On adjacent tables, suspended in the same amber gloom, were other people. A man with a salt-and-pepper beard, his chest slowly rising. A teenage girl, her mouth open in a silent O of terror. And in the corner, a small shape.
Her daughter, Claire, blamed the menopause. Her doctor, a kind but busy man, prescribed mild sedatives. The sedatives made the missing time worse. Martha would find herself standing in the pantry at noon, holding a can of beans, with no idea how she’d gotten there. She’d find strange, small cuts on the soles of her feet, as if she’d walked over broken glass in her sleep.
Martha Kellogg stopped sleeping in the spring of her sixty-third year. It wasn’t insomnia, not the fretful kind where you worry about taxes or grandchildren. It was a forgetting. She’d lie down, feel the cool pillow, and then—nothing. A blink. And the clock would read 3:00 AM, then 5:00 AM, with a hollow space carved out of her memory where hours should have been.
“He asked about you. I said you were brave. See you next cycle, Grandmother.” Budd Hopkins Intruders.pdf
The cold table welcomed her. The gray figures slid into view, their faces smooth as river stones. She did not scream this time. She turned her head.
When Martha Kellogg woke at 6:00 AM, the sun was bright on her face. The bruise on her thigh was gone. The journal on her nightstand was open to a new page. In her own handwriting, but slanted—as if written by a hand that had never quite learned human curves—was a single line:
Martha closed the book. She looked at her hands—old, spotted, real. And for the first time in sixty-three years, she smiled at the dark. On adjacent tables, suspended in the same amber
She had never believed in little green men. She was a retired librarian from Duluth. She believed in card catalogs, due dates, and the solid weight of empirical truth. But she had also read Budd Hopkins’ book years ago, shelving it in the “New Age & Paranormal” section with a skeptical sniff. Intruders . The word now lodged in her throat like a fishbone.
Then she saw the others.
She was on a table. Not a hospital table—cold, metallic, curved to the shape of her spine. The air smelled of ozone and rust. Figures moved in the periphery, short, with domed heads and skin the texture of wet porcelain. They didn't walk so much as slide, their movements economical, devoid of the fidgety chaos of human gesture. And in the corner, a small shape
Collect what? Martha wondered. Her eggs were dust. Her womb was a dried-up furnace. But the child in the dream—the one with the curl of hair—had looked at her with eyes the color of a winter sky. And in that look was not love, but a deep, ancient recognition.
That night, she did not fight the missing time. She left a note on the kitchen table for Claire, just in case: "Don't look for me until dawn. I need to know who he is."
The dreams started later, but they felt less like dreams and more like recovered files.
A child. No more than four. It had her husband’s chin and her own unruly curl of hair.