52 Project #11: Selkie (Patreon)

Now I don’t know if any of this is true for sure, and a lot of it sounds crazy, but this is what my best friend Stella told me, right before she and her mom disappeared. And I tried to tell the cops, but they didn’t listen, and I can’t blame them, because seriously, this story is totally cray-cray. It doesn’t help that her dad kept saying “They’re gone, they’ve gone and they’re never coming back.” I mean, officially he’s a “person of interest” but we all know the cops think he killed them and hid the bodies and they’re just waiting to have enough evidence that they can actually charge him. And maybe that is what happened. Maybe this was just a fantasy Stella came up with because she knew her dad was a crazy ax murderer and she was scared.

But I don’t think so. Stella wasn’t the kind of girl who stuck her fingers in her ears and went “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU” when things were bad. She confronted bad stuff. She tried to solve problems. So I don’t think she would have told me some weird made up story and then by total coincidence her dad killed her the day after, and I don’t think she would have done it because she thought he was gonna kill her. If that was what she’d thought she’d have told me, and we’d have told the cops.

I think what she told me was the truth. And I’m not just saying that because I don’t want to believe my friend is dead. I’m a Christian; I believe in Heaven, and God. If my friend was dead, then someday I’d see her again in Heaven. That’s what I believe. But if her story is true, then I have no idea if she’s gonna go to the same Heaven, or if like God has different Heavens for different planets, so I have no idea if I’m ever going to see her again, and probably not. Like, people have come back from near-death experiences and none of them ever reported seeing aliens in Heaven, so I think God must have different ones for people like Stella and her mom. So in some ways it’d be better if she was dead, because then I’d see her again someday, and this way, I never will.

But I still believe it’s the truth. And I’m still glad for her, even though I miss her every day and I cry because I know I’ll never see her again. But I know she’s going somewhere where her mom, at least, will be happy. And maybe Stella can be happy too.

So here’s the story.

It starts with her dad, who once upon a time, was hot. Or so I’m told. I find this really hard to believe. My mom says I’m being a ridiculous teenager when I say that Stella’s dad looks like he was always ugly, because she says that if I was middle-aged I’d think he was rugged and manly, like Sean Connery, except Sean Connery has a nice accent and doesn’t look like he fell out of an ugly tree and hit his face on every ugly branch there was until he landed at the bottom and hit his head on the ugly root. But apparently, once upon a time, long, long ago in a galaxy far far away… wait, I can’t tell that joke anymore. It means something now. Dammit, this whole thing has even taken Star Wars jokes away from me.

Anyway, once upon a time, Stella’s dad was ruggedly handsome, when he was young. And maybe when he wasn’t too super old. I don’t know, because if he was so hot, how did he get to be 30, with a house, and land, without getting married or even having a serious girlfriend? But anyway, he was single, and he was walking around on his property when he met Stella’s mom, who was a total stranger at the time, and she was on his property collecting leaves and grass for some reason.

Now the thing about Stella’s mom. Her dad might be ugly, but her mom… well, I’m straight, but if I was an adult and I was going to go lez for anyone, I would totally go lez for Stella’s mom. When I was a kid I thought there was no one more beautiful in the world, even my own mom, and I wanted to grow up to look like her, but I knew I never would. No one gets to grow up looking like Stella’s mom, which is another reason why I think Stella’s story is true. She has, like, skin that’s like golden, like we say about Asian people except hers is even more golden than that, and fluffy curly red hair that falls down straight instead of making a bell around her head which is what Stella’s curly hair does, and I don’t even know how curly hair can fall straight but it does. Except when it practically floats like a cloud around her head because it’s so light. And she’s tall, and thin, and her fingers are super long and look like she ought to be a surgeon, or maybe an expert piano player, or something.

When I was a kid, she was really, really graceful. Like, she looked like she was gliding everywhere, anytime she walked. When she turned around, it was like, I don’t know, like a wheel turning instead of a person, like there was no jerk to it, it was just completely smooth. But then she started getting pain in her back and her joints, and it got worse, and she started to have to walk with a cane and spend all her time on the sofa, using a laptop or watching TV or knitting. And then there were the medical problems because apparently she wasn’t eating right or something and she was too thin, only she wouldn’t go to the hospital so Stella wouldn’t be able to go over my house because she had to take care of her mom. So I’d go over her house instead, and we’d try to get her mom to take her pills, or eat, but some days she’d just ignore us and stare out at the sky. Other times, she told us to tell her stories, or she’d tell them to us. The stories she told us were all like science fiction stuff, which was pretty awesome. I mean, my mom can’t make up stories off the top of her head and I’m pretty sure that if she did, they wouldn’t be about other planets and weird alien creatures and stuff.

According to Stella, there was a really good reason for that, that she just found out.

Anyway. So her dad, who was rugged, met her mom, who was beautiful, and it was love at first sight. He went everywhere with her. He took her to the movies, and museums, and out into the woods, and she loved everything. Especially going to the woods, or the beach, or the mountains… anywhere in nature, and she’d collect things, like leaves, and rocks, and when he asked, she’d say “Don’t you think this is a beautiful world we’re on?”

He asked her to get married, and she said no. She had a job, she said, and her job was going to take her out of the area and she’d probably never see him again, so she just wanted to enjoy the time together that they had. He didn’t like that answer, but she was pretty firm on it. He suggested getting a different job, where they could be together, and she laughed at him. But she never actually talked about her job. So one day, he spied on her.

She had a house she was renting, a small shack out by the ocean. One day he snuck into it, and poked around, and found what looked like a weird metal hula hoop in a room next to what looked like a ham radio. (My grandfather had a ham radio. When I was a kid every time it was mentioned I thought it was a ham that had one of those speaker grilles in it. I was really disappointed when I found out what it really was.) And then she came back to her house while he was there, so he hid in a closet and he watched.

He watched her take the hula hoop and make it light up. She put it over her head, and it floated there, and then it went down her body and up again and she looked completely different. She was blue, and even taller, and really spindly, and her skin shone kind of like it was the outside of a bug or something, like a shiny blue beetle, and she moved like she was in pain, like she was all bent over. Then she turned on the ham radio, and a hologram of another blue creature floated in the air above her desk, and she said things to the hologram that sounded all clicky and hissy, and the blue creature said things back. Then she did the hula hoop thing again, turned back into a human, and left.

So there are a lot of guys who, if they saw their girlfriend turn into an alien, would decide they never wanted to see her again, or maybe even try to kill her, and I guess I’ve gotta give Stella’s dad that, he wasn’t one of those guys. But he also wasn’t one of the kind of guys who’d go to her and say “I know you’re really an alien but I love you and I wanna go to space with you and can you turn me into a bug thing?” or even “I know you’re really an alien and I love you and I accept that you’re gonna have to go back to the mothership or wherever.”

No, he was the kind of guy who took the hula hoop, and unplugged the ham radio, and took them on his boat, and went out into the ocean and threw them in.

Of course she figured out it was him; no one else would have known where she lived. I mean maybe some random burglar, but why is a random burglar going to go out to a little shack in the middle of nowhere and take the alien technology but not the computer or the TV? She screamed at him, and raged, and said that now she could never go home again. She hit him, but she wasn’t really very strong, because it turns out, she comes from a planet where the gravity is lower than Earth and even when the hula hoop thing turned her into a human, she was still a pretty weak human who wasn’t used to our gravity. She said that when the ship couldn’t raise her again, her family would assume the worst, and they would wait for her at the rendezvous point but there was like this stellar cycle they needed to follow to get to the next planet they were studying and they couldn’t come back here for 18 years and she was stuck all alone on this planet until then. And he said that she had him, and he loved her, and eventually she started crying and he held her and she let him do it, because sometimes something is so bad that you need comfort even if it comes from the guy who did it to you in the first place.

A year later they got married. Three years after that, Stella was born.

As far as I know Stella was 100% human. She was very pretty, but not like almost inhumanly pretty like her mom, just like normal human pretty. Her mom kept up the collecting Earth specimens and Stella particularly liked the rocks; she and I used to go climbing up hills and cliff faces looking for nice rocks together. I never cared about the rocks, but Stella was always the one in charge of what we did, because whatever she came up with was gonna be fun, so I always let her do it. My ideas were like, stay at home and play video games or get on the computer or something, but Stella said, her mom used to take her around everywhere and now that she was getting sicker and weaker and she was stuck on a sofa all day with nothing to do but be on the computer, she complained all the time about how she didn’t get to do things with Stella anymore and would always ask Stella about what cool things did she find today, or what did she do, so Stella didn’t want to be on a computer all the time because what if she grew up and got to be like her mom?  So we would go on adventures together, exploring the woods, and sometimes we were fairy princesses in exile plotting to discover the magic gems that would give us the power to take our kingdom back, and sometimes we were filming super important documentaries that we were going to put on YouTube and get to be rich and internet-famous, which maybe would even have worked if we weren’t 8 and the things we were filming weren’t like rocks and geese. And sometimes we were space explorers.

Kind of ironic. But we didn’t know. Stella’s mom told us all those stories, but we thought she was making it all up.

Anyway. What Stella told me is that they came back. Her mom’s people. They weren’t sure she was dead, so they set out to find her. And she used to put stuff on the Internet with the alien writing on it. You remember I said she knits, right? So she’d knit things, and take pictures, and put them on Deviantart or Tumblr or whatever, and the stuff she knitted had alien symbols on it but everyone thought they were just weird designs. So the aliens, when they came back, they searched the Internet for any signs that Stella’s mom was still alive, and they found them.

Stella’s mom has been in crippling pain for years because she wasn’t ever meant to live in our gravity, and she doesn’t get the nutrients she needs because her human body can’t digest things that her alien body really needed, and she’s been getting sicker and sicker, and more and more depressed. But when her people came for her and they brought her a new hula hoop, it was like all that melted away, and Stella said, for the first time she can remember in years, her mother looked joyful. And her mom told her the story, and now Stella hates her dad, because if you love someone why would you ruin their life so that you could be with them? She says, the only reason her mom must’ve stayed with her dad was Stockholm Syndrome or something, but I read stuff, so I don’t think that’s the whole reason. I think maybe she wanted to stay with someone who knew who and what she really was, even if that was the person who took that identity away from her, because it was so important for her to have just one person who she could share the truth with.

Well, she shared the truth with Stella. And Stella made her decision. She wasn’t going to stay on Earth, with her dad, who is the kind of jerk who cripples people he loves so they’ll stay with him. She was going to the alien ship with her mom. They’ll hula hoop her and make her an alien, and maybe it’s going to hurt and maybe in 18 years she’ll have to come back to Earth because maybe her body can’t handle it, but she’s half alien, so maybe she can. Maybe she’ll never have to come back.

Neither of us are even 18 years old yet. 18 years feels like forever. If Stella ever comes back, I feel like I’ll be so old I’m a completely different person, and so will she, and I don’t know if we could get our friendship back if that happens, because when I was in kindergarten I was best friends with Monique Stiles, and then we moved away, and I saw Monique again when I was in 5th grade and it was like we were total strangers and it was so totally awkward, and I hope that never happens with me and Stella but honestly I don’t even think she’s coming back, because why would she? If you could be a real life space explorer why would you ever come back to Earth?

So now Stella’s gone, and her mom, and I kinda feel like maybe her dad should go to jail because he made Stella’s mom suffer and be lonely for 18 years, even if he was there to love her, because she didn’t have her family or her friends or her work or even her own body, and it must have really, really hurt. There were days she just stared out at the sky and ignored us, and now I know why. Now I know what she must have been missing. But I guess 18 years after it happened you can’t arrest a guy for throwing someone’s stuff in the ocean even if it was really important stuff, and she did marry him and have a kid and I’m not sure that anyone who didn’t know her would understand that that didn’t mean much. That she needed someone, so she had to pick the guy who’d hurt her because there wasn’t anyone else who’d understand why she was hurting.

Anyway, my point is, he didn’t kill them. They went home to Stella’s mom’s ship, with Stella’s mom’s family. And I don’t know if Stella is ever coming back, but I know for a fact, her mom never will.