Possible Purposes of Plastic Buttons by Joanne Merriam
A woman is so preoccupied with her dying husband that an alien invasion fails to make much of an impression.
I was at the hospital when the aliens landed. I'd made up my face that morning, but I'd eaten since then, and cried, and laid my cheek against his. I wiped my face naked with wet tissues and rubbed it with my bare hands, something soothing about the gesture despite everything. At the hospital, other patients often said they were bone-tired, and the metaphor of the phrase had lost all meaning for me in literalness, but I was. And nerve-tired and sinew-tired and lung-tired. Pericardium-tired. The muscles in my palms were sore where I'd squeezed his hands for hours, and my calves ached, and my lower back didn't bear thinking about. I hadn't slept since the morning before, and I thought I'd have a sandwich and then get some sleep on the cot in his room and maybe, if I were very lucky, I would die in my sleep and not have to watch Mark die tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever he got around to it.
It was about that time when the aliens landed in Nashville. Just the one ship, which came down in the road outside the children's hospital. Well, you remember. I didn't hear about it until I woke up from my nap in Mark's room to the sound of the television. Giant buglike things were swarming out of a big round spacecraft, like so many cockroaches, their fangs and feelers dripping green goo.
"Stupid," he said, motioning at it, and flipped to a daytime soap he'd gotten addicted to. We both thought it was a bad movie. Later the nurses set me straight, and I asked them not to tell him. No point in scaring him when he was so close to the end. They nodded, but were more interested in talking about how frightened they were. I thought they were enjoying the drama of it, but they meant it, too; they paled and sweated and their hands shook.
"Aren't you scared?" one of them asked me.
"No," I said, motioning back towards Mark's room. "I know what I'm scared of."
"We're evacuating," they told me.
One of the nurses, Kelly, a kind middle-aged blonde who had been with us almost from the start, told me the hospital had an evacuation plan for tornadoes and natural disasters. They hadn't anticipated an alien invasion (she laughed without humor, sharp and high) but they would make do. Mark would be at the end of the line. He couldn't leave his bed, and the hospital didn't want to create a bottleneck by wheeling his bed ahead of the patients who were ambulatory. I told her not to worry about evacuating him. I would sign whatever they wanted. I didn't want him disturbed.
I went back to his room to hold his hand. His breathing was awful to listen to: hoarse and dry and unsteady. I didn't care what the hospital staff said. He wouldn't survive being evacuated. He told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him, and we said some other things then, private things which you don't need to know about. I told him not to worry about the noises coming from the hall, the running and screaming and banging doors, and he nodded and stroked my hair and told me not to worry either, and I didn't. We spent a lot of time looking at each other, and then he told me to get some rest. It was quieter outside by then. I put my head down next to his and fell asleep, half on the bed and half on the chair. When I woke up he was dead and the hospital was deserted. I stroked Mark's palm a few times where it fell open with a slack grace.
I got another sandwich and coffee from the eighth-floor café - it was unstaffed, but unlocked; I had the prices memorized by then and left exact change - and ate standing up, looking out Mark's window onto the broad boulevard alongside the hospital, jammed with cars abandoned every which way. Aliens stalked, slavering and dripping, from vehicle to vehicle, looking inside. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass. It was hard to tell from above, but they were probably seven or more feet tall, judging from the way they had to stoop to look in the back of the abandoned ambulance. Their backs looked like a giant hard shell, but must have been jointed somehow to allow for their slithering, scuttering movement. They had two sets of enormous fangs which dripped continuously onto the street, and feelers which waved around in the air constantly, also dripping. They must have a lot of trouble keeping their spaceships clean, I thought. I knew I was in mortal danger, but it was hard to concentrate on the idea. The scene below me just didn't feel real. I went back to Mark and talked to him for a while. I wasn't losing it. I knew he was dead. It just felt better to talk to him.
"There's nobody left," I told him. "It's really creepy walking around out there. You wouldn't think a brightly-lit hospital would be creepy, but it's empty. It's just you and me and the cockroaches outside."
The door made a noise as it opened, and I turned. An alien was there, drooling on itself, filling the doorway. As its smell hit me, I broke out in a cold sweat. I wouldn't be able to get past it without touching it; the only other way out of the room was the window. We were on the seventh floor. I was trembling, and I squeezed Mark's hand to steady myself. I thought about the window, about what a seven-story fall would do to me. If I could even break the glass. I couldn't hide under the bed: the space was filled with machinery of some sort that had allowed me to prop Mark up and lay him down again flat. I just stood there and waited for it to come at me. I was probably in shock.
It stood, or rather hunched, in the doorway for what seemed like a long time, apparently looking out the window, and then it went back into the hallway for just long enough that the door swung closed, and then it came in again. It did that three or four times, then wrenched the door off the frame.
If a human had made the same action, I'd have said they were in a rage, but the creature's emotional state was completely opaque to me. How arrogant to expect to understand them, almost as arrogant as the assumption everybody made afterwards that we were the reason they were here. I don't think we had anything to do with it.
It placed the door against the wall and smashed through the top of the door frame and straightened up to its full height, its antennae brushing the ceiling.
The hospital was the kind of building with controlled air, and the window didn't open; I would have to smash it, and to do that I needed to find something to smash it with. I looked down at my hands, and one of them was still gripping Mark's hand.
"Mark," I said, like he could hear me. I was going to have to leave him. "I'm sorry."
The creature began to move towards me. The hundreds of tiny legs at its bottom scuttled across the floor. I let go of Mark and dove for Mark's IV stand and swung it between us, but the thing vaulted up onto the mattress. I saw my chance to get away and rolled toward the door, slipping in the thing's drool. I looked back as I turned into the corridor, expecting to see it coming after me, but it was on top of Mark, now, doing something to his abdomen with its pincers; every movie cliché of bugs laying eggs inside people sprang full-formed into my mind and I turned back and brought the IV stand down on the creature with every ounce of strength and terror and anger I had left in me.
The tiny waving hairlike things that covered its body all stiffened, and the IV stand bounced harmlessly off it, hitting me in the forehead. I cried out. It didn't even look at me.
"Goddamn it," I said, and tried again, and got tangled up in the lines still running pointlessly into Mark's arm, and managed only to bash myself in the knee with the wheels on the bottom of the stand. I breathed hard and stared at the creature. It wasn't doing anything to Mark, I realized, or not anything I could perceive. Its pincers were merely waving over him (and dripping a little). Maybe it was praying. Or thinking. Or resting. I fell back, baffled.
You have to understand how tired I was at this point. If I'd had more energy to go on being frightened or angry, I'm sure I would have gone on being frightened and angry. But I'd just spent over a month on two sandwiches and about three hours' sleep a day, and the man I'd been married to for thirty-one years had just died. I sat down in the same chair I'd been sitting on for all of eternity this past month, and - almost calmly - I said, "What are you doing?"
I half expected it to answer me. It didn't. It didn't show any more awareness of me than a house fly would if I'd started talking to it. It reached out a pincer and took hold of a plastic button on Mark's dressing gown and snipped it off and ate it, or at least slid it into its mouth, and then it got up off the bed and slithered out of the room.
It took the elevator, and made no move to prevent me from joining it, so I did. It got off at ground level, and I followed, slipping again on its drool. Other aliens passed us; none of them seemed to register my existence. I yawned hugely and padded after my alien, past the cafeteria, past a sculpture of babies frolicking on cast-iron DNA strands, across a pedestrian bridge, down the stairs on the outside of the children's hospital, to its ship, which was parked in a handicapped spot. A handful of muttering pigeons pecked at the pavement. I was the only human in sight.
After the spacecraft left, everybody went on as though nothing had changed. I did, too, because what else was there to do? We couldn't contact them, even if they had been interested in a conversation. After a death or disappearance, the ones still living carry on with their affairs. That's the way of things.
But they worry me. I was the only one to see the alien regurgitate Mark's button and press it on the outside of the ship, which absorbed it somehow, and I was the only one to see it step around the pigeons to a patch of dirt and burrow down into the ground, leaving behind one last puddle of goo on top of the turned-up soil. I sat down on the curb near the ship and watched the vessel and the patch of ground narrowly. I must have slept then, because I have no memory of fighter jets bombing Nashville, although later I read about how their bombs were all made useless, triggers broken or payloads failing to fall or contents transmuted into plain dirt. When I gave testimony later to Congress, they thought I must have dreamed the whole thing, I was so stupid with fatigue and grief - and how could I have missed the planes, they asked. I have to be honest. I can't absolutely swear that I wasn't dreaming.
But I remember yawning, and then nodding a little, and jerking awake to find the sun almost down and the streets still full of the aliens. I remember watching them walk up to the ship and affix some small item to its outside, and watching the ship absorb those things - a high-heeled shoe, candy bar wrappers, an abandoned cell phone, a syringe, a naked Barbie with all her hair cut off - and then watching the aliens disappear into the earth. I remember the little puddles of goo sinking into the piles of disturbed dirt and slowly disappearing, like ice in a glass of water. I remember only two of them actually got back on the ship before it left. The rest are still waiting someplace underground like enormous cicadas.
I worry over the meanings of all of these things: Mark's button and the Barbie, the syringe and the rest of the shiny garbage. Manmade things, when I am certain we are no more a part of their planning than a colony of ants is part of the planning when somebody decides to put up a highrise.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
It was about that time when the aliens landed in Nashville. Just the one ship, which came down in the road outside the children's hospital. Well, you remember. I didn't hear about it until I woke up from my nap in Mark's room to the sound of the television. Giant buglike things were swarming out of a big round spacecraft, like so many cockroaches, their fangs and feelers dripping green goo.
"Stupid," he said, motioning at it, and flipped to a daytime soap he'd gotten addicted to. We both thought it was a bad movie. Later the nurses set me straight, and I asked them not to tell him. No point in scaring him when he was so close to the end. They nodded, but were more interested in talking about how frightened they were. I thought they were enjoying the drama of it, but they meant it, too; they paled and sweated and their hands shook.
"Aren't you scared?" one of them asked me.
"No," I said, motioning back towards Mark's room. "I know what I'm scared of."
"We're evacuating," they told me.
One of the nurses, Kelly, a kind middle-aged blonde who had been with us almost from the start, told me the hospital had an evacuation plan for tornadoes and natural disasters. They hadn't anticipated an alien invasion (she laughed without humor, sharp and high) but they would make do. Mark would be at the end of the line. He couldn't leave his bed, and the hospital didn't want to create a bottleneck by wheeling his bed ahead of the patients who were ambulatory. I told her not to worry about evacuating him. I would sign whatever they wanted. I didn't want him disturbed.
I went back to his room to hold his hand. His breathing was awful to listen to: hoarse and dry and unsteady. I didn't care what the hospital staff said. He wouldn't survive being evacuated. He told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him, and we said some other things then, private things which you don't need to know about. I told him not to worry about the noises coming from the hall, the running and screaming and banging doors, and he nodded and stroked my hair and told me not to worry either, and I didn't. We spent a lot of time looking at each other, and then he told me to get some rest. It was quieter outside by then. I put my head down next to his and fell asleep, half on the bed and half on the chair. When I woke up he was dead and the hospital was deserted. I stroked Mark's palm a few times where it fell open with a slack grace.
I got another sandwich and coffee from the eighth-floor café - it was unstaffed, but unlocked; I had the prices memorized by then and left exact change - and ate standing up, looking out Mark's window onto the broad boulevard alongside the hospital, jammed with cars abandoned every which way. Aliens stalked, slavering and dripping, from vehicle to vehicle, looking inside. I leaned my forehead against the cool glass. It was hard to tell from above, but they were probably seven or more feet tall, judging from the way they had to stoop to look in the back of the abandoned ambulance. Their backs looked like a giant hard shell, but must have been jointed somehow to allow for their slithering, scuttering movement. They had two sets of enormous fangs which dripped continuously onto the street, and feelers which waved around in the air constantly, also dripping. They must have a lot of trouble keeping their spaceships clean, I thought. I knew I was in mortal danger, but it was hard to concentrate on the idea. The scene below me just didn't feel real. I went back to Mark and talked to him for a while. I wasn't losing it. I knew he was dead. It just felt better to talk to him.
"There's nobody left," I told him. "It's really creepy walking around out there. You wouldn't think a brightly-lit hospital would be creepy, but it's empty. It's just you and me and the cockroaches outside."
The door made a noise as it opened, and I turned. An alien was there, drooling on itself, filling the doorway. As its smell hit me, I broke out in a cold sweat. I wouldn't be able to get past it without touching it; the only other way out of the room was the window. We were on the seventh floor. I was trembling, and I squeezed Mark's hand to steady myself. I thought about the window, about what a seven-story fall would do to me. If I could even break the glass. I couldn't hide under the bed: the space was filled with machinery of some sort that had allowed me to prop Mark up and lay him down again flat. I just stood there and waited for it to come at me. I was probably in shock.
It stood, or rather hunched, in the doorway for what seemed like a long time, apparently looking out the window, and then it went back into the hallway for just long enough that the door swung closed, and then it came in again. It did that three or four times, then wrenched the door off the frame.
If a human had made the same action, I'd have said they were in a rage, but the creature's emotional state was completely opaque to me. How arrogant to expect to understand them, almost as arrogant as the assumption everybody made afterwards that we were the reason they were here. I don't think we had anything to do with it.
It placed the door against the wall and smashed through the top of the door frame and straightened up to its full height, its antennae brushing the ceiling.
The hospital was the kind of building with controlled air, and the window didn't open; I would have to smash it, and to do that I needed to find something to smash it with. I looked down at my hands, and one of them was still gripping Mark's hand.
"Mark," I said, like he could hear me. I was going to have to leave him. "I'm sorry."
The creature began to move towards me. The hundreds of tiny legs at its bottom scuttled across the floor. I let go of Mark and dove for Mark's IV stand and swung it between us, but the thing vaulted up onto the mattress. I saw my chance to get away and rolled toward the door, slipping in the thing's drool. I looked back as I turned into the corridor, expecting to see it coming after me, but it was on top of Mark, now, doing something to his abdomen with its pincers; every movie cliché of bugs laying eggs inside people sprang full-formed into my mind and I turned back and brought the IV stand down on the creature with every ounce of strength and terror and anger I had left in me.
The tiny waving hairlike things that covered its body all stiffened, and the IV stand bounced harmlessly off it, hitting me in the forehead. I cried out. It didn't even look at me.
"Goddamn it," I said, and tried again, and got tangled up in the lines still running pointlessly into Mark's arm, and managed only to bash myself in the knee with the wheels on the bottom of the stand. I breathed hard and stared at the creature. It wasn't doing anything to Mark, I realized, or not anything I could perceive. Its pincers were merely waving over him (and dripping a little). Maybe it was praying. Or thinking. Or resting. I fell back, baffled.
You have to understand how tired I was at this point. If I'd had more energy to go on being frightened or angry, I'm sure I would have gone on being frightened and angry. But I'd just spent over a month on two sandwiches and about three hours' sleep a day, and the man I'd been married to for thirty-one years had just died. I sat down in the same chair I'd been sitting on for all of eternity this past month, and - almost calmly - I said, "What are you doing?"
I half expected it to answer me. It didn't. It didn't show any more awareness of me than a house fly would if I'd started talking to it. It reached out a pincer and took hold of a plastic button on Mark's dressing gown and snipped it off and ate it, or at least slid it into its mouth, and then it got up off the bed and slithered out of the room.
It took the elevator, and made no move to prevent me from joining it, so I did. It got off at ground level, and I followed, slipping again on its drool. Other aliens passed us; none of them seemed to register my existence. I yawned hugely and padded after my alien, past the cafeteria, past a sculpture of babies frolicking on cast-iron DNA strands, across a pedestrian bridge, down the stairs on the outside of the children's hospital, to its ship, which was parked in a handicapped spot. A handful of muttering pigeons pecked at the pavement. I was the only human in sight.
After the spacecraft left, everybody went on as though nothing had changed. I did, too, because what else was there to do? We couldn't contact them, even if they had been interested in a conversation. After a death or disappearance, the ones still living carry on with their affairs. That's the way of things.
But they worry me. I was the only one to see the alien regurgitate Mark's button and press it on the outside of the ship, which absorbed it somehow, and I was the only one to see it step around the pigeons to a patch of dirt and burrow down into the ground, leaving behind one last puddle of goo on top of the turned-up soil. I sat down on the curb near the ship and watched the vessel and the patch of ground narrowly. I must have slept then, because I have no memory of fighter jets bombing Nashville, although later I read about how their bombs were all made useless, triggers broken or payloads failing to fall or contents transmuted into plain dirt. When I gave testimony later to Congress, they thought I must have dreamed the whole thing, I was so stupid with fatigue and grief - and how could I have missed the planes, they asked. I have to be honest. I can't absolutely swear that I wasn't dreaming.
But I remember yawning, and then nodding a little, and jerking awake to find the sun almost down and the streets still full of the aliens. I remember watching them walk up to the ship and affix some small item to its outside, and watching the ship absorb those things - a high-heeled shoe, candy bar wrappers, an abandoned cell phone, a syringe, a naked Barbie with all her hair cut off - and then watching the aliens disappear into the earth. I remember the little puddles of goo sinking into the piles of disturbed dirt and slowly disappearing, like ice in a glass of water. I remember only two of them actually got back on the ship before it left. The rest are still waiting someplace underground like enormous cicadas.
I worry over the meanings of all of these things: Mark's button and the Barbie, the syringe and the rest of the shiny garbage. Manmade things, when I am certain we are no more a part of their planning than a colony of ants is part of the planning when somebody decides to put up a highrise.
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