Read More: A Brief Q&A with Margaret Karmazin
I am an alien abductee. Go ahead, roll your eyes, laugh, whatever, I don’t care. For years, I’ve had to put up with being rudely awakened in the night and dragged out of bed and through the wall into their stinky, clammy ships where they strip me down naked and torture me. Scraping, digging, gouging, scratching and shoving things crunchingly up any hole they find on my body. They are ugly, disgusting little bastards and if it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to make their evil little missions difficult.
First, I get a mean looking dog. Half pitbull, half German shepherd, from this mechanic at the garage who is moving in with his mother and she won’t have the dog around her cats. Since she’s paying the bills, he has to do what she says. Roger is the dog’s name. I don’t think of a Roger as being especially tough but it is what it is. I live alone. My wife left two years ago; she couldn’t stand my supposed nuttiness, but the reason she never believed me about the aliens was that they just put her to sleep when they came, so she never saw anything. Though one time she wondered why my undershirt was on backwards when we woke up and there was blood all over my pillow. But she didn’t wonder enough to believe anything I told her.
Of course, if the aliens can put her to sleep while they’re dragging me off, they can certainly do it to a dog but the thing about this dog is that he never sleeps. At least no one has ever seen him sleep. The former owner had him checked by the vet and then so did I and the vet claimed he just goes to sleep while we’re sleeping but I don’t know about that. The mechanic lived with a couple of friends before his move and they weren’t all asleep at the same time and none of them ever saw Roger sleep. So, I figure maybe he never did (though the vet said he had to do it sometime or he wouldn’t be still alive) and might somehow be immune to the aliens’ sleep power.
Meantime, I treat Roger good and direct his hostility toward pictures of Greys, those little bastards, and make life-sized cardboard cutouts of them and even sewed a stuffed doll of one and train him until he rips that doll to shreds. He is good enough around regular people but then I hardly ever have anyone over and when I do, keep him in the basement.
Time goes by and I have Roger pretty well-trained to be an alien killer. At night he has free rein of my bedroom and the upstairs hallway. The inevitable happens and the little fuckers shine their blue light into my bedroom which wakes me up and sure enough Roger bolts in from the hallway barking and slathering. Then I hear him whimper followed by a thud and damn if they don’t put him right to sleep like a baby and then suck me right through that wall again for another round of digs, scrapes and weird stuff with my penis.
Poor Roger doesn’t wake up for two days and after that is a sniveling little wimp and I end up giving him to an old lady down the street who wants a dog that won’t cause much trouble but looks scary. That’s Roger all right.
I don’t give up easily, so as soon as my sore penis feels better, I go to an electronic store and tell the geniuses there that I want to set up something that has one of those beams across the floor like you see in heist movies where they steal a priceless painting from a heavily guarded museum. Only I want this beam, when it’s crossed, to turn on real loud horrible music. Music music that will make the aliens pee their pants, assuming they ever pee, but you know what I mean. This takes more than one meeting with one of the techs, involving him coming to the house to see the layout and of course wanting to know why I want this in my bedroom.
I claim that I was burglarized and it scared the shit out of me and I can’t sleep a full night unless I have this protection. “But there are better ways of setting that up than this weird idea,” the tech says and I say, “Well, if you don’t want to do it, I’ll find someone who will,” so naturally he says all right, what the hell, and does the set up. I have it programmed to blast heavy metal should anyone cross the beam and I keep a remote on the nightstand to turn it off if I get up to piss. The whole thing costs a pretty penny but it’s worth it.
A couple of months pass with nothing happening and then I am jolted awake by noise that sounds like fifty screaming banshees running heavy machinery and then ZAP, it’s gone and I am jerkily dragged onto the ship where, to express their dissatisfaction with my musical taste, the little pricks bring in their boss, a larger and more muscular looking guy, who proceeds to stick his hand up my rectum into my abdomen and move a few things around without anesthesia. Okay, you win, fuckers, I think in a state of insane rage and then I’m back in my bed with my head at the foot, my clothes missing and an ass full of blood.
Takes me a while to recover from this before I am back at it. You might accuse me of having a death wish, but I wouldn’t call it that exactly. More like I inherited my mom’s temper which has gotten her into trouble more than a few times and caused her to be kicked out of numerous clubs and organizations and to be divorced by my father who went on to marry some mumbling little blonde half his age who ended up with all his money when he croaked.
I wonder now if the reason Mom is so mad was that she too has spent her life being poked and prodded by the evil little devils. They do say that it runs in families. I’m afraid to ask her though.
Several months pass while I recover from my internal bashing and concentrate on my job. I’m a nurse, so I know how to help myself heal. I volunteer for third shift to avoid being home at night but eventually they put me back on day because they’re up on how working night shift isn’t really good for you and insist on giving me a break I don’t want. And, sure enough, the little fuckers are back, only this time they concentrate on messing with my mind and teaching me how to read three-dimensional alien letters superimposed on top of each other. I have no idea what any of it means and don’t care.
“Are you still going to be doing this when I’m old?” I yell at them but they don’t answer. They never answer anything. This time they’re gentle when putting me back in bed, though I think they yanked some pubic hairs out since it hurts down there again. […]
Subscribers can read the full version by logging in. |
___________________________________
Margaret Karmazin’s credits include stories published in literary and SF magazines, including Rosebud, Chrysalis Reader, North Atlantic Review, Mobius, Confrontation, Pennsylvania Review, The Speculative Edge, Aphelion, and Another Realm. Her stories in The MacGuffin, Eureka Literary Magazine, Licking River Review, and Mobius were nominated for Pushcart awards. She has stories included in several SF anthologies, published a YA novel, Replacing Fiona, a children’s book, Flick-Flick & Dreamer, and a collection of short stories, Risk.
“Curses, Foiled Again” originally appeared in Spank the Carp.
Read More: A Brief Q&A with Margaret Karmazin