I am nine when I see the lights in the sky. I crow to Mom from the back seat that there’s a triangle over the field, moving away from us. She says she needs to keep her eyes on the road, but that I can draw it for her when we get home. I take some artistic liberties. What I saw as three soft, even lights I draw as a formation of floating spirals. I tell Mom that the aliens live inside each one like snails. I tell her their bright bodies are what make the rigid hulls glow.
I am thirteen when I see an alien’s ship behind glass at the natural history museum. The placard calls it an opalized ammonite; a curled fossil millions of years old and as big as a cinnamon roll, its pearly surface glinting back the whole cream-washed rainbow. I recognize it instantly, as if my drawing was some prophetic vision. I write my field trip essay about an ancient visitor from another world and get a D+ with the note “creative but false.” I start drawing the spiral on the back of my hand in crusty ballpoint pen, refreshing it whenever it fades, so when the aliens come back they’ll know right away who to trust.
I am seventeen when Mom finally sends me to therapy. The office has the color and smell of oatmeal. I invent a boyfriend who sometimes takes things too far in the back of his Jeep and feign angst over my belly fat. Mr. Dale eats it up. He doesn’t even ask about the spiral graffiti I’ve been caught leaving around town. I brag about my deception in the chatroom afterwards, where I’ve amassed a community of nearly two hundred fellow believers. They’ve seen the spiral ships too, hovering over pastures or appearing up close in dreams, glowing flesh moving inside translucent shells. Their descriptions color in the details of what I never saw.
I am twenty-one when I take a receptionist job at a medical imaging lab. I wear fingerless gloves to my interview so they won’t see the white scarring where countless metal nibs have etched the same spiral for almost a decade. I spend the workday on the paranormal message boards while the MRI revs in the next room like a jet engine. I map sightings of the aliens’ ships and misfile enough medical records that my boss checks the computer’s browser history. The day after I’m laid off, my online community reaches five thousand people. They comfort me when I share the news. I tell the truth: that I’m not upset. It just makes me want the ships to get here sooner.
I am twenty-five when my supporters pool the money to buy a condemned cottage in rural Oklahoma. The location was carefully chosen for its proximity to past sightings. The nearest neighbors are three miles away down a peanut-butter-colored dirt road. Mom begs me to reconsider, to get an apartment in the city where I can meet other people my age. I hug her and don’t answer — she doesn’t know about the others, a whole network around the world that looks to me as a visionary. She waves as I pull out of her driveway for the last time. A creek flows near my new house over a bed of muddy silt. I sit in it to cool off after mowing the first enormous spiral into the overgrown field.
I am twenty-nine when we begin making arrangements. There are several dozen of us scattered in trailers and tents around the property. The county won’t let us add rooms to the cottage until we fix the ones already there. We don’t plan to live here long enough for that. Every morning we gather in the field, tracing the spirals with our bodies. Every evening, we practice sinking into the creek. We light bonfires. We send letters that scare the few people who still love us. My drawing is framed behind glass above the crumbling mantlepiece. When I close my eyes underwater, I can see the spiral lights as clearly as if I actually had.
I am thirty-three when I awake from a dream surrounded by light, certain that the aliens have come for us after our years of sacrifice. But the headlamps are attached to men; the floodlights attached to their trucks lined at the gate. I’m dragged outside squinting. Around me I hear people running, hollering, trampling tents. Mom shows up to court and cries the whole time, like she really believes I would do what they’re claiming. My sweaty lawyer tries playing up the alien angle to get me deemed mentally unfit. A few defectors take the stand to say I’m dangerous. I feel sorry for them, having to go through life knowing nobody’s coming to save them.
I am thirty-seven when the letter arrives. The woman wants to interview me for a documentary. She says the county is even letting her film on the land they seized. In the visiting room I show her my ink. Spirals on the backs of both hands, done stick-and-poke by a kid in the next cell block. She wants to hear about my follower who died in the creek. I tell the truth: that he was tired of waiting. The woman asks me if I’m tired of waiting. For the first time in years, I think of the triangle over the field — three soft lights that could have been anything. And I tell her I’ll wait as long as it takes. I tell her I know what I saw.
Natalie Wallington is a writer living in Memphis, Tennessee. Her flash fiction has previously appeared in Wigleaf, Ellipsis and 101 Words. She is a co-founder of the Kansas-Missouri Writers’ Collective and was a finalist for the 2025 Mythic Picnic Postcard Prize.
Okay Donkey 