the alien had been speaking for years. speaking and sending transmissions of visual matter. it had been sending them to its prime contact person, the novelist. but the novelist was struggling to not listen.

teams of scientists had been working with the novelist. they were carefully monitoring his blood and temperature, in order to administer a substance that might alter the novelist’s internal perceptions. the voices had stopped. now all that remained were vivid nightmares of invasion and attack.

the alien arrived on a thursday. it was sunny and unseasonably warm. there was patchy fog in the late afternoon. birds were flying south for the winter. the alien stopped to admire them. dark against the sunlit sky. then, stretching its many arms and jumping down from the ladder of its ship, it set off to find its contact person, who ought by now to be filled with twenty years of galactic information. but, at that very moment, with tubes and wires coming out all over him, the novelist was being monitored for brain wave irregularities, in a small room with no windows, in the east end of the city.