• “Casey, get out of bed, now! I’m getting your clothes. Pack anything that you can’t possibly part with and then go grab Cami, we’re leaving.” A hoarse groan from within found its way out of my mouth. I was too disgruntled and tired to recognize the panic in my mother’s voice.
    I rolled over and waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. “What time is it, ma?”
    “Four.” Was all she said, and then returned to my closet, throwing clothes across the room frantically, not even aiming for the open suitcase by my television.
    “In the morning?” My voice squeaked. “Forget it!” To be honest, I was getting mad at her. She’d woken me up from the most amazing dream. Dad had come back from war. It turns out that they had mixed up somebody else’s mangled remains for his. And even though I had seen his body at the wake three years before, completely intact aside from the poorly disguised dents and scratches on the right side of his head, it was so believable. The dream had almost come back to me when, “OW! What was that for?!” I shrieked, now thoroughly aggravated, picking up the shoe that had just collided with my head
    “Get up now! Outside, there’s a… a,” but she couldn’t finish, she simply let in a shaky gasp. “We have to leave; they’re coming right towards us!” They, who were they? Sitting up, I saw my mom in the light of the moon, tears streaming down her face.
    “Mom, why are the lights turned off? You’re really scaring me.” I whispered, not even sure why I was doing so.
    “Channel nine.” She stated. I grabbed the remote and, two button pushes later channel nine was on the screen. There, was a steady picture, but what was it of? The picture was small, and looked like a circle, but it had corners. How many sides were there? To me, it looked like one of the pictures you’d find in text books that represented infectious diseases.
    A sickly thin blond woman’s head appeared in the corner of the screen. “This is the most recent image of what scientists can only refer to as, a UFO. It first started to appear on radars at 1:19AM and was visible by news cameras at 2:33 AM. Here are just a few images we’ve collected.” The screen now showed the mysterious object in a still picture above trees, then above a lake, above a house. A few more of these, and then they showed a shaky video, obviously home made. Someone was running to their car, flicking the video back behind them to catch glimpses of the object in the sky.
    I sat up abruptly as the camera caught the video taker’s head in the frame for a moment. It was Mr. Schafer; he lived just down the block from my house! I remember falling off my bike in front of his house when I was five, and he had come racing outside with a handful of bandages.
    “How close is that thing?” I asked, voice becoming unusually steady considering the circumstances. Mom let out a squeak and nodded towards the open window. Their, steadily getting closer and closer, was, well, what ever it was. Right now, it looked about the size of a pumpkin. My mind wandered to Cinderella, when the pumpkin gets bigger and bigger until it became a carriage. It may seem odd to be thinking that, but the pumpkin resembling shape was also growing, faster and faster as it sped toward earth.
    “Get up, get anything you need, then go grab Cami.” Mother affirmed. I quickly grabbed my week old coach purse and threw a couple things in, like make up, a hair brush, and a few ponies from my collection. It wasn’t because I liked ponies or anything, I mean, I’m fourteen years old! But when I was eight my dad had bought me a pony plushy, and I was so excited, not because of the horse, but because he had come home. He didn’t realize that though, and every time he came back home, he’d bring me another stuffed horse, just as childish and unique as the first.
    While doing so, the anorexic news lady began to speak again. “Alarms are being sounded every fifteen minutes in small town of Riverton, where the UFO is expected to land. We advise you to shut all the lights off, bring no attention to yourselves, and get out. Sources still cannot be sure of what is in the UFO, how they’ll react, what they’ll do, where they’re from, if there are more, or even if there is anything in it. It could be a huge threat.” She said in the gravest face that her plastic, cliché model head could manage. Then she smiled, “Back to Johnny, who will give us the reactions of other towns far and wide, Johnny.”
    “Thank you Kim,” but whatever he said next was drowned out by the promised sirens, awakening any still sleeping people of Riverton.
    “I’ll get food, go get Cami, now!” She shouted over the siren. The once shaky voice was now collective and stern, only concerned for the health of its family. I ran across the hallway of the one floored house, trying to ignore the freezing wood that my feet pounded against. I reached my two year old sister’s room to find her standing up in her crib, screaming her lungs out at the loud noises.
    “MAKE STOP!” She screamed.
    “You’re two years old, talk like a big girl.” I scolded as I ran into the bathroom with Cami in my arms where the noises were muffled. It was already empty of toothbrushes and shampoos. “Cami, you want to go for a ride?”
    “Ride?” She sniffled, now curious. The sirens had stopped, and I had already run to her room, one handedly throwing diapers and one pieced outfits into a small duffel bag.
    “Yeah,” I said sweetly, already getting exhausted. “A car ride.”
    She thought it over for a moment, thumb in mouth and eyes staring at my face. “Okay!” She shouted, as if we wouldn’t have gone if she’d said no. Now she was nothing but smiles, recent tears completely forgotten.
    After packing, I ran downstairs to find my mom slapping mayonnaise on white bread. I threw the duffel bag and purse in a pile with all of the other things we were taking with us, and took a second to stop from the rush and think. What if aliens were coming down to earth? Were they going to hurt us? Were they going to help us? There was one girl in my algebra class who was constantly talking about stuff like this. She’d studied it and raved about it. All she got was criticism and patronizing remarks thrown at her, even by teachers, and regrettably, myself. Right now she was probably whipping out her telescope and camera with a ‘We Come in Peace’ sign.
    I let out a snort at the image in my head. But who was I to talk? She probably knows what’s going on already, and knows what to expect. Here I stood in the kitchen doorway with a sponge bob tank top, baggy green sweatpants, and messy black hair standing at impossible angles. Then there was mom, a large replica of myself only wearing red shorts and an old gray shirt of dads that read in bold green letter ‘Army Strong’. And who could forget Cami, in her pink one piece and short curly hair that just never got messy. She was the only one that inherited dad’s golden yellow locks of hair, and I envied her for it. All I had that connected me to dad were a couple of stupid ponies.
    “Casey, Cami, let’s go.” Mom looked like a human coat rack with all of the bags draped from her neck, shoulders, and elbows.
    “Do you need help with those?” I asked anxiously.
    “Get in the car now.” She glared; “You keep your eyes on the car, or me. Don’t look up, don’t get distracted. You got it?”
    I nodded, “okay” unsure of how true I would keep to my word. We sprinted to the car with remarkable speed for two girls carrying at least two hundred pounds between them and had only woken up less then half an hour before. After buckling Cami in the backseat, I knew I shouldn’t have, but also knew that there was no way I couldn’t, I looked up.
    “Mom!” I shouted in a voice that I didn’t know existed within me. “Mom! Look how close it is!”
    “Casey! I told you not to-” Her voice may have started out strong and scolding, but now it was gone in a squeak of an, “oh”. As yet another siren blared in the distance; the UFO steadied itself for a landing on the same street we were on. I screamed, expecting the world to shake is the immense object hit the ground, but it landed the same way a hacky sack would. It came straight down, landing without crushing the earth beneath, and the only sound issued was a calm thud.
    Cami had already fallen asleep in the backseat while mom and I both stood there, car doors ajar and mouths wide open. I hadn’t realized before, but the streets were packed. Civilized people; people I knew were running around the streets screaming, cars sped past, not even paying attention to if they hit anyone. It seemed as if the world had gone mad!
    Yet while all this occurred, I could not keep my eyes off of what sat before me. I began counting the sides. One two three four five, no, I had already counted that side. One two three. . . I got to sixteen before loosing track again. I now realized that it wasn’t just smooth gray metal that encased the ship, but an unknown material. It looked gray at first, but was also translucent in a way, and didn’t look quite solid. Not only that, but strange lines and shapes were traced around each side, that now looked more like dozens of six sided panels. Could they be inscriptions of some kind?
    BANG! My mother swore loudly as the first bomb hit the skies. “Forget our stuff; get in the basement, now! I’m getting Cami!” Mom shouted over the torrent of guns and bombs that hit the air. ‘How strange that the aliens would have the same kind of weaponry that we had’, I thought. As mom ran in the house with a wailing Cami, I then realized that the aliens weren’t attacking at all, but that the shooting had come from tanks rolling up the once calm streets of Riverton.
    The only word I could find to describe my emotions was appalled. Whatever species had just come down had done nothing to us! Who were we to just start shooting at them? “STOP!” I cried, but even I couldn’t hear myself over the explosive morning air. So much violence was going on, so why hadn’t anyone been hurt? Why was the UFO still intact?
    I stared in awe at the ship as each corner began to glow bright neon blue. You couldn’t see any type of shield like they show in movies, but all of the bombs stopped short of anything it came in contact with, and destroyed itself. I could tell that the UFO, or whatever it was, was protecting not only itself with its otherworldly defenses, but protecting the humans of earth that had done nothing to help it.
    That’s when mom came out, more panicked then ever. She grabbed my arm and didn’t even try to yell at me as she dragged me back into the house. During all this, while people screamed, bombs exploded, and the first sign of life began to expel from the ship, the only thing I could think or say was, “wow.”