In honor of Marie Vibbert's upcoming novella, Multitude, we hosted a microfiction contest inviting you to imagine a moment of alien contact. We got some amazing submissions, and after much trial and tribulations, narrowed it down to a top three. In first place was "You Must Needs Be Strangers" by Conor Barnes. You can read the piece and learn more about Conor below! Congratulations to Conor!
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"You Must Needs Be Strangers"
By Conor Barnes
The ship is burning like the last gasp of sun on the horizon, but it's here, striking here, faster than the earth can spin you away, screaming above all air, in a few minutes it will crash into the deep swamp behind your house and kill all the half-innocent beavers and squirrels and ticks, it's only minutes before you'll forget these creatures forever because there's a disoriented beast crawling out of its ship, flashing between a moose, your own twin, a child, and in between all these, a paper-thin glow with no face at all, and then finally a man, the kind you find pitiable, tall and gangly, crying, "Please, you have to help me, please, they'll kill me," and it's easy, it's so easy to hide him in your bed while local police and then federal police and then nameless police scrounge every inch of your land, because it's not hiding, it's your lover, it's your lover who knows what you want before you say it, who kisses you everywhere you've been too ashamed to ask, and it doesn't matter that he stares at the stars and cries, it doesn't matter that he hides under the covers when he hears sirens, because it's your husband, pushing through the clouds in a little plane with you in the passenger seat laughing and shrieking until there isn't enough air to push through anymore, it's your husband apologising to the swamp for his entry, and in a few years the government will declare it suspects hundreds of aliens live among us, but it doesn't matter, because around the world people will say there's no crime for being scared, and gentle, and kind, and that's later, right now there's just a dot on the horizon that hasn't yet shattered your world.
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Conor Barnes lives in Halifax, Canada. His fiction has appeared in Potato Soup Journal, Apple Valley Review, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. His poetry has appeared in Frogpond and Modern Haiku. He blogs at parhelia.substack.com.