E.L.E.

The sharp smell of ozone filled the air, and a loud whine erupted around them. Roy looked up at the ship, but Susan kept her eyes on Roy. The lights on the bottom of the ship began to flash faster now and now faster, until they became solid. Roy and Susan looked at each other, fearful, but resigned.

-- Corby Kennard, (Artwork by Erin Wells)

“And that will end the final broadcast of this station. If … anyone is watching this … we’d just like to say thank you for many years of loyalty, although I suppose that sounds quite hollow now, I’m going home to be with my wife and children, and the rest of the staff will, hopefully, be doing the same. There are vigils and prayer circles everywhere; I passed a few on the way to the station this morning; so I am sure that you will be able to find comfort in this, our darkest hour. I’m sorry … I’m … I’m at a bit of a loss. This is Brian Emerich, signing off for the final time. Good bye and, God bless us all.”

The anchorman stood up and walked out of frame just before the “Technical Difficulties” screen showing a bewildered TV repairman coiled in coaxial cable took over, followed seconds later by static as the signal was turned off at the source.

Roy stared at the screen for a few more seconds. He pressed the power button on the remote, and the set clicked off. The silence was broken only by occasional sounds of crying from the apartment next to his. He didn’t know the woman who lived there; he had only seen her once. His interest in the other tenants in the building had always been academic at best. There was a couple on the ground floor who may or may not have had a baby; three guys in the place to his right who were either unemployed, drug dealers, musicians, or college students, or maybe all four; a single/divorced/widowed woman in the flat above him who had a lover or a sister; and the crying woman on his left, who probably had a boyfriend, or she could have been a hooker or party girl, or lapsed nun.

He’d thought many times this week about introducing himself to his neighbors. Better late than never, he figured. But he hadn’t seen the downstairs couple since all this started, and the college student drug dealers had all left, probably to spend time with family. The woman upstairs had jumped out the window two days ago, and he’d never been very good with crying people. So he’d sat on the couch, watching the commentators and pundits explain to an increasingly fragile populace that this was by turns a liberal/conservative, hoax/threat, sign from God/trick by Satan, or any other bizarre theory they could fathom. Why, just that morning, hadn’t he watched some fruitcake claim that there really weren’t spaceships out there in the sky, but that this was a mass hallucination brought on by a reaction to bio engineered foods and some sort of odorless gas released by additives in our fuel supply? Roy supposed that the millions of suicides and stress-related deaths were just the result of “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.”