A few months back, aliens called the Elians landed on our planet. They weren’t like any criminals we’d ever known—not the kind who kill or destroy. Instead, they gave people exactly what they wanted. In return, these beings fed on our emotions, somehow extending their own lives through the process. Before long, most folks were walking around with big, goofy smiles plastered on their faces. It was a sickening sight, if only because it felt too good to be true. As the old saying goes, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
I never understood why the authorities welcomed them with open arms, blindly buying into their supposed benevolence. Maybe the Elians had brainwashed the people of Wildhill, or maybe we humans were just that naive, always desperate to believe in fairy tales. Whatever the reason, time eventually revealed the truth, and the aliens’ real nature came to light.
Two weeks after their arrival, my dad told me and my sister to steer clear of them. The death toll in town had started spiking, and as a doctor, he had access to information most didn’t. He was hell-bent on figuring out what was happening. Long days at the hospital turned into sleepless nights. Cursing over the phone with old colleagues and having nervous breakdowns took a toll on him, leaving him exhausted and sick. My sister Bluerain and I tried to pull him away from it all, but it was no use. Some things never changed, even in times as dark as these. The Earth kept spinning, day turned to night, and Michael Autumn, consumed by his work as a doctor, couldn’t see anything beyond it.
Experiments, attempts to isolate some substance from the blood of the deceased, and relentless stress ate up his days. I thought things couldn’t get worse, but soon enough, the world flipped upside down again—people started disappearing. Every week, bodies of men and women turned up here and there, linked only by their interactions with this alien race. No one seemed to care, though. Everyone was getting what they wanted: the people had their wishes granted, and the Elians got the emotions they needed to survive. Then, kids and teens started getting sick. At first, it looked like a bad cold, but once the fever landed them in the hospital, their condition plummeted, and they died.
The medical community was the first to sound the alarm. My dad, ever since the disappearances began, barely came home. Three hours of sleep, and he was gone again. He was convinced the Elians had brought some kind of virus from space, and that turned my life into a living hell. No one listened to him, which only drove him deeper into the mess, completely forgetting about us—his own family. Maybe he was wrong, or maybe it just wasn’t convenient for our mayor to admit the truth. Whatever the case, one day, Michael just didn’t come home. His phone went straight to “out of service,” no one at the hospital had seen him, and even our neighbors couldn’t recall the last time they’d spotted him on the street. I searched for Dad around the clock, combing through half of Wildhill, but there wasn’t a trace. It was like someone had erased him from our lives.
All the while, people kept pouring into the hospital, only to never be seen again. A colleague of Dad’s confided in me that, to prevent the spread of whatever this was, they were cremating the bodies in special facilities. Families weren’t even allowed to say goodbye or see their loved ones one last time, even from a distance. No one ever explained what this plague was. It didn’t seem to spread to relatives, so people like me—those still aware of what was happening—pointed the finger at the aliens.
Sometimes I asked myself, was it worth it? A few fleeting days of carefree happiness that didn’t even feel happy anymore. For some in town, the answer was a resounding yes. Take old Ann, for instance. She’d been in a car accident years ago and lost the use of her legs due to a spinal injury. Plenty of you might say that’s not the end of the world, that there are ways to adapt, but here in Wildhill, those solutions didn’t work. Our town was built among pine forests by the ocean. Sure, the roads in the central part were decent enough, but getting to the houses on the outskirts meant trudging through endless mud. The soil was sandy, and with the nearby water and frequent rain, the ground was always swampy, the paths constantly overgrown with moss. Navigating that in an old wheelchair was near impossible, so Ann turned to the Elians, asking them to fix up her “personal vintage ride.” Instead, they healed her legs. It was nothing short of a miracle. But ten days later, they found her dead outside her house. Just like a dozen others.
For a while, I still held onto the belief that the Elians had brought us some kind of good, even as I raged at the world over Michael’s disappearance. Then my little sister, Bluerain, died, putting an end to any doubts. One day, her temperature spiked out of nowhere. I called an ambulance, and within 24 hours, a doctor called to offer his condolences. They cremated Blu, and even Dad’s connections couldn’t get me a chance to see her one last time. Everything bright in my life vanished, as if it had never existed. I cried nonstop. I wanted to find solace in someone, anyone, but there was no one left close to me. No one I could talk to without feeling sick with disgust or contempt. Up until that moment, I’d clung to the hope that Michael might come back, but deep down, something told me he was gone for good. If Dad were alive, he’d have returned by now. Their deaths marked the end of my old life.
The pain of loss crashed over me in waves, flooding my mind. Sometimes it drowned me completely, other times it receded like the tide before a tsunami—pulling so far back that I couldn’t even feel life itself. Amid the storm raging in my soul, I forgot everything: food, work, friends, even the hated Elians. None of it mattered anymore; it all faded into the background. When another massive wave of memories shattered my resolve once more, I felt nothing but emptiness. It was an abyss of indifference so deep it swept away even my hatred for the aliens. If the world wanted to play pretend, acting like nothing had happened, then I’d do the same. Maybe one day, I’d disappear from it too. Deep inside, I begged the heavens for that day to come soon.
That was the day my new existence began: painting, sleeping, cooking, painting. If the Elians didn’t finish me off, this routine would eventually do the job and free me from my past. I didn’t want to feel anything anymore. I refused to feed them with my grief, my joy, or even my fear. They wouldn’t get a single drop of emotion from me. Not from me, even if they got it from everyone else. Indifference became my closest friend.
And so, at the start of summer, my life fell apart, leaving me alone in a world where happiness killed.