Small Step

She was born before the war. Not long before, but long enough that she remembered ice cream and lawnmowers and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee. She remembered laughter and the way the playground slide took her tummy almost into her throat. She knew what it was like to think of Earth as safe and space as a dark, starry frontier. Aliens were the stuff of movies and conspiracy theorists.

Remembering the pre-war world was how Laura spent her neverending nights, huddled in the gutted conversion van, its front tires and some of the engine block submerged in the sandy edge of Lady Bird Lake outside Austin proper. She wrote down everything she could recall, thinking she might be the next Anne Frank, and wishing like crazy she would NOT be famous in that way.

Anne Frank had people to die with her. Laura had only herself.

From the outside, the van looked like all the other abandoned vehicles with their dead passengers rotting away inside them. The once-white van had an algae film that looked as if a giant can of light green paint had been tipped over on the roof, and glops of it cascaded down the sides. Nothing remarkable about the cracked-open side window that allowed air to circulate and kept her alive in the heat of May, although just barely. Plenty of days Laura wished she’d cook already. Just die of heat exhaustion and be done with it like everyone else in Austin. And, possibly, the world.

A lush copse of cypress, elm, cottonwood, and sycamore trees kept the ten-passenger Chevy van from a direct view of all but the tallest skyscrapers. Squirrels and birds played in the forest and sometimes scampered around her van. It seemed wrong for them to do that, to frolic. Laura had found the van occupied and had to pull the owner’s body out during a rainstorm. Rain was the only time she could go out safely because water did bad things to the alien invaders before it killed them. That was why they left the conversion van alone, she surmised. Half-submerged. Not worth searching.

The idea of annihilation wasn’t new to Laura, or to anyone really. In war, one had to expect death and destruction, especially when the enemy was extraterrestrial. Laura was in gym class at Gable Elementary School when an announcement came over the speaker. They asked teachers to stop every class and turn on the televisions. Laura and her fellow students sat cross-legged on the basketball court, watching the first ships appear in the sky and the first city attacked: Lima. Over the ensuing months, the same thing happened in Dubai, then Tehran. Desert cities. It took too long for the UN Security Council to understand and exploit the effect water had on the celestial invaders. Chemical weapons and nukes were deployed, and AI hackers found ways to slow the aliens down, but not how to stop them. Laura knew nine years of peace and nine years of interplanetary war. It was not likely she’d know what it felt like to turn nineteen.

Laura had been fishing with her sister when the ground began to tremble, signaling an approach. Her sister wasn’t as fast a runner as Laura was. And she didn’t go into Lady Bird Lake as Laura had. Laura lay in the lilies and put her head under the water to get a break from the screaming. It softened, but didn’t kill the sound. Till all was quiet she stayed in Lady Bird Lake. All the rest of that day and all night.

It was pure luck that it was raining the next morning when she found the van with some canned goods and unsmoked pot and a recently-dead hippie who stocked the hide-in-plain-sight van and then gave up the ghost, maybe from a heart attack? The hippie was too big for Laura to drag very far. She’d had the sense to pull him into the lake where he’d sunk, but two days later, she looked out the front window and saw him on the surface again, all bloated like a balloon. Two small turtles sunned themselves on him.

The canned goods had run out. The only thing keeping Laura alive was that she could crawl to the front passenger footwell and cup water that seeped in from the lake. It was yucky and smelled of oil, but it was wet. She had no way to check the weather, no way to know when it would rain. Her belly ached so much Laura pulled pieces of the leather seats and chewed on them, swallowed when they got thin enough. Every day of sunshine meant another day of heat and starvation. Another day of Anne Franking it in her journal. Just yesterday she’d written: If I had a gun, I would’ve ended it by now. I know that’s not what Anne would’ve said, but I don’t care. Anne wasn’t alone. I am. And there was more, but Laura wanted to be remembered as brave, so she’d draw over the parts she didn’t like. Loops and lines and waves until the words were scribble snakes.

But scratching it out didn’t make it any less true. She’d had it. Inside the tallest skyscrapers were beings that could take her life in an instant. She’d seen what the aliens did to people. It was quick and horrible, but painless. All she had to do was open the back door and step out into the sunshine. One small step.

True: Laura wanted to challenge me. She gave me only this: She was born before the war.

Also true: Laura writes for Cool Cleveland, reviewing plays HERE. Aren’t you jealous? I am.

Also also true: I have the pleasure of sharing my writing journey with Laura. She gives me smart, honest, and critical feedback on my work. I met her some twenty-odd years ago when she led a writers’ group in Borders book store.

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