The Abduction of Meghan Hoigt

Streak Day 4

This is Emily Writes Back, for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

The Abduction of Meghan Hoigt

Illustration by Marshall Hopkins

Planet X Inhabitant Ahhh-Blue-7 Recollects

(Translated from the hot white Blurght)

Intersection unexpected but fortuitous. Rich, heavy planet. Crust of trees. A cacophony of ecstasy and complaint. Flitting time. A wild tossing of salt and bubbles. A pervading discomfort. Chronology fractured. Pinpricks of surging joining that is warm.

By magnetism, we were pulled to one little animal in a box made of striving, frustration, slumber.

We bi-cradled its body and its secondary consciousness at once, but it cried out. We brought it back to us.

Many dancings. You toward? We asked. The little animal glowed and floated. We spun it to fast spinning, which it stopped liking. Meld resisted because to the animal, meld was loss. Back to box we took it softly. The box was full of other little animals now, bopping. Before final ascent, we constructed a message for later. We will green-swirl for the little animal until its planet is complete.

Meghan Recalls Her Abduction

I have been so upset lately about politics. It feels off to even refer to what is happening in this country now as “politics.” It is disaster. It is ridiculous. I toss and turn at night. I write piddly letters to my representatives in Congress. I thought we were a long, smart novel but now we are a cheesy comic book that kills real babies? The combination of dumbness and evil is frightening. I guess I expected evil to be clever and imbecility to be sweet.

Last night, I lay awake in bed. My house, you know, is small, built in the 1950’s. One story. It is a very quiet house, not old enough to creak or clank. I have central air. A heat pump outside the bathroom window. Suddenly, my bedroom was filled—completely filled, every square inch of it—with a semi-opaque purple energy that felt like deep, deep amusement. It was like if laughter had been turned into a gel and pumped into my house. Then I started to float up from my mattress! The only thing that was keeping me from flying up to the ceiling was my bedspread, but then even that stopped working. The laughter took me right up through the ceiling and into the night sky. It actually hurt a little to go through the ceiling and the roof. It’s not like I was a ghost. I was still me with a body, so going through the ceiling felt like being pressed hard between two metal plates or something. In the sky, the purple laughter turned into light blue liquid that was not laughter but concern. I could feel myself responding to the concern with reassurances. “I’m fine!” I thought. “Don’t worry!”

And the next second I was in a tube that went forever. It was a tube through the entire universe. I knew this instantly. And it was sparkly inside the tube, not visually, but the feeling was sparkly. And a choir was signing to me questions that I didn’t quite understand. And then I was spinning, like on an amusement park ride, and I knew somehow that the choir thought I would love this spinning, but I hated it. Then it stopped and I was floated back out of the tube and into the night sky. I heard crickets and a dog barking and police sirens. They put me back in my bed and pulled the covers back over me. I cried out, like “Ahhh!” and my sister who lives in South Carolina rushed into my room and stared at me like I was a ghost. She was wearing an apron and holding a big bowl under one arm and a wooden spoon in her opposite hand.

“Meghan!” she screamed. My other relatives came rushing into the room and all stared at me with their mouths hanging open. It turns out I had been gone—missing without a trace, they said—for six years, and my sister had moved up from South Carolina and was living in my house with her kids and it was Thanksgiving and she was hosting, which is why everyone was there.

I tried to explain what had happened, but it was difficult to keep talking when everyone was crying so hard. My nephews were like men now.

Who is president? I asked. They told me a woman’s name I’d never heard of. I asked what wars were happening. They said “None!” I asked about Marco Rubio. I don’t know why he was who I wanted to know about, but I think because I wanted to hear that he was in prison. But they told me, “He’s dead.”

I thought we would have to face great hardship to overcome the fascists. I thought we would have to all wake up and realize “These people must go NOW.” But my family didn’t tell me those things.

Tonight, after things settled down and we all agreed we needed sleep, I found a hole under my bed. I have wall-to-wall deep-pile cream carpet in my bedroom and the hole goes straight through the carpet and down through the subfloor and into whatever is beneath my house. I don’t have a basement. I dropped in a penny to hear how deep it went, but I never heard the penny land. The hole is too small for me to stick my hand in. There is a breeze that comes up out of it, and a scent. It smells like chewable vitamin C pills or iris, the tall purple flowers. Sweet, delicate, a little tangy, decorative. I know the hole is from the purple laughter. I am lying next to the hole and breathing the freshness and feeling a faint trace of that laughter. Now I can never sell this house or move away? Is this hole the reason things were righted? The reason we are polite to Canada again?