Amber Baird, Author

Grandma came home richer that night with rainbow bingo dauber speckled arms, purple and green and red and blue smudges from wrist to elbow, and when we came into unexpected money we always went to Brown Cow, the barbecue and steak place by the university, to celebrate. 

Both of my grandparents let cigarettes burn in the cow-shaped ashtray on the table and I coughed when ordering my food, Hungarian cabbage rolls which I would pick the rice and meat out of, leaving the cabbage leaves. Grandma let me get away with it if I had a side salad. Mom always said they spoiled me, but she had no say about that now. 

My mother used to work here as a smiling, coiffed waitress, a fact I knew through stories and candid Polaroids from the life she had before, which meant she lingered over the whole place for me.

But it was their favorite.

So there I was, nearing adulthood, having a late dinner in a dark restaurant full of cigarette smoke and smoked meats, my missing mother heavy on my mind as I chased paprika-spiked tomato sauce around my plate with a speared chunk of meat.

Grandpa said, “I guess we should tell you our big news, huh, kiddo?”

I’d just popped the bite into my mouth when Grandma said, “We were going to wait for your sixteenth birthday, but what the heck.”

Grandpa’s eyes were alight, full of sparkle and cheer. As I chewed, he said, “We’ve found your father.”

My mouth went dry as I swallowed my load, and it moved through my tubes slowly, a near-choking near-solid mass. 

I knew the story, but I thought they didn’t. 

It went: Mom’s coworker, a line cook, took her back to his place and raped her at gunpoint. She got the gun, though, and so she tried to shoot him but she’d never even touched a gun before so she didn’t understand the safety and she crawled away across the carpet but he grabbed her leg and he sunk his teeth into the flesh of her calf. He would have killed her then, she told me, if his brother hadn’t heard screaming and come in to rescue her.

She showed me the half-moon bite mark on the back of her leg every time she told me the story.

The heroic brother, well, that was my father. Probably. When she was drunk she told me I looked like my uncle, though, and she said she could see the snakes writhing behind my eyes.

I’d never met my supposed father nor my rapist uncle, and when asked, Mom would shrug and tell me they were both dead, now, so there was no point telling me their names.

Grandma and Grandpa continued, explaining that they’d discovered my mother had been abducted shortly before she fell pregnant. 

“I know,” I said, surprised that they were choosing to bring up such a traumatic topic at dinner.

“She told you about the aliens?” Grandpa asked, his bushy eyebrows reaching for his still-healthy hairline.

Ignoring what I took to be a xenophobic comment, I said, “I knew what he did to her, the… rape.” The word blinked in angry red neon, the truth escaped. I yearned to rewind when Grandma frowned and shook her head.

“Your mother was never raped.” Grandma’s voice flattened into a plain of exasperation.

“Yes, she was.” I barely heard myself.

Grandpa waved his hand in dismissal. “Don’t worry about earthly concerns. We haven’t even told you the best part.”

“You’re a princess on your father’s home world,” Grandma said. There was reverence in her voice.

I had so many questions, but my mouth was too sticky and dry to ask them. I grabbed my glass of water, drippy with condensation, and slurped through the straw until it made sucking noises at the bottom of the cup and Grandpa chastised me. “I know this is a shock to you, kiddo, but do you have to embarrass us?”

I think I did.

My mother had disappeared a couple years before, leaving me to be raised by my grandparents, as was the custom in our neighborhood. But, my grandmother told me, it wasn’t that she’d relapsed, not at all. She’d just gone back to visit them, the aliens, including my father and an extraterrestrial half-sister of mine.

There came a time in every teenager’s life when they had to decide whether they were more Mulder or Scully, and this was mine. The cabbage on my plate looked extra-green and veiny and I stabbed it with my fork. “How do you know?” I asked, without looking either one of them in the eye.

My grandparents had fallen in with a strange crowd lately. They were mostly older people who met at a community center downtown, “for philanthropy” my grandparents had said, which I had thought was kind of weird because what business did we have giving money to the needy when it often felt like we were the needy?

It wasn’t charity, though, Grandpa explained at dinner, but an organization for enlightened people. “Now you know we’re not religious, kiddo, but an open mind is a priority for me, so if they had wisdom to share, I wanted to hear it.”

“It’s not a church,” Grandma added, anticipating my question. “Nothing silly like that. A gathering of friends.”

“What’s this have to do with Mom?” I gave up eating and let my fork fall to the plate, the ting punctuating my sentence.

“They had a recent photo, transmitted from up there.” Grandpa flicked his eyes to the ceiling, like the UFO was hovering right above the restaurant.

A chill settled over me. “Can I see it?”

Grandma dug her Nokia out of her purse and searched through her pictures, straying from the task at hand every time she saw something she misjudged as interesting to me, like a squirrel she’d seen outside the window while she was washing dishes last Thursday, but finally, she presented it.

The woman on the tiny screen could have been my mother, if you squinted maybe, if your eyes were fuzzy with age, if you desperately wanted it to be true. Same rich brown color and outdated cut for her hair, roughly the same build, wearing all black just like Mom. Everything else, though, was very much not my mother—the nose too small, too upturned; the mouth wider; cheekbones a little higher; face overall more angular. I also didn’t recognize the deeley bobber tiara.

“And my father?”

They didn’t have a picture of him, but there had been a letter written in wavy symbols which had been translated for them on the spot, explaining everything. They didn’t have it, though, only the memory. “Because of security concerns,” Grandpa whispered.

We left after Grandma dropped a twenty on the table for a tip like a high roller, and when we got home, I lingered in the backyard. You couldn’t really see the stars in the city, but I tried anyway.

Originally published @ PULP LIT MAG, Issue 1, page 129