one
. . .
Emily
Getting kidnappedby aliens was not on my 2026 bingo card. I mean, it might as well have been. God knows I had other crazy shit on there just for fun:
A celebrity gets caught in an AI scandal.
My favorite indie video game gets pushed back another year.
Another person in the hand-dyed yarn community fakes their death to get out from under overwhelming orders.
World War III starts.
At this point in my life, I’d given up on filling my New Year’s bingo card with anything hopeful or life-goal related. The only way I was making it through the next year was with a hearty dose of cynicism, and a few good memes.
Kelsey, my BFF and roommate, had put “Alien Invasion” on her card, but I just laughed my drunk ass off, poured another drink, and counted down to midnight, kissing my cat, Bennet, when the ball dropped. An alien invasion might just be an improvement on the current state of things, far too hopeful an idea for my bingo card.
But no, this wasn’t an invasion. The goopy, baby-poop yellow monster that appeared on New Year’s morning, just as I walkedthrough the park to my favorite bakery for a hangover chocolate croissant, wasn’t looking to invade Earth. He was just abducting women.
The creature slid out of the trees in a loping roll, a long floating stretcher following behind, carrying an unmoving woman in a Barbie-pink sweatsuit. I stopped my hungover stagger and squinted into the shade, needing a second to process what I was seeing. Unfortunately while I sat there, loading wheel spinning above my head, staring at the sun casting golden rays through the translucent ball of poop, a pair of eyes within the mass of goo dilated as they spotted me. Something that looked like a purple banana rose, and a beam of light hit me square in the chest. That was the last thing I remembered before waking up in a cage with eight other women, all in varying stages of consciousness.
I blinked and sat up. My head swam, my vision went fuzzy, then black for a moment and hands braced me before I fell.
“Easy. Go slow,” a voice whispered.
I blinked a few times until a sweet, round face and a bright pink tracksuit came into view.
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“We aren’t sure,” pink girl said. “But the consensus is we’ve been abducted by aliens. Whoa there!” She reached out and grabbed me just as I started to sway.
My heart pounded in my chest, and my mind very much wanted to pass out again and wake up somewhere else.
“Keep it together, okay? We’re alive and we can’t afford for everyone to break down here.”
The pink girl shot a look to my left, where a stocky, round girl with dark skin and straight black hair sat curled in on herself, sobbing. Sobbing right now didn’t sound like too bad of an idea. Maybe if I gave it a minute, I could go catatonic until thiswhole issue was resolved. My heart thumped erratically, and my breathing felt shallow. Yeah, wouldn’t be long now.
“Do you think aliens are really into BBWs?”
I blinked and turned back to the girl in pink. My mind spun, and somehow a laugh escaped my throat. “What?”
“I mean look around.” The girl in pink gestured, and sure enough, the other women in the cage were all various levels of thick and fat, just like me and my not even close to midsize ass. “I thought if aliens were going to abduct anyone, it would be all young, skinny chicks, right? But I’m thirty-two and this tracksuit is just for show if you know what I mean.”
I glanced down the woman’s body, and I mean, yeah, she was big, but she was also stunning. Curves in all the right places, and boobs even bigger than mine. I met her determined blue eyes. “Thank you.”
“For what?” she asked.
“You snapped me out of what was likely to be a pretty serious breakdown.”
Her face broke into a wide grin and her eyes sparkled. “Yeah, I thought that would work. Want to help me try to get these other women ready for a chat? We need a game plan.”
I nodded and crawled over to a pale girl with thick black eyeliner who was just starting to stir.
Most of the women remembered seeing the goopy guys, so there wasn’t complete shock at the concept of aliens, but the reality was far harder to accept. While most of the women present seemed to get that the situation was dire and we all needed to remain level-headed, there were still a few who were locked up in catatonic fear. When the goopy guys returned to open our cage and place another unconscious woman inside, I moved to the far side of the bars and watched them retreat down an empty-looking corridor. They repeated the process, delivering a few more women as the hours ticked by.
After everyone was awake, and no one new had been delivered for what felt like a few hours, Jen, the girl in the pink tracksuit, started testing the walls of our cell, as if the rusted and pockmarked metal, or the thick bars separating us from the hall, might give way with just the right tug. They didn’t, and eventually she settled in a corner, a contemplative look on her face as she studied her fresh manicure. No one talked much after the initial discussion of our fate, and I settled into silence, wondering if my cat, Bennet, would be happier with my roommate than he was with me.