Aliens

by Matt Greene

 

My mom worked at a hospital downtown with a parking lot carved in spiraling concrete deep below the city. When I ran a fever, she took me there to deposit at daycare for the sick. It was like preschool but without windows and with more fluorescence. There was a Super Nintendo that only the older kids played. Mostly I spent the day waiting, lying on the carpet in the act of playing but with my mind elsewhere, somewhere bleach-scented and white and empty. There was a separate room for the kids with chicken pox and for a week I ran my fingers along the surface of blisters sprouting from my skin like flowers or tube worms. I remember being older and the empty pleasure of the Super Nintendo. Mario jumping up and down. At nap time they gave me a pen light so I could read The Hobbit. It had been an emergency. They could, technically, take anyone up to 12 years old. It was like being back in an old nightmare, Frodo going this way and that way, my insides hot and wrong and thick. Hey kid, I said into the air above the nearest body, You believe in aliens?

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Matt Greene holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University and teaches writing in Appalachia. “Aliens” and “The Prince” are from a linked series. Pieces from this series have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Cleaver, Spillway, Split Lip, Wigleaf, and other journals. Other recent work has appeared in Conjunctions, Moss, and Santa Monica Review.