Invited

One - Timber

It'd been a long time since I'd felt so nervous I wanted to puke. Getting in front of the whole world to tell them that life as we know it was about end was by far the scariest thing I'd ever had to do. And that was saying a lot, I should add, because I used to be quite the daredevil. Even auditioning in front of the biggest names in Hollywood was tame in comparison. I still wasn't even sure what to say. Thankfully for me, Paul was going to write out my grand speech so I didn't have to struggle with finding the right words.

Whenever he was going to arrive. If the "sun" is going down, then I'm pretty sure it's not the afternoon anymore. Paul was only ever late if something important was happening. As the leader of our habitat, he kept order amongst the humans on the starship Salvation. Yeah, starship, as in a spacecraft. I still have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.

Some moments, I would wake up and my time on Earth would be nothing more than a distant memory, and in others it'd be like being at a never ending summer camp – I missed my family and I just wanted to go home. When I'm homesick, that's when being trapped in space is the worst. Bitterness filled me all over again as I remembered how I was forced to come here. Don't get me wrong; Salvation wasn't a bad ship. It had everything I would ever need, and then some – but it also wasn't home. Now that I understood why I had been kidnapped from a mall nearly three months ago, it made being on the ship that much more bittersweet.

Earth was going to die approximately thirty days after I gave my speech, hit by a stray piece of moon that had traveled God only knows how far, only to make contact with the planet I was born and raised on. I didn't want to think about how the people who got left behind would suffer from such a catastrophe. The good news was I could bring my family and friends onto Salvation with me, and that was a small solace. As soon as Paul had given me that tidbit of information, life on the ship got a little more bearable as I started to count down the days until I got to see my mom, dad, and girlfriend again.

Those days on my imaginary calendar were now down to sometime within the week. A week! At most, it would be seven days. For all I knew, it could be tomorrow. Which was another reason I was so nervous. After all, my family didn't know what happened to me on the day I was taken away. They probably assumed I died or something. I couldn't predict how they would react when I told them my tale. Laugh in my face? Be empathetic? Get excited? The possibilities were endless, and given everything I'd experienced in my short time on the ship, anything could happen.

To take my mind off of Paul's tardiness, I watched my roommate, Chevelle, rummage through the kitchen. She was another who had been taken from the mall with me. I had been in her home town doing a promotion for my latest film. While I had been on break, the Achlivans, the aliens who kidnapped us, teleported into the building. Chevelle had been working that day in a toy store, and it was in that store that I decided to seek shelter from the attack. Ever since, we'd been more or less inseparable.

She grunted as she shut the cupboards. "No."

"No?" I asked, getting up from the dining room table and walking over to the spacious, open concept kitchen. "What is 'no'?"

"I'm trying to find something to eat that isn't a chicken nugget, but everything I'm seeing is just gross-sounding." She sighed heavily and went to the freezer to get the box of chicken nuggets.

I crinkled up my nose, because those things were nasty. If a person stopped to actually think about what's in one of those nuggets, I can't imagine why anyone would want to eat them. Disgusting. "You're just craving the chicken because of the nutrients in the meat. Let me make you a nice grilled chicken, or even baked. I can add some vegetables, garlic mashed potatoes, go down and pick you a kiwi, whatever you want."

"The last time you suggested an alternative food to what this growing life form inside of me wanted, I ended up worshiping porcelain for an hour." She glared at me. "Baby wants chicken nuggets, and darn it, I am going to eat them. I don't care how bad they are for me, or what they're going to do to my hips. Newsflash, I'm going to get fat anyway so why delay the inevitable!"