Waiting for them
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Illustration: Jacey
My dad loved aliens, until they showed up.
His friends would say they were “not religious, but spiritual”. Dad wouldn’t even go that far. His love of aliens was based on the firm belief that they were physical, corporeal beings, “just like you and me”, he repeated, “but probably better.” After Mom died, he got a lot out of the idea of there being someone else out there, even if he didn’t think there was any beyond.
“At least not that we can know,” he would tell me, for the 400th time, or maybe it was just that I was 16 and parenting seemed repetitive — even with only one parent left to repeat things. I got more patient with the repetition after college, when I had my own place — it was just Dad, like the bizarre way he folded the towels and his insistence on putting shredded cheddar in tuna salad. I knew I was home when I heard either the Eagles’ ‘New York Minute’ or Dad’s latest theory about what aliens might know that we don’t — what they might have seen, how they might have seen it.
It helped that he was happiest when he was discussing stuff like that. He relaxed, almost like he used to be when Mom was alive. As close as I could get now, anyway.
So when the Githrum landed, I expected my dad to be the most excited person on the planet. I expected that he wouldn’t be able to stop talking about new developments — that he would get as close as he could to the landing site, maybe even sweet-talk his way into a volunteer team to interact with them directly.
Read more science fiction from Nature Futures