Cosmos

Do you ever wonder what is truly out there? What if there is something beyond space and time? Imagine something so big that it is beyond our comprehension and it extends beyond our galaxy. What is the meaning of life and why are we here?

These are the questions Ruby asked herself every night while she starred at the night sky that summer. The stars in this part of the country looked so beautiful as if the cosmos was flowing out and falling into the earth. Ruby had always loved astronomy, learning the planets of the solar system at age 6. Ruby herself was unable to explain her fascination with space, she just felt an inexplicable connection to the stars. To encourage her to have a potential career in astronomy her mother gifted her a telescope when she turned 12 last spring.

Ruby was the second child of 3, a middle child with too much time in her hands and not enough supervision. She would sneak out and stare at the moon on the roof of their house for ages. Her oldest sister Katherine was too good to spend any time with her or let alone speak to her unless it was necessary. Sometimes that necessity was her need to spread venom and petty gossip. Katherine was an honor roll student with an impeccable reputation as one of the best students in her school. She had previously stated that she had “no time for whimsical nonsense” when Ruby asked her if she thought aliens were real. Her brother David was 7 and did not know much. A child of divorce with nothing to do, Ruby and her brother David were sent to spend the summers with their father and their grandmother in northern Maine.

Their father had moved to northern Maine from Arizona for two years now but this was the first summer they had been able to visit due to the pandemic. The reasons for the divorce were initially unclear to Ruby, who tends to live in her head too much for better or worse. Luckily for her, or rather unluckily her sister Katherine knew all about the divorce and the affair his father had with one of his college students that caused him to lose his family and job. One night while David slept and Katherine was babysitting both of them, she told her the whole story and how this all happened while their mother was trying to recover from a hysterectomy done to avoid the cervical cancer that killed their mother’s mother.

It was only June and they were supposed to stay in this dingy and dim town until mid July. School in Arizona starts in late July, Ruby always envied those in private schools that would start in August or those in other states that would start in early September. Being in a small town like Houlton had its benefits, everyone knew each other and knew of one another.

The Farlow family had been in the town since the late 1870s post civil war, where her great great grandfather fought for the north. Or so she was told. Ruby recalls someone insulting her Puerto Rican mother and calling her a slur it came from a parent of a friend during a heated argument about masking and vaccinations. Altercations like these opened Ruby’s eyes to the real world, Earth. These were grounding moments that would take her out of her stargazed and dreamy reality. It made her think of humanity and of earth more than the fourth planet in the solar system.

Her mother Esperanza was born in Puerto Rico and immigrated to the United States when she was 16. She arrived in New York City in 1985 with her parents and brothers and sisters and settled in Brooklyn. The family struggled but her mother graduated from City College of New York with a degree on engineering, she then moved to Arizona for work and that is where she met their father 20 years ago.

Ruby hated doing farm work on her grandparents farm but this time made it possible for her to explore nature and get lost in her thoughts. She would get lost in the sea of starts she would see every night and would marvel at all that she could see in her telescope.

This particular night, Ruby was camping on the barn to see the stars at night. Her grandparents lock the barn and there is only one opening in the roof that allows her to see the starts. Ruby fell asleep so peacefully, all cuddled up in her sleeping bag with the family dog, Puddles in a pile of hay that was directly connected to the sky.

Ruby would fall asleep under the stars and dream about space. She would dream about all the different universes and and creatures she would meet in her adventures. She had a deep fascination for aliens. From surfing through the rings of Neptune to time going backwards on Neptune due to it rotating counter-clockwise. Ruby had many dreams, like discovering a new planet and naming it whatever she’d like. Some say that sometimes we call bad things to occur to us, so some might agree that what happened next was bound to happen.

Ruby was woken out of her slumber by a bright light and Puddles’ barking. Frightened, she saw that she was being lifted into the air, there was no sound, no where to grab and nowhere to flee. Puddles kept barking while he stared up as she she being lifted into the air by an unknown force into what appeared to be a spaceship. From the outside it looked as if it was a ship. At first she thought it was an a large rectangular box but as she got closer she noticed that it was not rectangular and it was not made out of metal. As she entered the ship she lost consciousness.

Upon opening her eyes, Ruby sees the inside of the ship. It resembles a lab with many instruments and all in white. Ruby recalled the room she was in looking like the movies. Except, unlike the movies she was hooked with several cables on her body. Some sliding doors in the left side of the room open up. A grey-ish humanoid creature comes in, holding a laser scalpel. Behind this creature that looks almost like a man but has longer extremities and a nose similar to a dog’s is a reddish squid or octopus creature that is red with several arms. To her chagrin, these aliens were not here to make friends or connections with a young girl from earth. They were here to run their experiments in the effort to take over the planet.