good. It’s good faith, good sweat—smoking spliffs under the Moon, hoping the lights will take you back. You’d eat an adrenal gland for them to take you back. “Let me in,” you moan with your knees in the pine needles, clawing the dirt. “This isn’t a game.”

What a goddamn nightmare, you think as they ban you from the park, your scar’s oozing again and they’ve already received complaints about you.

The humming’s growing quiet. You can hardly feel it. A faint vibration in your cuticles. And that settles it. You’ve looked up the answer.

This is it.

You open your scar, clawing for an adrenal gland.