Something came into my head this morning as I lay on the pillow and tried to sleep. So I got out of bed and wrote it down before it vanished. And then I posted it here because I hadn’t posted anything here for, like, ages.

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I remember us getting out of bed in the morning before sunrise, and that by the time we had dressed and had left the house, the world had rotated to such an angle that the first little hints of sunlight were spreading like diluted paint through the trees and were drawing strange pictures in the grass, and that in the air there were little rivers of both cold and warm air that mixed as we waded through them. There was a lifting fog. I heard an aeroplane pass not quite overhead but somewhere to the south. I saw the shape of a man walking his dog.

I remember noticing how perfect her hair was, after eight hours of sleep. And how white her teeth were. There were certain sorts of things, like that, that she could do without ever being noticed. She never coughed, for example, or sneezed, or made unpleasant noises in the bathroom. She was what my mother would have described as ’a quiet achiever’.

The police asked me how long I had known her and I couldn’t remember. Two or three weeks, I told them.

When we reached our favourite little bench in the park and sat down, she produced a small packet of biscuits that she had baked the night before and had wrapped in greaseproof paper. She unfolded the paper and offered me one and I ate it. It tasted of sugar and almonds. It was very good. There was a brightly coloured bird in a tree about twenty metres away looking at us and we were both looking at the bird and for just a second nothing in the world moved. Nobody took a breath.

My mother swallowed twenty-three sleeping tablets on a Wednesday night and didn’t wake up on Thursday. I guess that’s what sleeping tablets are for. Sweet dreams, mum.

Anyway, there we were in the park eating biscuits that tasted of sugar and almonds. The sun was still coming up. The bird was still looking at us.

I became aware of a certain presence around us. A kind of invisible glow. I told the police that I thought it was probably an alien spaceship of some sort, but when they asked me to describe it I couldn’t. I don’t really know what alien spaceships look like. Nobody does.

I could tell that the police were very frustrated by the lack of detail. Who could blame them? I was a bit frustrated myself. What had I seen, they asked me. I hadn’t actually seen anything. I had just felt it.

Here’s the thing though. When the spaceship was gone, so was she. Even the biscuits had vanished. I think the aliens took the bird too, but it may have just flown away.

I filled out a form, and somebody asked me where I lived. A nice lady organised a taxi for me and suggested that I go home and rest.

Everything would be alright, she told me.

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