Feeling Some Kind of Way

 

Photo credit: Robsalot (that's me!)

It would have been a surprise, if surprises were still a thing in the end. In the beginning there were still surprises, though, and surprise was exactly what everyone felt. It was a good emotion, the type of emotion one would expect upon realizing aliens were real, and had suddenly appeared en masse all around the world.

There was some debate who made the first discovery. Was it at an orange orchard in Florida? A sheep croft in Scotland? A rice paddy in Vietnam? It was impossible to know. One night the world was the same boring old world filled with the same boring old life forms that had always been, and the next morning the newspaper headlines screamed out the amazing discovery. Funny little egg-shaped creatures, with large iridescent eyes (were they their eyes? No one seemed to be quite sure, not even the scientists) and smoothly scaled skin mottled with indescribable colors that seemed to be derived from the stars, and webbed talons that they used to peddle their way through the air, as if they were swimming. The creatures could fly without wings.

Of course there was worry, and fear, and curiosity, and a whole litany of human emotions beyond the afore mentioned surprise. Peoples reactions to the news ran the gamut, and then back again. There were theories, and arguments, and conspiracies, and at least 17 new religions, and then there were corporations. It didn’t take long for people to figure out how to exploit the aliens. But the aliens didn’t appear to mind, in fact they look as if they enjoyed it.

You see, what the aliens seemed to love more than anything was being around people, and even though the people were scared at first, they soon grew fond of these weird little beings. Something funny happened when the aliens were nearby, people suddenly felt good. Not necessarily physically good, and not necessarily mentally good, but just good good. Poets, and writers, and musicians, and doctors, and scientists, they struggled to describe the feeling, and they failed. The real problem wasn’t describing the feeling, though, it was satiating the demand for it. This was a logistics problem really, the aliens appeared on the farms, and they needed to be distributed to the cities and towns and suburbs and everywhere else that the humans lived. Thankfully the corporations stepped up, and for a nominal fee, everyone was able to obtain their very own alien, and everyone was good.

Then one morning, as suddenly as they had arrived, they were gone. One night, the aliens were there, and the next morning, they weren’t. You would think the void would be immense, how would the humans react with all that good suddenly gone? Would they turn on each other, would they band together to try and find them? As it turned out, they did nothing at all, because they felt nothing at all. The aliens had not been exploited, they had been exploiting. They had been feeding off the human’s emotions, and when the emotions were sucked dry, the aliens moved on to find the next planet blaring feelings into space. But that morning, for the very first time, the sun rose over the earth and not a single person stopped to watch it.