The Brides

The tip of him nudged against my ass and I gripped the bride's breasts, mounting her more deeply as he plunged into me.

The crackle of his starched uniform against my body and the warmth of the bride's cunt wrapped around my cock drove me to orgasm, filled with him and filling her. I leaned forward, still caressing the bride's member and gently bit her shoulder as I shuddered and released into her body. The policeman wrapped his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me against his chest speaking in a language not comprised of words or even sounds, but the pressure of his exhalation of breath.

I realized that the chittering I heard earlier was this mode of communication. Each small whoosh of breath, chopped and cut by their divided tongues, was their words, their songs, their stories. It told tales like morse code and I suddenly longed to be privy to this private world of theirs. I wanted to belong to them. I wanted to be married to them, if such an institution existed in their culture. I turned to kiss the policeman, who was slowly morphing into a bride identical to the ones who surrounded us in the beginning. His uniform dropping off of his body in sheets like a peeling sunburn only to be swept up by a creature that looped itself into a neon-yellow hoop with rows of vents along the sides that opened and closed like rows of blinking eyes.

The bride under my hands slipped from my grasp like a stranger at a wedding dance and glided over the bridge to huff and chitter with the others. The brides stared at me with their glossy eyes for a moment before I felt a single sharp prick in the side of my neck.

Then the world went black.

Vietnam - Phu Bai Combat Base- August 10th 1967

They are sending us home. Dippy and Greener and me. We have been medically separated. Honorably discharged. Cast out to live amongst the people who have forgotten us, abandoned us in this country. I thought I would be happier, but instead I am scared. What if the brides can't find us?

They told us we were experiencing a "shared delusion" and that we are all hallucinating together. Because of the shell shock, they said. Because of what happened out there. We saw too much.

When they found us we were ten miles from camp. I was naked from the waist up and Dippy had two black eyes. Greener was missing his boots and mine were on the wrong feet. We clung to one another, trying to remember our training. We had trouble speaking for two weeks, except to each other. Our words were clipped and tight and we realized as we spoke that these weren't words at all, but the same chuffing sounds the brides made.

They are going to put us on a plane soon.

United States - Cut Off, Louisiana - September 3rd 1968

It's been about a year since I got back from the war. I tried to tell folks about my experience with the UFO, but Daddy took me to our priest who claimed I had a religious experience of some kind. Angels and the Christ child and all that. He said that angels in the bible don't look like the ones with benevolent eyes and fine noses we all see made of marble or painted onto funeral fans. He said that they look like what I described. His knobby finger scanning the pages of the bible to show me verses about seraphim.

I told him that it was impossible for that to be true because the brides healed us and loved us, and God and his angels wrote it into their plan for Davis and Coco to be cut in two by a booby trap and that all their crying and praying didn't do shit.

He said they had crossed the river Jordan that them scooping up their guts was their trial to be with our most loving father.

Fuck that. Loving fathers come running when they hear their children scream.

I never went back to church after that. My mother looks at me with hurt eyes now. Most people do. They skirt around me like a dangerous dog, mostly because I am a veteran now. They don't want to hear about the war. They don't want to hear about UFOs. They want me to shut up and let them buy their barbeques and television sets. They don't want to be reminded of us with our herniated discs and shiny-scarred limbs.

I got a letter from Greener. He lives in Mississippi, but says he found a place for us to go together. He said there's a place in Colorado where all kinds of "portals" open and close because of the iron content in the mountains. There have been reports out there of UFO sightings and abductions, though I think "abduction" is really the wrong word. I like to think we were chosen, rather than abducted.

Greener is coming to pick me up in a week and we'll go to Texas to find Dippy.

United States - Crestone, Colorado - October 28th, 1968

We came to Crestone to find the brides and we did it. We found them. But this time, they brought us aboard to say goodbye.

They crowded around us on the main deck, chortling and petting us. One of them waved a spherical device around our faces and pressed a thin, flat piece of metal against our ear lobes. They kissed us and let us talk to them, their eyes shifting from opaque cobalt to the odd replication of human eyes without pupils.

They stroked our hair as we sprawled in their laps, weeping into the silken fabric stretched over their thighs. They never hushed us, just tilted their heads to our weeping and used pipettes to suck away our tears and drip them into tiny transparent tubes.

There was no sex this time, just a long and gracious holding process before they deposited us about three miles outside of town. Our clothes switched again. We pulled one another into a tight three-way embrace and touched our foreheads together, giggling at the absurdity of my belly poking out from under Dippy's tiny yellow t-shirt and Greener's beaded vest tucked around Dippy's thighs like a bizarre pair of short shorts.

We all peered up together to see if we could see their ship flash across the horizon one more time.

The night sky in the arid scrubland was splintered with comets and hot white stars against the velvet blackness. Winks and reddish pulses dotted the expanse above us before a faint white streak flashed and then disappeared over the mountains.

We stood together, our arms draped over each other's shoulders for awhile before trading shoes and walking back into town, our breath flooding out before us in white clouds.