My name is Genevra Badger. That is not my real name. I can’t remember my real name, and I don’t care. But I can remember the iced latte I was holding when it hit. I was just about to taste it. I was holding it in my hand, I was lifting it to my mouth…and then I could not move anymore. I was stuck. For six hundred years, apparently. 

I was at the mall, bunking off school, checking out Hot Topic and Spencer’s, and then I was leaving the mall and walking toward my car. Stasis. Paralysis. Call it what you will. When the building eventually collapsed behind me (some centuries later?), none of those people got out alive. The high school was flattened too. And everyone in it. Ha ha. They tell you about silver linings. 

When I awoke in a daze, there was no mall left: it was all forest, just some scraps of rotten concrete with rusty wires sticking out. 

Weird to think we slept for six centuries, but we never awoke: we never slept! I was conscious throughout, I saw everything. The redhead mom with the toddler, perched on her knee as she fiddles in her bag to get her car key. I watched them in slow motion for hundreds of years: first, over the rim of my coffee cup, then, when it blew away, over my hand, which stayed ridiculously bent in a cup-holding pose, like a round claw holding nothing. I was so ashamed when our clothes rotted off and it was just the three of us standing there awkwardly naked. Then the cars began to rot too and trees sprouted up between us and I lost track of mother and child. It was a blessing.  

I could tell you I saw frogs spawning in the cup, after the coffee went moldy and evaporated, and then filled up with rain, again and again, with birds drinking out of it, perching on the rim – but I’m definitely imagining that; I could have been delirious at that point. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not when the days and nights blur by in a cosmic time-lapse, and you can’t move a muscle or make it go away. You’re just stuck there looking at the cars in the parking lot, the buildings gently falling apart as roots and tendrils slowly tear everything down. Squirrels scrambling and birds peck-peck-pecking for eons. What is an eon anyway? It’s not like there’s a book I can look it up in now, is there?

The animals left us alone, as if we repelled them somehow. They got on with their lives: they were having a ball now they didn’t have to bother with us getting in their way. Birds, squirrels, skunks, groundhogs, raccoons – my namesake the badger, of course (I don’t even know what a badger is, but I like the word). Deer. I am pretty sure I saw a pack of wild hogs at some point: 30-50 feral hogs, if you will. I don’t even want to think about what happened to the animals in captivity but when we woke up the pigs and cows and chickens were long gone. Dogs and cats too. Fuck ‘em. 

The weather got hotter. The trees grew to a massive size, and the pink skies, weird at the beginning, became the new normal. 

I love the pinks. I think they are a huge improvement. Blue was cool. Pink is cooler. It’s like the sky has suddenly become gay or something. I can stare at them for hours. 

“Don’t stare at the pinks,” the village elders say. 

“Why not? Why why why why?”

The bugs have been the main new addition, like we really needed extra bugs. Crunchy bugs, shiny green bugs with big silver eyes. Sometimes I think the bugs are the real invaders, and the pink things merely their hosts or vessels. The bugs made a beautiful new world for themselves, and came and settled here. Buzzing slowly, as if drugged, in large shoals, we catch them easily and eat them. They produce a slightly swoony effect, like getting high but more liquid; maybe like alcohol was, I can’t remember. I only got drunk a few times and it’s too long ago to know. 

We had to start over with “civilization”: build a “town” from scratch – more like a shithole camp if you ask me. Today we are having a meeting about water. Yep, about how to keep the water clean, because, as the immortal saying goes: do not shit where you eat. We have to re-invent toilets, so grateful for that. Why again do I want to be mayor? Glory, I suppose.  

Now that I am venting I can bitch about the food. The food! Rabbit: gets old real fast. Brown carrots, or whatever they are. Potatoes warped beyond recognition: no flavor at all. What I would do for an ice cream! A cookie, and a glass of milk. Just one cookie. I could die happy. Anything creamy, cheese, yogurt, even the fake shit, especially the fake shit. Peppermint filled chocolates. I swear sugar is the pinnacle achievement of humanity, and ice cream is on top of that pile. I once heard of an egg and bacon ice cream, a pork ice cream: sounds delicious. There should have been more savory ice creams: egg, bacon, and pancake ice cream. Breakfast ice cream. Ice cream with bits of waffle in it, and maple syrup, and chunks of donut. Pizza ice cream, with swirled pepperoni and mozzarella cheese, and olives, and capers because why the fuck not. 

Shall I tell you about Glooptown? “Gloops” are what we call those of us who can’t or won’t snap out of it: they want to go back to being stills in the Stillworld. Gloopy, globby, weepy creatures, they cry all the time, and when they’re not crying they are trying to kill you or preach at you in tongues. I do not believe they have seen something we haven’t: I think they’re just weaker, or more broken. They feel we never had it so good as when we were all standing around naked for hundreds of years, while the world roared by in an endless swirl of day and night, snow, rain, and sun; plants and leaves and tendrils creeping, cracking, tearing our human world down. We didn’t have to do anything, I get it. We didn’t feel hunger, pain – we didn’t age. Just stood there, locked in our own minds for six centuries. No wonder so many of us cracked. 

The “ecological theory” is that we were put on pause because we were fucking up the planet, so we got put on lock for a while, until the Earth re-generated itself, and we learned our lesson, and all the technology, petrol, plastic, and factories rotted away, sending us back to the stone age without us being able to continue the damage we were wreaking. Could be.  

I like going to Glooptown, if only to congratulate myself that I am not one of them. The place stinks. They don’t clean up their shit. They live in mountains of shit and flies. There is disease here. I will not forgive the pink things for reducing people to this shitty level of existence. They squabble with each other: they fuck, they fight, they live and breathe, indiscriminately. They are like animals, but worse. 

And now they are, gone, apparently. 

“Yep, they’re gone, they just up and went two days ago. Like there was a noise, and they just pricked up, and off they went,” explains Eric, one of their guardians. A rather gloopy fellow, if I may say so.  

“What was the noise like?” asks Jeff, one of my assigned companions. A forester. 

“What noise?”

“The noise you just described.”

“There was no noise.”

Jeff looks perplexed. 

“I said ‘like a noise’: by which I meant ‘as if called by a noise.’ Like dogs, with the dog whistle, only they can hear it.”

“Ah.” 

I stroll through the vacant cabins and find an old man with a long beard, perhaps too weak to leave. He has a dreamy, desirous look on his face, like someone who has sensed a favorite drug, in the vicinity. 

I sit down opposite him and roll a joint, and lick it closed. 

“Where did they go? You can tell me.”

He keeps staring ahead, not seeing me, as if hooked on some frequency, privy to a vision just over my shoulder.

These people wanted to be stills again. Yet they couldn’t manage it: they had to eat, and drink, and pee and poop. They had forgotten how to live. 

I sit there for a while looking in the face of the man. I can hear the others getting restless outside. The guard sent to escort me into the forest – on my forced expedition to make contact with the aliens, but we’ll get to that later – wants to go back to town. These motherfuckers carried out a literal coup against me, and are now sending me on a mission to meet the monsters that put the human race on pause for six hundred years. I am so fucked. 

The old man swallows. What is he hearing? Were the pink things in communication with these people? I doubt it. All I hope is that whatever they are, they don’t put us all on lockdown again. I don’t know if I could take it.