I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.
Currently Playing: Sneaky Sound System – UFO
The first time Melissa saw the UFO, nobody believed her. The second time, she could hardly believe it herself. The third, the fourth, the fifth time, and so on? She might have believed but she was struggling to care.
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The first time Melissa saw the UFO, she was driving home at nearly 2am in the morning. Her drive back from the pub where she worked was a little over half an hour on mostly dark and empty roads. No one else drove between the towns of Bunndilla and Garrawong at that time of night, often she went the whole distance without seeing another car. She still had to keep her eyes open though. Thick strands of bush lined both sides of the two lane blacktop. It didn’t happen often but sometimes kangaroos came bounding into the road and into the path of her headlights. Or a wombat would trundle across the two lanes like a furry cinderblock on legs.
Three lights flared in the sky directly ahead. It was a clear night, filled with diamond chip stars and drifting satellites. That was what she thought they were at first glance, satellites. But the lights didn’t move like satellites, revolving around one another and growing as they descended toward the road.
Suddenly, Melissa’s car died. She let out a squeal as the headlamps went dark. The vehicle coasted forward on its own momentum until she hit the brake. The three lights continued to descend until they were hovering, orbiting, directly above the road only a hundred metres ahead. She could see a triangle of blackness strung between them. It wasn’t just lights but some kind of craft. She estimated it to be about half a footy field in size. With another flash, light spread across its surface. Many more lights covered its base and sides. It was almost pyramidal in shape. A kind of glowing engine or portal occupied the centre of its underside. Completely silent, it hovered there, turning slowly, as Melissa gaped and tried to process what she was seeing.
The UFO hovered for almost a minute. Melissa thought to grab her phone so she could record it but the phone was as dead as her car. In fact, the phone’s battery was drained and it wouldn’t switch on again until she got home and plugged it into its charger even though she’d had half a battery when she left work. Unable to take pictures or a video, she simply stared until the UFO vanished. Streaking into the sky, straight up, silent but at extraordinary speed. She craned her neck to follow but its lights blinked out and it was gone. After it left, her car turned itself back on and she drove the rest of the way home.
No one believed her, of course. Coworkers and patrons at the pub where she worked, the Bunndilla Hotel, made a lot of jokes about her drinking on the job even though she’d been completely sober. Her mum acted like she was still six-years-old and making up stories. Not even her boyfriend, Travis, trusted her version of events. He worked as a tradie and they had moved to Gurrawong to be closer to his current job. He didn’t like her driving home most nights on the empty road and had told her she should find a job closer to where they were living now but she was never a big fan of change. He claimed to believe her but then insisted she consider the possibility she’d fallen asleep at the wheel and hallucinated the whole thing or something.
For Melissa’s friends and coworkers, the UFO was the subject of jokes for a couple of days then it was almost forgotten. No one believed her and no one really cared. Melissa was left wondering what to do next. On the one hand, she never doubted her own memory of events. No amount of scepticism or mocking could make her think for a second that she’d dreamed the whole thing, or that it was actually a plane or somebody flying a drone. She knew what she’d seen.
On the other hand, there really wasn’t that much to talk about. She’d seen it, it killed her car engine just like in the movies, it killed her phone, it hovered there for a minute, and then it was gone. And she didn’t really want to become known as the UFO girl who talked about having a close encounter all the time. So she resolved to keep it as a spectacular memory, never deny what she’d seen if asked, and to keep her mind a little more open to the possibilities of the world. But, she stopped bringing it up herself.
Then she saw the UFO a second time.
At first things played out much the same. Driving home in the middle of the night, empty road, empty sky. The lights appeared, dancing a circle around one another as they descended to reveal a triangular craft. Her car died, her phone died, and she could only stare in awe as it hovered closer.
A beam of light shot out of the circle on the belly of the UFO. It scanned the car and, through the windshield, it scanned her. Melissa had never felt anything like it. The light seemed to crawl beneath her clothes, invasive, uncomfortably intimate. It didn’t hurt but it was as if she could feel it slipping through her skin, piercing her bones, filling her lungs and traveling through her veins with her blood. It didn’t last long but it was long enough that she had time to get scared. All the common alien encounter tropes ran through her mind. She worried the light might turn into a tractor beam and pull her out of the car. Abduction, probing. They might lay eggs inside her or use her as a midnight snack.
Then the light switched off and, just like the first time, the UFO shot into the sky. Her car came back to life and she drove the rest of the way home.
Melissa wasn’t sure if she should tell anyone about the second encounter after the way the first one was received. She ended up telling people anyway. Travis claimed he was concerned about her and so did her mother. Her coworkers weren’t sure what to make of it. Like whether it was a topic they could still make fun of or if she might actually be having some kind of mental episode. However, a few patrons at the bar actually took an interest. She gained a small following of genuinely curious listeners. It seemed the town of Bunndilla had something of a history with UFOs. There were stories about lights in the sky, strange craft, and even encounters like her one. They were the first people to listen and ask questions with actual curiosity.
The third time, Melissa was prepared.
She didn’t actually expect to be visited a third time, of course. But anything that had happened twice could happen again. And she continued to travel the same empty road night after night. Her car and phone shut down when the UFO approached but she had bought one of those disposable cameras like her parents used to give her when her family went on holidays as kids. They still made them even though they were nowhere near as common. She’d been keeping it in her glovebox, just in case.
When the UFO appeared and her car drifted to a stop, Melissa snatched the disposable camera and jumped out. The camera was a lightweight box made of cardboard and plastic. She snapped photos without really looking where she was aiming and wound the little plastic wheel on the back of it between clicks. The UFO didn’t scan her again. Almost cooperatively, it drifted above the trees for a good couple of minutes before rocketing off again, allowing Melissa to cycle through the camera’s entire roll of film.
The camera proved nothing. When Melissa had it developed all of the pictures were blurry and vastly overexposed, as if the lights of the UFO did something to burn the film. There were glimpses of what might have been captured but only because she already knew what she was looking at. She showed a few of the people who’d taken a genuine interest but even they couldn’t make out much of anything.
And then came the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and the seventh times, and so on.
Melissa tried to come up with more solutions. She tried different cameras, she bought a dashcam and left it running as she drove. She tried wrapping her phone in aluminium foil and carrying a spare battery pack. None of it worked. The photos showed nothing. The phone and any electronics invariably died. A few times, she had people drive home with her or follow her at a distance in their own cars. Naturally, the UFO never appeared on those nights. Instead, it would invariably appear on the next night when she was alone.
Some nights, the UFO just hovered there. Some nights it scanned her, running its light up and down her car and her body. Sometimes, the lights put on a little show, blinking on and off in weird sequences, or the UFO would circle above the trees. Regardless, the encounters became routine. Inconvenient, really. Weeks turned into months and she stopped counting how many times the UFO appeared. She never knew which nights her late night drives would be interrupted or how long she would be delayed. And her phone would lose its charge every time, which could always become a problem. Meanwhile, no one believed her, no one cared. Even the UFO diehards had stopped asking her about it after she’d claimed to have a dozen encounters with no new developments and no proof.
Melissa started to think Travis was right, she needed a new job. With him working early hours as a tradie and her working nights at the Bunndilla Hotel, they were on totally different schedules. And even though she liked working at the pub, she could easily find the same kind of work without the half-hour commute. The UFO became another just thing that added to that inconvenience. But then she’d feel guilty and ungrateful. Here she was having an utterly unique experience that many people would kill for and she was dismissing it as an annoyance. In spite of what Travis said, and the late night drives, she stuck with it. Sooner or later, she figured, she would come up with a way to prove what she’d been seeing.
It had been just over three months since the first appearance of the alien craft. Watching the empty road, Melissa felt her eyes labouring to stay open. It was a Saturday, well, Sunday now, and she hadn’t left the pub until 3am. Gripping the wheel, she did her best to watch for kangaroos and wombats and UFOs. She knew the curves of the road through the black and empty bush well enough that she took them almost entirely by instinct.
Without warning, the car and its headlamps died. She hadn’t spotted the UFO and her heart rate spiked for a moment but then she heaved a tired sigh. Automatically, she pulled toward the side of the road. When she heard leaves and twigs crunching beneath the wheels, she gently braked. After pulling the handbrake as well, she checked her dashcams, multiple, and her phone. All dead, of course. She didn’t bother reaching for any of the cameras in the glovebox. Kicking open her door, she stepped out and into the road.
Lights beamed directly overhead. The UFO swept down the road from behind her then stopped above Melissa’s head, its engines silent. Three bright points of light occupied the corners of the pyramidal craft. More lights, including the glowing portal, danced on its underside. It flew lower than usual, stopping and then drifting a short distance down the road ahead.
“What do you want from me?” Melissa shouted suddenly, surprising herself. “What do you want?”
The UFO turned slowly, as it had done for her night after night. A beam of light shot from its underbelly. Carving a perfect circle out of the road, it captured Melissa and her car at its centre and burned away any trace of shadows. She winced and covered her eyes, momentarily blinded.
The light felt different. Melissa didn’t feel it climbing through her skin and scanning her down to her bone marrow. Instead, she felt oddly weightless. Like her arms, her chest, her legs were all filled with helium. With a jolt of panic, she realised she could no longer feel the road beneath her feet. She was floating! The beam of light picked her up off the ground and began to draw her toward the craft.
“Hey, no! No! Wait, what are you doing? Let go of me!”
Melissa was terrified. She fought to return to the ground, kicking and windmilling her arms, but she’d already drifted clear of her car and there was nothing she could grab onto. Picking up speed, Melissa whipped free of the ground and was siphoned into the glowing circle on the underbelly of the UFO. A scream choked in her throat. Either from acceleration or fright or some added effect of the beam, she fainted.
Melissa woke up again in a dark and unfamiliar place. Held upright, her back pressed against a metal table of some kind with her wrists and ankles shackled. She pulled and kicked against them but couldn’t get free. Dim pools of light illuminated parts of the room revealing utterly alien equipment and trays of tools, but most of her surroundings were hidden in deep shadow.
“Help! What’s going on? Is anyone there? Let me go!”
Her words echoed. She wasn’t answered but after a few long moments a doorway opened across the room from her, slitting open and then widening in a strangely organic way. Light flowed inside from the corridor. Half a dozen chittering figures filled the opening.
“Oh, my God,” Melissa said.
The creatures were small, curiously much, much shorter than the doorway they entered through. They would have barely come up to Melissa’s chest. Scrawny bodies, skinny arms and legs, but with bulbous heads that looked like lightbulbs mounted on top of toothpick bodies. Their skin was ashen grey. Their faces were dominated by huge, black eyes with slitted nostrils and mouths tucked under them like an afterthought. They were clad in black outfits that almost looked like wetsuits. In every aspect, they resembled recreations of alien abductions that Melissa had seen or read about since the UFO started appearing in her life.
“What do you want from me? Hey, let me go!”
She’d wanted this, she thought. She’d tempted fate wishing something more would happen that would help to explain what the UFO wanted. She should have found a new job, stopped driving that road late at night. Look at her now!
The grey aliens spread around the room, ignoring her. They chittered in their own language as they did. It was weirdly musical, like birdsong or some kind of jazz. Patterns of light appeared across the walls as they took up positions at various stations, revealing more weird and horrifying equipment. Small as they were, a lot of the equipment and tools looked oversized next to the greys.
They were going to probe her, at best. Invading her with cold shafts of metal and weird electrical devices. At worst, they’d treat her like a frog in a science lab and cut her to pieces while she was still alive. Melissa knew she should be terrified but instead she started getting angry.
“Hey, hey! Don’t ignore me! What are you going to do to me?”
A few of the aliens glanced over at her from the corners of their big, black eyes. They chittered among themselves. Melissa almost felt like they were laughing. She kicked against one of the ankle shackles, only succeeding in hurting herself.
“Don’t ignore me! What do you want?”
At one of the workstations, one of the greys flipped a lever. Lights dimmed further across the room. Melissa heard something shift overhead. A cannon of a device descended from the ceiling on a mechanical arm. The muzzle of the thing pointed right at her face.
“What is this thing? No, no! Turn it off!”
The gunlike device moved closer, ominously slow. From within its muzzle, a blunt head emerged. It glowed with an evil red light. Melissa screamed and pulled her head back but there was nowhere for her to go. Metallic claws unfolded from behind the head. Serrated edges snapping and flexing, they looked ready to snatch her face right off the front of her skull.
When the probe, or whatever it was, was only a handspan away from Melissa it suddenly let out a loud and somehow rude noise. A discordant musical note that resembled a fart. Little bursts of colour, holograms that looked almost like miniature fireworks, exploded around the head as it stopped moving. Wincing, Melissa looked around in confusion. More alien chittering filled the room. The greys’ features were unreadable but Melissa was more certain than ever that they were laughing.
The door across the room peeled open again. A far taller silhouette was backlit by the corridor lighting. Its head nearly brushed the top of the doorframe, the same head and face as one of the grey but balanced on top of a much taller, slender body. Instead of grey, the new arrival’s skin was flushed with green and patches of a pinkish colour. Its wetsuit-style uniform was almost black but covered in bands of colour as well.
The tall alien stepped inside and started barking at the greys. Its voice was much deeper and bassier. If the greys were clarinets, it was an oboe. The greys stopped chittering and stood up straighter.
“What is this?” Melissa said. “What’s going on?”
The tall alien looked to her, its face unchanging. It gestured and the shackles around her wrists and ankles released. Unsupported, her legs went weak. She staggered forward, ducking to avoid what she’d thought was some kind of probe.
Turning its attention back to the smaller aliens, the tall one continued honking. It must have been eight-foot-tall, towering over Melissa, absolutely dwarfing the grey aliens. An adult and a group of children? The greys lowered their heads as if being admonished.
With a sudden impulse, Melissa looked down at one of the nearest consoles. A tray covered in exotic tools sat within reach. While the aliens were all distracted, she grabbed one of the tools at random and shoved it in the pocket of her workpants. It nestled there, slightly warm, against a combination bottle opener and corkscrew she’d been carrying.
The tall alien turned its attention back on Melissa. Holding its palms out in a gesture of peace, it seemed to beseech her with some kind of apology. She couldn’t understand the words, even the tone was ultimately alien, but she sensed a kind of sadness in it. After a few moments, it gestured for her to follow.
The greys stayed where they were, heads bowed. With some hesitation, Melissa followed the tall alien into the corridor. She had to hurry to keep pace with its long, stiltlike strides. The passage was oval in shape, narrow and only just tall enough for the alien to walk through unobstructed. Soft light ebbed from the walls. There were no windows and no visible doors as it followed a curve around the craft.
“What is this? A mistake? Some kind of experiment they screwed up?”
The tall alien might have tried to explain but all Melissa could hear was the rise and fall of its weird, warbling, musical voice. It splayed its long-fingered hands.
“What else could it be? A prank? Was this all some kind of joke to you? Those other guys, are they kids? Is that it? At least, the equivalent of kids for you people, and you’re the grownup?”
They passed into a much wider area with a bunch of other aliens. Both the taller kind, who apparently came in various colours, and small packs of grey ones. Like in the lab, consoles lined the walls which the aliens occupied. A few gave Melissa curious glances but they didn’t intervene.
The tall alien led Melissa to a blank piece of wall. It gestured and the wall turned transparent. Melissa felt her legs almost give out. The new window looked out into space. Much of the view was void, nothing but silky, black nothingness, empty and eternal. Centered in the middle of the window, however, was Earth. A tiny blue orb. The view staggered her. Surrounded by absolute emptiness, it was so small, so fragile. Everyone she’d ever know, everywhere she’d ever be, was a fraction of a fraction of a fraction on a speck in an impossibly vast, cold, limitless universe. She felt very, very far from home.
“Oh, my God.”
The tall alien gestured some more. Whatever it tried to tell her was lost in translation. Fingers splayed, it reached for Melissa’s forehead and she passed out again.
When Melissa woke up again, she was back in her car. The engine rolled over of its own accord as several lights shot back into the sky. Her headlamps painted the road ahead. She didn’t know how much time had passed but the night was still dark. After checking her phone and everything was in place she set off for home.
By the time Melissa got back to the small house she rented with Travis in Gurrawong, dawn was beginning to break in the eastern sky. Her eyes ached. As tired as she felt, she really hadn’t thought about what she’d been through. She went inside to the living room. Travis would be sleeping but, as was her habit, she left the lights on and turned the television on, muted, for some company.
Reaching into her pocket, Melissa found the device she’d taken from the alien ship. They hadn’t realised she’d stolen it, or they’d let her have it, while she was asleep. Like the UFO itself, it was shaped like a three-sided pyramid. It felt warm in her hand. Strange symbols were etched into its sides.
Experimentally, Melissa ran her finger over one of the symbols. As she did, the lights and TV died. Her phone, which she’d automatically stuck on a charger, died as well. Melissa went to the window. The streetlamps outside their rental had still been switched on but now they were dark. She reversed her touch on the little pyramid. The streetlamps flickered back on. Around her, the lights and TV came back to life as well.
Melissa wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do next. She hadn’t really processed what had happened and didn’t know how she would explain it. Whatever she decided though, whatever parts she chose to share with people, this next time she would make sure they believed her.
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Sean: I like to think I’ve got a bit of a theme going when it comes to alien stories. Something that combines aliens being weird and inexplicable with aliens being recognisably close to humans in some ways. I like to think that, because all the proper authors have themes, right? Makes me a real special proper author with all these themes up in here. Anyway, here’s a few examples:
Next Track: Billy Idol – White Wedding
Sean E. Britten 
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