295.3

His sister stands in their backyard, wide-eyed. There are flashing white lights, holistic white lights, turbulent white lights and a harrowing ringing that would deafen anyone if they didn’t muffle their hands with their ears. Their ears with their hands. It’s a confusing ordeal. She’s being abducted. Her brother stands watching from the window with the rest of the family.
All of a sudden the lights stop flashing, the inexplicable commotion disappears, silence. His sister, with her hands raised into the sky as if accepting the burden of heaven, subsides. Her brow wanes. Her arms languish. She wavers, hair gently blowing in the wind, gradually taking steps backwards, doggedly gazing into the sky, finally surrendering and trudging back to the door, which has been opened by her father, her head having hung itself.
“They didn’t want me. They made a mistake.” Grief.

Her brother, dancing in front of his bathroom mirror. She saunters in. On the toilet, she bawls, absolutely maudlin like her brother expects a little sister should be.
“It’ll get better. Maybe they’ve just got you waitlisted. Maybe they need more time.”
“Whatever.”
Her brother keeps dancing in front of the mirror. Her childhood sobs with her. Everything sobs. The towels on the sallow towel rack sob. The towels disheveled on the floor sob. The bathmat sobs. Curdles like spoiled milk. His sister is so beautiful.
“Go break some hearts or something.”
“I thought they wanted me.”
“Not everyone’s going to want you. Most people, maybe just not them.”
“I was sure of it. Mom was sure of it. Dad was almost sure of it.”
“It’ll get better.”
“What am I going to do?”
“Get better.”

They come back. His sister rushes out, hands projected into the air, perhaps to intercept a baby plummeting to its doom dumped by a besotted stork. The white lights again, engulfing the entire suburb with the philosophical and psychological theory of holism accompanied by memory-erasing and dazzling fluorescent white light. Lobotomizing, corporeally racking flashing. Symphonic caterwauling, orchestral in its bombast and scope. The clouds part, making way for something in the sky that’s too incandescent to distinguish. They gravitate remissly over her, not hovering for a moment. They take her brother. He’s slowly funneled through the ceiling by a majestic, transcendental tractor-beam.
Forthwith everything reverts back to as if nothing had happened. They disappear. Crickets. Nothing.

“Oh Mom, why won’t they take me?”
“Maybe you’re just not ready yet honey. Maybe they need evaluate you as a viable candidate for abduction, or maybe you have more work to do, here. You might as well make the best of it. I’m sure they’ll come back soon.”
“Oh Father, why won’t they take me?”

“Dad?”

Lachrymose in one of her school’s most sequestered bathroom stalls, she’s beautiful. At the back of the class, doodling sketches of flying-saucers with white-out on her desk, she’s beautiful. Drinking two-dollar malt liquor out of a forty-ounce with two hands on an ominous stranger’s bed, she’s beautiful. On the balcony, when she notices that three of his teeth are missing and there’s a, only while deliriously intoxicated, seductive wart on the inside of his nose, she’s beautiful. Watching the cars speed down the Henry Hudson Parkway after knowledgably succumbed to being taken advantage of, she’s beautiful. Picking the dirt beneath her fingernails while walking home from school, she’s beautiful. In the cafeteria, taking too long to choose food to nitpick rather than eat, she’s beautiful. Sitting in front of the cupboard beneath the sink, contemplating suicidal methodology, she’s beautiful. Throwing pillows at her ceiling and letting them drop flatly on her face, she’s beautiful. Eating cereal, sipping the final traces of milk from tiny spoonfuls, then sighing and raising the bowl to her lips and slurping it all at once, she’s beautiful. Watching the X-files on the sofa in the living room in a manner that could be considered stereotypy, she’s beautiful.
Dresses cursorily and without premeditating, extracted from an elder man’s fantasies.

She waits in the backyard every night for them to return. She waits for a signal. She lingers for hours, waiting for a sign, a flash, anything. She buys a telescope and puts it on the front porch. It gets stolen. She buys another one. She stares at the stars, and learns the names of each and every constellation. Students she passes in the hallways at school, she can trace constellations from the shape of their faces. She’s overwhelmed by fluorescent lights, the dim dangling gym lights, anemic overhead bathroom lights. She drags around a boy who rings deeply in her ear, his face furrowed with craters of acne.
She hears her brother’s voice after she’s shut the light before getting into bed.
“Brother?” She listens intently, to hear his demure voice again, knees clasped against her chest, gathering all the sheets of her unmade bed and ensconcing herself in them, solemnly trying to pray, not knowing to whom or how.

To simulate what she believes an abduction might be like, she takes lysergic acid diethylamide, wary of abbreviations, and administers it fastidiously onto her tongue in tab format. She repeats this procedure every other night, administering a higher dosage progressively. Unsatisfied, she combines both lysergic acid diethylamide and methylenedioxymethamphetamine, which she once overheard her chemistry professor refer to as “candy flipping”. During her hallucinations, she attempts to contact them through metaphysical means, incognizant of her parents’ observation of her crawling, stumbling about while trying to keep balance, and transfixing her attention to kitchen utensils. Soon she begins to imprint, with a sewing pin, alien logos on the pills she takes.
Her parents, mistaking her drug-induced states as delirium, which she has somewhat already inflicted upon herself, take her to the hospital, where she is redirected to a short-term institution. The permanent damage she’s caused to her brain due to sustained abuse of admixing hallucinogens and empathogen-entactogens, along with her frenzied word-salad expressed belief that aliens are going to abduct her, eventually, she is diagnosed with schizophrenia, sub-typed paranoid, having displayed such prominent positive-symptoms. Within three days she is redirected to a long-term institution.

Her parents promise to visit her every month, but because they do not want their own belief of abduction exposed, this promise is meagerly kept at best. After they dispense of her at the institution, they subsequently visit her every month, every two months, every four months, every half a year, once a year. The nurses play card games with her in the lounge, but she no longer can tell the difference between winning and losing. A fellow diagnosed schizophrenic sneaks into her dorm and, as a foundation for a habitual avocation, starts off by kissing her neck. New patients come and go. Patients that lock themselves in their closets and scream. Patients that attempt to hang themselves by their gowns in the shower. Patients with Down’s Syndrome, infatuated with celebrities, cutting pictures of them out of magazines and storing them in towering unkempt stashes in the corners of their padded cells. Patients with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder that can’t remove themselves from standing in front mirrors. Patients with rigid and flexible catatonia that are referred to by the nurses as “acrobats”.

Years pass.

They come back, again. The white lights flare, blare, blind everyone in a one mile radius. The drop of a pin begins to echo. They hover over her backyard while her parents stare out the window with their trembling hands concealing their eyes. They wait. The battery of a truck driving by melts and it crashes into a department store, demolishing it and several other stores in proximity. They wait more. Someone tries to take a picture but their mind is instantly erased.
They wait. And wait.
Finally, unconvinced that she’ll ever come scrambling out into her backyard hands distended into the air wide open in acceptance like she once did, they leave. Her parents begin to weep. They never return.

But she can hear them! Isolated in her ward, pressing her hands and body firmly against the walls, listening, scampering back and forth, twittering and placing her ear to where she can hear them more accessibly.
“They’ve come for me!”
“Honey, there’s no one there.”
“But they’re here for me!” She paws at the walls, shrieking with delight.
The nurse stationed ushers everyone away from the room, and motions for security.
Listening intently. Her heart fills with joy.
“They haven’t forgotten about me.”
The nurse prepares the syringe.
“Honey, they never will.”