Favourite Children

Taken to the Skies

When I close my eyes, I can still remember the day it happened. We’d been hearing about the disappearances for days: thirty children gone from a school in Peru, a train of people vanished from Egypt, an entire village in Tuscany disappeared.

It isn’t that no one cared. Global search parties were mobilized for each of the escalating catastrophes. Thousands donated their time scouring satellite imagery searching for clues, evidence, or remains.

The first thing I heard was a noise like a hurricane, so out of place in our quiet Muskoka town. The windows rattled in their frames and the ground trembled until the walls shivered and started moaning. My father and I raced from the house in the early morning sunlight, joining our neighbours gathered in the streets. Dust swirled into the air like some sort of dervish, and above our idyllic boulevard the sky shimmered.

There was screaming when the ship finally de-cloaked, hovering like a pot-bellied insect in the sky. Delicate leg-like protrusions extended and touched down to the ground, swiftly lowering the bulky body of the ship. We were already backing away when a high-pitched sound split the air, raising in frequency until only the younger people in the crowd were forced to their knees.

My father, with evident panic and parental concern, took me by the shoulders, trying to coax me to my feet. “Julia,” he whispered urgently, unable to take his eyes off the ship as several hatch doors popped open, “Julia! Come on, come now, move!”

I curled my head down between my arms, seeking any relief for the debilitating noise drilling through my skull. Heavy, metallic footsteps sounded through the fog of pain. I looked up in time to see a hulking, helmeted figure bending over the boy lying next to me, and my father: running away in my peripheral vision.

My arm was grabbed away from my head with one gauntleted hand and pricked with a device. At the time, I didn’t see the screen, didn’t see the results, and didn’t see my captor’s smirk of satisfaction. The only thing I did see was the dusty asphalt as I was picked up and placed (surprisingly gently) into the belly of the ship.

That is how I came to live in the stars.