The True Meaning of Smekday (Smek 1)

“Like about the Boov crashes in ’47 and ’63,” said Kat as she emerged from the bathroom. “And all the hundreds of sightings, and how the Boov want to impregnate us women to save their dying race.”

The man snorted. I mouthed “You do?” at J.Lo, but he quickly shook his head.

“Don’t forget the crash in ’85,” said Vicki. “That’s what alerted us to the link between the aliens and the Agarthans. The Agarthans are an ancient race of people who live inside the earth, Grace.”

I’d forgotten my name was Grace, so Kat spoke before I did.

“I didn’t ‘forget’ the crash of ’85,” she said. “You know how I feel about it. The evidence points to a government thought-control dirigible, not to—”

“The evidence,” said Vicki, “to anyone who isn’t too blind to see it, is that the indwells and outwells of energy from the earth’s hollow core create—”

“Whoa, hey. I know. I know what you’re saying, but you fail to—”

They went back and forth about it. Andromeda shrieked and started hitting her spoon against J.Lo’s round ghost head. The man knelt down beside me.

“You believe any of this, kid?”

I got the impression he didn’t.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I believe in aliens now.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Kat noticed us talking.

“Don’t you go poisoning her young mind, Trey,” she said. “You people want proof about the alien conspiracy? Have you tried looking south recently?”

“I’ve never said there weren’t any aliens!” Trey said. “I only said they haven’t been visiting, abducting, and impregnating us since 1947! And I still say it! If you claimed that elephants have been visiting Roswell for sixty-five years, and then the next day the circus came to town, that wouldn’t prove anything, now would it!”

Vicki approached while the two shouted.

“Grace, could you be a dear an’ go across the street to the museum and tell the rest that dinner is ready?”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on, JayJay.”

“So,” I said to J.Lo as we crossed the street, “if you’re gonna impregnate me, I think we should get married first.”

“That lady is crazy,” said J.Lo. “You know already howto the humans and Boov babies are made differently. I may as well impreganate the car.”

We were approaching the International UFO Museum. It looked like an old movie theater.

“Speaking of Slushious,” I said, “what are we going to do about that? We’ll have to sneak away to fix it.”

“I am afraid the problem might be being bigger than this. That roads sign has stuck into the Snark’s Adjustable Manifold.”

“Important?”

“Ff. Is your heart important? Should you be okay with only three livers?”

“But you can fix it.”

“I do not know. It was a part from my scooter. If I cannot fix it, there is no other.”

We’d have to go back for Pig and J.Lo’s tools, but otherwise we could leave the car if we had to. We could borrow another—Roswell was full of cars. Even now I could just barely see a turquoise pickup truck driving past a saucer-shaped burger restaurant at the end of a row of streetlamps painted to have alien eyes.

The important thing was getting to Arizona. But the truth was, I wanted to do it in MY car. Slushious. We wouldn’t be borrowing another car, I thought as I pushed open the door of the museum. We’d be stealing.

We walked into the lobby, to have all our senses assaulted at once: rumpled threadbare sleeping bags like snakeskins all over the floor, empty bags of potato chips and pork rinds, a model flying saucer, the smell of chocolate and feet, a diorama of the 1947 crash site labeled “Foo Fighter,” an almost untastable taste of eggs in the air, scraps of plastic wrap and paper, a dead rubber alien on a gurney overseen by a human mannequin in surgical scrubs, a paperback book called Life, the Universe, and Everything, and enough pairs of underwear for thirty guys. I mean, really, it was a lot of underwear, like these guys were just wearing each pair once and then cracking open a pack of new ones.

“I wonder where the rest are,” I said.

J.Lo had his face pressed up against the alien autopsy exhibit.

“What is this?” he asked.

“That’s a fake dead alien. The fake doctor is going to cut it up.”

“Not very neighborlike.”

“Do you recognize the alien? Is it a real kind of people?”

“Hm. No. Looks unlike any race I know. Lookses a little like a M’Plaah. They are a sort of octopus for milking.”

“Right. I was just going to say the same thingWHERE IS everyone? HELLO?”

“Hello?” came a faint reply.

“Where are you?”

“On the roof…the stairs are by the restrooms,” said someone.

We found the bathrooms, which were labeled “Aliens” and “Femaliens.”

“Finally,” I said to J.Lo. “Here’s a bathroom you’re allowed to use.”

“I do not have to go.”

We opened a STAFF ONLY door and climbed the stairs to the roof. A man with the worst beard in America and the two little boys were up there with about ten telescopes of different sizes and shapes. The man hunched over a short fat telescope pointed south while the boys ran around.

“What’s all this?” I asked, to which one of the boys shouted, “Boob!” Then they both cracked up and shouted “boob” some more.

“Hey!” the man said. “The new kids! Come look at this!”

He had a thick, soft face that just flowed downhill into a thick, soft neck. A pencil-thin beard and mustache traced a line between the two, like an imaginary border on a map. There should have been a mountain range of jawbone to separate head from neck, but there wasn’t, so he’d done what he could.

“Look at what?” I said. “The big purple ball? We’ve seen it.”

“You haven’t seen it this close,” said beard-guy. “Look in here.”

I knew what I was going to see, and I didn’t want to see it. But J.Lo and I walked over anyway, and I squinted into the eyepiece.

“Isn’t that weird?” asked Beardo. “Doesn’t it look almost alive?”

With the telescope you could see the texture of the Gorg skin—its pores, blemishes, scabs, and freckles.