John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

A week later, the witch returned to the village, her few belongings in hand, and asked the chandler if he might allow her to mind the shop again. He agreed gladly, for he was old and stiff, and she was quick and could climb the ladder to the highest shelves for him.

There she lived for a year, content, sweeping the floor, mending the shelves, and stirring a little magic into her soaps, so they cleaned better than others, and gave hope besides. She did not speak much, for her voice frightened children, but she listened carefully, and closely, and no one seemed to mind.

And there she would have stayed, growing gray and wise, had not a peddler with a profitable knack for roaming between stories rung the shop bell.

Looking over the wares he had spread on a cloth, all polished and gleaming, the witch and the shopkeeper chose combs, mirrors, scissors, and ribbons to buy. When the silver had been counted out and poured into his hands, and the goods collected, the peddler grinned a gapped grin and dug from his pack a pair of dancing shoes, cut from red leather and pricked all over with an awl.

“For you,” he said to the witch. “Secondhand, and a few bloodstains, but pretty, no? Some angels don’t like to see the poor dance, and the last lass had a heart too clean and Christian to wear them for long, but your heart’s spotted, and these are just your size.”

“Thank you,” the witch said, “but I don’t know how to dance. I know how to fly, and slay dragons, and make good soap, but dancing is a mystery.”

“Then you should learn,” the peddler said.

The shopkeeper sighed, because he could guess what was coming. When the witch approached him three days later, with a request, and a promise, he sent her on her way with a bag containing three cakes of soap, three spools of thread, three needles, a mirror, and a comb, cursing the peddler under his breath.

That night, as the stars glistened overhead, and the frogs and crickets sang a joyful Mass from their secret places, the witch locked up the hut, laced on the red shoes, whistled, and flew.

We went to sleep, and in the morning they were here. We saw them on our screens as they emerged from a grove of trees a hundred miles west of us. Their ship had crashed. It was made of a rose-gold metal and looked like a claw with a broken tip. Within hours the government had moved these beings—the “blues,” we eventually came to call them—to a holding station outside the nearest city. There we could watch them whenever we wanted, because of the cameras in each room.

We assumed they would have special powers, like mind-reading or levitation, but apparently they couldn’t do such things. What they could do was spray a fine white mist from their pores. Although this wasn’t what we’d expected, it still seemed amazing to us: White mist! Coming out of an alien’s skin! Mostly they just sat there in their rooms. There was a big to-do about how nice their accommodations were: the pricey organic grains they were fed, the high thread count of their sheets, the multiple down pillows, and the room dividers for privacy. The blues spent hours hiding behind those partitions. This became frustrating, because we couldn’t see what they were doing; we could only hear them, and the sounds were unrecognizable to us.

Science teaches us that creatures adapt to their unique environments. Surely the aliens’ home planet must have differed from our own, yet the blues did look almost like us—or like imitations of us. They looked as if they had done their best to look like us. They even began to mimic our speech, though their voices were pitched ridiculously high, higher than a human child’s. Their skin, of course, was blue, as were their nails and hair. Mrs. Durand, who has lived here in town for many years, was disappointed. She wanted the blues to look like her dead husband, like in that old sci-fi movie about aliens who took the form of people’s deceased loved ones. That was useful, what the aliens in that movie had done.

In the dream she went inside the blues’ ship. They took her up into the air and welcomed her with circular motions of their arms. They touched her neck and her back and her stomach. The ship’s interior was soft and warm and painted with light. The walls seemed to pulse, Mrs. Madden told us, like a heart. That’s the picture we had in our minds: an enormous heart going whoosh, whoosh, whoosh through space.

Ms. Mueller began the rumors that our water had gone bad. Little Rita Oh refused to sleep, and her mom had to take away her screen at night and lock Rita in her room. Mr. Lucas’s hands began trembling. (From fear? Anticipation?) Roger Gibson put on a sandwich board declaring, “The Emperor Has No Clothes!” and he stomped around the train station in a menacing way. Dana Fisher moved up her wedding to Jeff Campbell, even though nobody thought they should get married at a time like this. At their backyard reception Mrs. Fisher laid out somber plates of mashed beans and skewered tomatoes, and a lot of people left early. Young Tom Durand tied a red bandanna over his mouth and stormed into the Pizza Palace waving a water pistol. The Lucases decided to try for another baby, like Mrs. Lucas wanted. Suzie Breton raised her hand in homeroom and let everybody know that she thought the blues were beautiful; they made us less alone in the universe, she said. Somebody kicked in the head of the homeless guy who begged at the interstate on-ramp. Jessica O’Brien complained of cramps. Certain people stopped drinking our town’s tap water. Jeff hit his new wife, Dana, in a place where he thought nobody could see it, but we saw it and took note. At our annual summer parade the children dressed up as aliens, or how they imagined aliens should look, wearing grotesque masks and walking around with lurching steps. We were unsure whether this was appropriate. Mr. Lucas forgot his bedroom windows were open, and we heard him tell Mrs. Lucas, “If you just lie there with your legs open, I might as well go fuck a cow. Should I? Should I go fuck a cow?” Many of us felt on edge. Ordinary things appeared unfamiliar or even vulgar.

The whole town came out. All morning we waited, keeping the mood festive and light. Johnny Reynolds strummed his guitar, and Mr. Sullivan gave blue balloon swords to the children, because it was the only shape he could make out of balloons. We drank lemonade and ate popcorn and played word games to pass the time. We wore our best clothing. Our children were well-behaved and patient.

At noon the three school buses appeared in a cloud of diesel exhaust. Dana Campbell threw white confetti left over from her wedding, and the children sang a song about sunshine. We tried to catch a glimpse of the blues, but we couldn’t see through the white mist inside the buses. The drivers didn’t stop; they continued on to the refugee apartments that had been built east of town, where the blues would live eight to a room. This arrangement was okay because, from what we could tell, the blues enjoyed living close to each other. They were like animals that way. The relocation agency made sure the blues had what they needed: their closets were stocked with used clothes, their pantries filled with donated food. In each apartment hung a video camera.

After their arrival, if we spotted a blue in town—which was rare, as they were skittish in the beginning—we were supposed to treat them kindly. We weren’t to call them “aliens,” because of the word’s connotations.