John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

“This is getting rather wild, Maria,” Ms. Mueller said.

It turned out the blues were headed to a lake—a very important lake to them, one of the only lakes on their planet. Mrs. Lucas followed them there. On the way they began to sing again, and though she had no idea what the words meant, she found herself singing them too. When they reached the lake, the blues removed their cloths and leaped naked into the clear water, but Mrs. Lucas remained on the wet sand, waiting to see what would happen next. A blue male began to watch her. He climbed out of the water, dripping, and took the edge of her cloth in his hands and tugged.

“Oh, my God,” Ms. Mueller said.

Mrs. Lucas held her cloth tight with both hands, suddenly shy. The blue male slapped her face and neck.

“He did what?” Ms. Mueller said.

The blue male let Mrs. Lucas look into his face as long as she needed to until she let go of the cloth. Then he unwrapped her slowly.

Ms. Mueller attempted to change the subject to the ongoing drought. On their screens they’d seen dusty refugees and ranchers standing beside their dead cattle. But Mrs. Lucas returned to the dream, because she wasn’t even halfway through it yet. She needed Ms. Mueller to understand the way the blue unwrapped her by forcing her to turn. Soon she was as naked as he was. Then he pushed her into the lake.

“That’s enough, Maria, please,” Ms. Mueller said, standing suddenly and taking Mrs. Lucas’s half-eaten danish to the kitchen.

At the school there was little interaction between the blues and our kids. The blues sat in a far corner of the lunchroom. No one made them sit over there; they just did. And they ate nothing. In classes our children sat as far away as possible from them. The teachers tried their best, even working the blues into their lesson plans: the art of “savage” cultures, for instance, or the physics of space travel, or the portrayal of aliens in fiction. There was a lot of material there. Dana Fisher (she used her maiden name when she taught) asked students in her world-history class to give five-minute presentations on the blues’ home planet, drawing on both primary interviews and their imaginations. Suzie Breton went first, standing at the front of the room and describing something like the Amish farms of the past: the horse and buggy, the obedient children and enormous families. Who knew where she’d gotten this idea? Halfway through, a blue boy stood up from his desk and said, “Wrong.”

“You sit down,” Ms. Fisher ordered.

The blue boy did not sit down.

Suzie Breton began crying, her face red and ugly. “I did my best,” she said.

Ms. Fisher told the boy, “Look at what you did. Do I need to write you up?”

The blue boy closed his eyes, and soon his expression, his entire unattractive face, was lost in that infernal mist of theirs.

“You stop that right now,” Ms. Fisher demanded.

The mist spread throughout the room. It touched the students. It wrapped itself around Suzie Breton’s hair and neck. (It felt, she said, like someone was breathing on her.)

“Get it away from me!” Jessica O’Brien shrieked, grasping at the air, as if that would do any good.

The mist crept up the walls and covered the flags and the model of Monticello on the top shelf. Finally it drifted out the open window and dispersed.

“I’m not doing this anymore,” Mrs. Madden told the blues lounging on her front porch in the sun, waiting their turn to hear her predictions. “Not today, not next week, not next month. Go away. Get out of here! Get! Don’t come back!”

Was she having a vision of what we would do before we did it?

The blues shrieked, pounded on her house, tore her flower beds apart, and uprooted small shrubs with their teeth—their teeth!—but she would not open her door to them again.

After months of the blue children sulking in the corners of classrooms and being bullied—our teachers were not bodyguards; they could not form protective shields around each blue and still be educators—we moved the blues to another building. An old warehouse, actually. To be honest, all the blues had done was distract our kids, and we had our children’s futures to consider. Better to teach those creatures separately, in a special environment where we could focus on topics more vital to them, like how to bathe, or speak clearly, or patch a roof.

You have to understand, none of us hated the blues. We just didn’t want to be around them after a certain point. The fact was, we could already imagine them gone. We imagined the sorts of things we might say once they were gone: Oh, do you remember how they danced? Do you remember those songs we heard drifting out of their apartments at night? As if we hadn’t hated their music and their dancing.

“No human being can fuck you like you need,” he said—or rather shouted—to Mrs. Lucas. We think he then tied Mrs. Lucas to the bed. Even with the windows shut we heard them, but we pretended not to hear. It became clear to us that the blues were ruining certain people’s lives.

Look, we studied the same textbooks as you. We knew all the dark secrets of history, just as you do. When we discussed dark times in the past and the things people had done to each other then, we talked as if such acts had been committed by a different species. But these were dark times too. And dark things happen in the dark. You don’t always have the luxury of sitting there and figuring out who did what to whom. Nobody should walk around acting like they have a golden light inside them, because they don’t. The blues were a disappointment to us, and disappointment can breed anger. We wished to be rid of them.

So we got rid of them.

The whole nasty business seemed like something we had watched, not something we had done. Already the air felt different: lighter, or rather clearer. Something about the sky—though it was still the same sky it had been the previous day—wasn’t the same. We opened our windows for the first time in a long while. The charred smell of the fires still burning east of town drifted in, but we soon got used to it. Littered about our lawns and the streets were the rocks and bricks and ropes, looking obscene now in the daylight, like something it was best not to talk about. We got out trash bags and cleaned up. It was not by any means a joyful day. None of us were throwing confetti or kicking our heels together. In fact, we did not look each other in the eye. For the most part we kept to ourselves, raking our yards or organizing canned goods in the kitchen—the sort of tasks you think you’ll never have time for, so there is a great satisfaction in doing them. There were a few scenes, a few hysterics, such as Mrs. Lucas running down the street in her bloody dress, which she should have changed out of by that point. Anyone visibly upset was ushered inside and soothed with chamomile tea or something stronger. Though we knew the blues’ apartments were empty, Johnny Reynolds went over there just to be sure. He didn’t tell us exactly what he’d seen. All he said was that he’d checked every apartment, even looking in the closets and under the mattresses, and there was nothing worth saving.

Toward sunset a few cardinals in the trees of Mrs. Durand’s yard began to trill in the most extraordinary way, as if to say that certain things did not have to go on forever, and it was okay that they ended.