Chains
an excerpt

I turned on the TV and was about to sit down when I realized what she’d been making a fuss over. I stopped breathing. The camera was zoomed in and looking at a gigantic ship in the sky—an alien ship that looked as if it stretched as wide as infinity and as long. I blinked, unable to say anything for a while, but decided to speak because I had to say something…anything…as long as I was talking and knew what I was doing. I didn’t know what logic was anymore…only knew that it was a word I used to believe in, sort of like someone who believed in one thing and decided to believe in something totally different because it had been proven.

“Is it real?” I asked. “I mean, it could be a hoax…”

“Meg, tell me who has enough power to make that kind of hoax up?”

“I don’t know…Bill Gates?”

I was unsure of myself, unable to think clearly as my eyes stared at the spaceship. A spaceship! A real spaceship! I couldn’t believe my eyes, which explained why I was unable to blink. I started to think about all of the movies I’d seen in my life that concerned extraterrestrials, about what I’d learned when I was young about the possibility of them existing, along with so many theories behind the possibility they existed or didn’t exist, and realized that there was no longer a need for theories. Floating in the sky over Manhattan was a spaceship…and there was no need to have theories about whether aliens existed, except to think about what they looked like.

“Bill Gates? What makes you think he would do this?”

“Aliens don’t exist,” I found myself saying, still doubting the possibility they did…even when it was in front of me. I had a tendency to do that. I didn’t know why.

“If they don’t, then what the hell is flying over Manhattan?”