Let’s Go Swimming on Doomsday

Like I said, I’ve been in worse cells.

At some point while I’m lying on the damp concrete floor with my hands and ankles tied, I have a revelation. Here’s what I think: My family and I weren’t actually abducted from our beds in the middle of the night by soldiers. My mother, grandmother, little sisters, and brother are not in a nearby cell, broken or in the process of being broken.

I think that maybe, in fact, they have been abducted by aliens.

Wait. I know how that sounds, but just hear me out. Let me explain. It makes a lot of sense, actually. Why haven’t I been allowed to see them? Why won’t these soldiers tell me where I am?

Because they’re scared, that’s why. They don’t want me to know the truth.

I’m not talking about a bad abduction. I’m talking about one like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We showed it on repeat about a year ago at Salama Cinema Palace, the backroom DVD hall where I used to work. The movie was old as shit, but awesome. Isn’t it actually possible, totally possible, that right before the soldiers broke into our compound, Hooyo, Ayeyo, Hafsa, and the twins were just beamed up? I saw the light. It was blinding. Knocked me right out, didn’t it?

I close my eyes, open them, see the same thing: nothing. It’s that dark. I warm to the thought that in the chaos, child like aliens with gentle little hands saw what was happening and stopped time, came down, and led my family away to their spaceship. They intervened at exactly the right moment and protected Hooyo and the others from the men who have me now. Maybe the aliens didn’t see me, or they thought I was dead. That’s why I got left behind. The soldiers only managed to get me.

I can picture it all so clearly. My family is sitting up there in space, and they are all fine. Ayeyo is complaining that the aliens talk too softly while she nods off in her comfy white space chair. And maybe instead of a little dog, like in the movie, there’s a cat up there for Hafsa to play with. One that looks like the tabby that ran away during the long rains last year. Faisal and Zahra play with silver alien LEGOS. Maybe even Aabo and Dahir are there. They found Aabo and beamed him straight up from what ever construction site he was working on in Saudi, and Dahir has escaped from the Boys. The little aliens are friendly, and when the time is right, when everything is safe again, they’ll rescue me from this pit and we’ll all go zooming off into space, to a better world.

I want to tell my captors that I’ve figured it out. I know what they don’t want me to know. But I can’t seem to make my body take on the task of sitting up. I tell it to move and nothing happens. My head and face are sticky and swollen, and my mouth won’t form words. I smell copper and urine, mildew and dirt.

Thoughts flit through my head in the dark like pale butterflies.