The town was suspended in white. Streets kept still and the snow-smothered lamplights looked like suns and moons pinned beneath clouds. After tending to the sick man, several nurses and myself stood out in the bay and watched for nearly an hour while all foliage disappeared.
It is, one of them said, like watching quicksand in reverse.
Another one nodded. Like watching the quicksand step onto its victims instead of the other way around.
We were hypnotized. Time could’ve ceased or cranked ahead.
When my shift ended and I was free to go, I couldn’t find my car. I was unable, really, to see or do anything, and so I gave up, walked back inside the building and found an empty exam room where I got beneath a thin, pink blanket. I thought to myself how easy it would have been to get lost out in the heart of the storm, not five steps from the hospital’s walls. To get lost and to die, my body missing until the sun seared through the clouds again and the blue sky tacked itself high up, work crews at last able to plow. One could be pinned beneath a pile from a storm like that for a week at least, depending on the temperatures and the rate of thaw.
Another month passes, then another. It is almost half a year before I see my sister next, at a bon voyage party for her and her husband, the couple headed overseas for a long overdue vacation. These are my sister’s words, written in her nervous pen at the bottom of the invitation where she also wrote: Things happen, we both know this. Who can say when we’ll see each other again, in what form or where.
Before leaving for her house, I check all dials on the gas range. I make sure the toaster, the coffee maker and blender are unplugged. My two cats I find in my bedroom, deep in the bed’s top blanket. On my way through the kitchen, out the back door and into the garage, I add food to their bowls, check that their water dish is filled.
Summer has closed and fall opened up. The leaves are turning, the barometric pressure dropping. I’ve got my eye on a storm cloud banking the horizon, moving no closer but not leaving, either.
When I saw my sister last, when she spoke about the aliens, she also told me of her daughter. She’s tested positive for pregnancy, my sister said, the two of us still in the entryway. With a woman, she softly added, looking at the floor, the closet, back to the floor to watch my shoes come off. Already she held my coat. It was here I first noticed her sacky jowls, her once slender, enviable neck all loose with folds.
I resisted each urge to stoke her discomfort. Congratulations, I said instead.
We walked to her kitchen, waited for the tea to steep. Then visited the deck briefly, then got back inside, to the back room overlooking the yard. Over the course of our visit, I’d watch my sister's mouth tell me everything, her once thin and lipless face looking overused and bloated now. The aliens were revealed, but it was her daughter, my niece, I kept returning to. Seeing her pictures on the mantle was strange. The last I’d known her she was still a plank, some boy-haired girl, androgynous with a mole below the corner of her left eye that she’d rub at like a sleep pebble only it never gave way. Then, in the photos, she was spilling all over the place, a soft and curvy pelt. And now this: fertile ground. The guts of her poor manners ground into paste and seasoned, fed through some tube of defiance, packaged as a woman with a woman on the plate of a mother who didn’t care to eat it but refused to be so rude, to push it away. My sister was being tested. It was a wonder to see her surprisingly limber yet, absorbing each impact.
I’d been at the party for almost an hour, keeping mostly to a corner of the kitchen that had me wedged between the telephone and the backyard’s sliding glass door. The glass chilled me through my clothing but I didn’t leave it, enjoying a flurry of goose pimples.
My sister had, by that time, already ushered me to her husband who’d embraced me intimately, strangely, and who’d then said I most likely needed a drink and he was my man, he’d get that, pronto.
Daddy’s in charge, he grinned at me, and I nodded, unsure how to respond. He skipped away to the bar, returning promptly with a tumbler filled to the brim in clear, thick liquid, three wedges of lime.
Cheers, he said, chinking the glass now in my hand with his own, drenching my knuckles with spillage. His eyebrows wriggled. The doorbell began to ring and ring, and again he skipped away, to help welcome guests. I’d never liked him.
Watching my sister, I’d wondered what was going on inside her, anywhere inside her: what it was she heard, how much beneath her skin was left to fall. Truthfully, I wondered then, though I didn’t realize this until much later – until they’d been away on their trip for probably two months and were still not due to return for another three – if she could hear my wondering, the synapses sparking beneath my skull, and how it might sound.
I did not for a second doubt anything she’d told me – about the holding tanks, the aliens’ shape and colors, what her body has become. I’ve seen gruesome, otherworldly things, inside and outside peoples’ skins, and have been unable, even when I’ve held them, have felt them, to account for their astounding reality.
When I was still new to my practice, we operated on a woman complaining of severe cramps, an inability to stop bleeding between cycles. We harvested a tumor from her ovary, sent it out for a biopsy. Later, we were called excitedly to the lab where it lay open, dissected: long strands of black hair grew inside and two small, perfect white teeth nested in the flesh.
The woman, when we told her, asked to see it herself. When we showed her she vomited so immediately into a wastebasket, and with such an exact calculation of distances and height, that I could only conclude she’d noticed the receptacle along the wall when she’d first arrived. Then, wiping her mouth on the back of her hand, she asked if there was any way she could take the body home with her. Was there any way at all to preserve it.
This is likely the closest I’ll come to giving birth to something, she told us, bending so her face was only inches from the opened lump. She said, quietly: It did come from me. It should be mine to keep.
I remember leaving the lab, walking the quiet hall, catching glimpses of a day alive beyond the windows. The sky was dark blue. The hillside nearby had grown its grass green and long by then, stalks curling in wind gusts. At one of the windows I stopped to look out: stuck to the glass, irritating my sight, was a round, black beetle. It was then I recalled a mole on the young woman’s hip. I’d brushed against the growth with the edge of my hand, my pinky finger, able to feel it just barely through my glove’s skin as we began. This happened before the first incision. I brushed against it a second time only after the young woman had received a last black stitch. The skin around the mole had been goose pimpled throughout the entirety of the procedure, and by the time we finished the dark spot reached taller than I’d remembered, wider than a quarter dollar, and stiff. I wanted to peel it up with a fingernail like some anise flavored candy, dropped from spoon to sheet to cool. Put the treasure in my mouth, melt it, its sweet trickle slow and dark and down my throat.
