Marissa arrives at the morgue a little past two in the afternoon. It’s a plain, nondescript building on the side of the freeway with only two cars in the parking lot. A tumbleweed rolls through dusty gravel in the distance as Marissa pulls into a parking space right outside of the door.

The radio, tuned into some local news station in West Texas, which somehow happens to be where Marissa is right now, plays at full volume as she sits and waits, torn as to whether or not she wants to turn her car off, if she wants to hear the deafening silence.

And we are now receiving reports that the UFO that landed on El Capitan in Culberson County, Texas, has lifted off from its perch atop the peak of the mountain and is once again airborne—it appears to be moving at a slower speed than we saw previously, perhaps fifty to sixty miles an hour as opposed to the almost miraculous speed of its initial landing. We are still unaware if any human has made contact with the ship’s pilot or crew—

Marissa turns the car off, cuts the radio broadcast short. No more news.

Her phone has been buzzing in the passenger side seat all morning, since she started her drive from Austin a little past six after her mother’s sobbing, stuttering phone call interrupted her dreams. Please, Missy, you have to go—I can’t do it myself—I can’t look at her in the morgue, please, please, will you do this for me— 

Marissa had looked at the calls and texts when she stopped to get gas and bought a two dollar instant coffee. Six different group chats with various configurations of her friends—high school, college, coworkers. All about the UFO landing. So close to them, almost at their back door when you think about how vast the earth is. The UFO could’ve landed in India or New Zealand or in the middle of the ocean, and here it was in Texas.

I think the aliens must not understand that Texas is a shoot first, ask questions later territory, one of her friends jokes. 

Marissa has not added anything to any of the conversations. No one has noticed yet. She can’t share their shock and excitement and fear. She’s felt numb since she woke up this morning and her mother told her that her sister is dead.

Marissa gets out of the car, slams the door behind her. It’s hot and windy today, a high risk for wildfires. Maybe the aliens will get a front-row seat to climate disaster. Stranger things have happened.

The inside of the building is grey striped concrete, with all the color sucked out. There’s a tiny waiting room with plastic chairs and an attendant sitting in the window.

“Hi.” Marissa approaches, aware that her voice is gravelly and rough from hours of crying alone in her car, listening to the news announce the presence of alien life on their planet that Gina will never know anything about. “My sister’s body was brought here this morning. Her name is—was—Gina Masterson.”

The morgue attendant asks for a form of ID; Marissa passes it over. Gina’s ID must have been on her body. She died last night, Marissa’s mother said. They found her body last night, out in the desert, alone in her car, gunshot wound to the head, the revolver limp in her hand. 

The attendant gives her ID back, tells her that he’s sorry for her loss and to sit tight and someone will be with her right away. His eyes are half on his phone during their whole conversation. Marissa can’t blame him. There is something far more exciting going on than a dead girl. 

She waits for twenty minutes, even though she’s the only one there. She tries not to be frustrated or angry, and it’s actually quite easy, because she doesn’t feel anything at all. 

She scrolls her news feed. Minute-by-minute updates of the alien vessel on CNN, MSNBC, Fox—she doesn’t even want to know what the Fox News crew is making of all of this. It would be something she would’ve texted Gina about, laughing at how their gun-toting Republican family members probably thought the alien ship was a woke mind virus. 

A man in a suit comes to get her eventually. He looks somber, tells her that he’s sorry to have to bring her here today. Marissa thinks she says thank you. The man leads her back, tells her that she needs to identify the body, that the angle of the gunshot wound is consistent with a suicide. Did her sister have a history of depression? Attempts? Any warning signs in the past days or weeks?

“Yes,” Marissa tells him. “Yes, she had a history of depression, but I thought she was better. I really did. She had a new job she liked. A new apartment on her own. A medication regimen that worked. She didn’t call me crying anymore.”

The man nods, writes her words down in a little black notebook. He must be a detective; he probably wants to rule the case open and shut. 

They approach the door to the examination room. The man looks at her apologetically, tells her that they usually have a grief counselor on-site but today is a little different, for obvious reasons. Marissa nods. She understands. For everyone else, today is the day that the aliens landed not a hundred miles from this little building. They won’t remember it for any other reason.

The man leads her into the white, sterile room. The fluorescent lights overhead buzz, and there’s a body on the table. 

Marissa stares at it—at her. Long legs partially covered by cowgirl boots with blue flower petals. Denim shorts, a white tank-top. Long blonde hair, not unlike her own. The left side of her face is mangled, somewhat, by all of the blood and bone. The right side is clear; Gina’s brown eye, still open. 

“It’s her. It’s Gina.” Marissa’s throat narrows, hot tears threatening to fall, but she keeps it together. She stares for a few seconds longer before closing her eyes, a wave of nausea rushing to her gut. It passes. She opens her eyes again. She’s still in the white sterile room with her sister’s body, the room that her mother begged Marissa to enter so that she didn’t have to. 

Marissa thinks she might be angry about that, eventually. 

She makes herself look at the body again, seized with the impulse to find some kind of proof that her sister, out by herself in the desert, may have been set upon by these visitors from another world. Isn’t it suspicious that Gina died as soon as they arrived? Shouldn’t there be some sort of connection, like in a science fiction movie? El Capitan is so close to where they found her body—fifty miles, maybe less. Certainly the aliens—

Marissa makes herself stop her magical thinking and asks the man if they can continue their discussion elsewhere. 

The man leads her out of the room again and thanks her for her time. He gives her his card, says that they’ll be in touch, but that they don’t have plans to perform an autopsy. The attendant at the desk asks about making arrangements for the body. Marissa gives him the address of the funeral home in Dallas, the city where her mother lives. She can deal with the body after today. It’s more than fair.

Marissa leaves the building alone, takes an unsteady breath, coughs when the blowing dust enters her lungs. 

Yesterday, her sister was alive. Today, her sister is dead, aliens have landed on earth, and she can never cross the divide to the other side of either of those truths again. 

She gets back in her car and turns off the radio. She can’t hear the rest of the world right now. She gets back on the freeway, heading east, a long drive back to Austin where nothing will make sense anymore. 

It takes her an hour before she sees it, the small shape looming in her rearview mirror. She doesn’t realize what it is at first; it’s a speck on the horizon line, black and hazy, until suddenly it snaps into focus, and it feels as though Marissa’s heart has fallen out of her chest for the third time today. 

It’s a sleek black triangle with wings spread wide, too inky black and perfect to be made by human hands, maybe five hundred feet in the air. It matches the pictures that Marissa mindlessly scrolled through this morning at the gas station; it’s the vessel that sat atop El Capitan—a looming shadow overhead. It will overtake her car any minute now. 

The other cars on the freeway slow to a stop and Marissa follows suit, chest thudding. Within minutes, the stretch of the highway plunges into shadow, shielded from the sun, the light choked out. 

It doesn’t last more than thirty seconds. The ship hurtles on without stopping, and the sun beats down mercilessly once more. Some of the people around her get out of their cars, pointing, gawking, snapping photos with their phones. Marissa sits unmoving in the driver’s seat, watching the ship disappear into the horizon, entering a new future, and she has no choice but to follow where it leads.