biting the narrative

In the hospital ward a consultant gastroenterologist appeared.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“I feel,” I said, “very ill.”

This, apparently, was not the concise yet comprehensive answer that I had imagined it to be. He seemed to require something more. “Can you describe it?” he asked.

I couldn’t. That anguished, pressurised feeling – a sensation somewhere between burning and falling – that extended through my torso, my limbs, my entire body was by now so familiar to me, I was astonished that it didn’t have a name and that I didn’t know it. How could this be? I was, after all, a prize-winning novelist.

Frustrated I fell back on anger. Was the doctor stupid? Didn’t he know what “feeling very ill” meant?

In her essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf says, “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry”.

At least I was in good company.

next life incarnation: jewel-toned gamefowl

So there's an alien research station in space. Humanity's worst attempts to destroy it amount to a bear turning over the trash can. Aliens occasionally abduct people and return them with a clean bill of health and an ankle bracelet. It takes them forever to figure out those bracelets are screwing with their data because humans who carry them are curve-wreckingly popular.

Disaster strikes somewhere, I dunno, Japan, and there's an uptick in abductions, but of people stuck in collapsed buildings, and yeah the giant octopus tree that looks straight out of Call of Cthulhu is scary but it's also using tech you can't even comprehend to find survivors and teleport them out of the rubble. You see humans with absolutely 100% deadly injuries wisked away and a good number of them even return. There is now a new consent form specifying if rescuers can take you to the aliens, because they will probably try to save you but if they can't your family will never get your body back. You decide if your life or your body is more important.

Little by little, pragmatism wins out. The aliens aren't attacking, but they ARE abducting and doing weird tests. But the survivors mostly return unharmed with a Big Mac in hand and a weird piece of tech. There have been less valid excuses to miss school. The aliens are clearly researching humanity just as much as we are researching them, and until communications are established this status quo isn't the worst.

Ofc, then one of them actually attacks. Knocks the statue of liberty clean off. The military starts to deploy fast, and even wounds the attacker a lot, but before they can shoot the second missle it bounces. And it turns on the shooter. Every military person in the attack dies, suddenly and through means you cannot comprehend. The other aliens whisk the attacking one away. Construction materials appear as if in apology, but that's it.

The attacker was a hooligan who thought destroying wildlife was fun, and ran into something they can't handle. But even if the bear is perfectly within its rights to defend its territory, the ranger will atill have to shoot it to save the stupid brat, and hope the idiot learned their lesson.

But the bear is still dead. And the forest critters who had just started getting used to the ranger are now having second thoughts.

But the abductions continue. There are no hooligans for a while. And what else can you do? This is your home, but if the invaders really want to take it, what can you do?

So you try to stay out of their way, if you are in some serious trouble and your chances are already less than 50/50, maybe you seek them out. Sometimes they help. Sometimes they don't.

And sometimes the abductees catch glimpses of something that looks like it might have been human once, but eyes and skin all wrong, speaking incomprehensibly, and rubbing its head on the alien's 'knees'.