The Perfect Dream

by Emmie Christie

You amble outside of your in-laws’ house, the one they’ve had for thirty-four years of married life, the one you’ve driven to approximately 784 times if you count all the late-night stops when you dated your now-husband in high school. The air wavers like a mirage in a desert, and this clues you in that a dream has begun.

A white van rolls to a stop outside the house, and six men in masks jump out. Your hair isn’t greasy and you’re not in the hoodie you thought you wore to your in-laws’ house; you’re wearing a sleek midi halter dress with a slit down the leg, and your breath smells like success, like someone from the FBI just called you for your expert opinion on underwater trenches and the possibility of aliens living under the crust on the ocean floor, like some alternate Atlantis. And these aren’t men that just popped out of the van—which is suspiciously too van-like, too generic, like an AI’s rendering of VAN—they have too many fingers to be men, you think. Twenty is too many fingers. Or maybe it’s that their hair flows like it’s underwater, too slow, too languid. They stream toward you like butter on a hot skillet, fast and sizzling, their eyes intent. They will take you.

You, however, are somehow too fast for them to surround even though you only took that one judo class in college, and you remember how to grip the first alien’s wrist and bend it just so, against the joint. And even though they’re aliens, it still works because anything can happen right now, especially if you want it to. Your husband rushes out of the house, because everyone witnessed the van pull up outside from the big front window, and so do your brothers-in-law and their wives. Your sister-in-law announces predictably that, well, her boobs are just so huge, they must have attracted the aliens like gravity.

You swing the first alien-man into the second, bowling them over. The aliens don’t care about your sister-in-law. They are here for you and your frustrating brain that figured out their existence. Only a few seconds have passed, and your husband and brothers-in-law have run halfway to you, but the other four aliens have gathered around you. You rear back to punch one, but they grab your wrist, just as you grabbed the first alien. They are learning from you. One holds a strange vial full of something.

You spin and yank the alien’s arm, bending and hauling him over you in a judo takedown that you never executed in any class, but that you saw in a YouTube video once. The second alien kicks you in the side and you fall. The one with the vial pours it on his ten-fingered hand, then holds it over your mouth. Your eyes flutter, and your husband shouts somewhere close by. He’s reached the aliens. Or are they aliens anymore?

No, their sharp coral cheekbones whisper of fae-ancestry, and the reason their hair flows like they are underwater is because they are underwater. You are now in the ocean. They have shifted the location of the kidnapping, instead of taking you someplace, they brought the place to you, and you can’t help but think how efficient that is. They brought all your in-laws, too, because that’s just how the magic works, and you want everyone to see how important you are for fae-aliens to kidnap you. Everyone’s underwater, but also, everyone can breathe, because you don’t want anyone to die, of course—and you have a mer-tail. It’s shimmering that perfect color, that strange bluish green that appears sometimes in photos of the ocean, but never in real life.

Your tail shivers, and you know, somehow, that you’ve always had alien blood in you, too. The fae-mermen’s faces change from contortions of anger to wide eyes, and you know they realize it, too: that you are a fae-mermaid, and that’s how you knew about the ocean trenches and how they live under the crust of the sea floor. It’s just the flora of their skies. They bow to you as one and fold their hands in a diamond shape, and they say they are very sorry because only the royal fae-mermaids have that tail color, and would you please forgive them? You bow back as the royal blood roars through your veins, and you shift the location back to your in-law’s house because you have the magic to do so and that’s what you want. You can always shift your location to visit the ocean because you’re royalty.

Your husband isn’t weirded out at all at your bloodline, but seems pretty turned on by it, and your sister-in-law hates that when the FBI comes to the house, it’s not because of her giant ta-tas, it’s to talk to you about alien-fae-mermaid relations while you float in the swimming pool. They aren’t aliens, but that’s not what you can tell the public. The public will accept aliens, but not fae-mermaids.

As morning sunlight streams through your bedroom window, the dream-mirage wavers like the tide at a shoreline.