By Michael Loyd Gray
I reckon them Harvard people are smart enough alright. For woke folk, anyway. One of them wrote just the other day on how maybe space aliens walk among us. They might be smack-dab on the next bar stool. Or in line at Walgreen’s. The pretty little cashier with a swishing ponytail at the Piggly-Wiggly could be one.
I saw all that in the Enquirer while buying beef jerky and smokes. Them aliens somehow take over human bodies. Just look around you. You might be surprised. Maybe you’re looking right square at one and don’t even know it.
Or someone’s checking you out, wondering if you’re the one.
I glance at napping Ebbett, his mouth hanging open—a play cave for flies—and I think, nope, no need to worry about old Ebbett. He’s human as they come. Aliens wouldn’t try and take him over at all. There’s probably not much inside old Ebbett.
But maybe old Ebbett is one of them already. Maybe has been for years. Since he was a boy sucking his momma’s tit. Maybe little green men are running him from inside, like a machine. Maybe they done somehow climbed inside his wrinkled, splotchy skin.
Now, I don’t get how that works. Living inside someone. How you could do it without killing somebody. I guess it must be true that space aliens don’t need to breathe. Not like us, anyway. They must have their ways, and as a body grows, there’s more elbow room for the little green men inside. That’s space aliens for you. They’re more than us. I reckon they’d know things and do things we can’t even imagine.
Old Ebbett stirs some in his chair, fidgeting, eyes fluttering. Maybe that’s the little green men pulling his strings and scoping me out—through his eyes. Maybe I’m looking square at one and it’s staring back at me.
I wave.
Wink.
Frown.
Smile.
Flip the bird.
I make all the damn goofy faces I know, which ain’t too many, really. His head lolls to a side, his pink tongue peeking out just a tad, the way I’ve seen cats sleep. Do little green men hide inside cats? Naw—too damn small, I reckon. They wouldn’t waste time on cats or dogs or even a giraffe. How would they handle that long neck a giraffe’s got? Little green men likely prefer a prowling lion. That’s if they go in for animals at all. The Enquirer didn’t say nothing about that.
I reach over and slap old Ebbett’s elbow. He stirs but is still half asleep. I smack again and his eyes try to focus. He coughs. Do little green men sleep at all? Do they sleep when their human body sleeps? What are the dreams of little green men?
“Ebbett,” I say. I shake his arm. “Wakey-wakey, Ebbett. Or whoever the fuck you are.”
His eyes open but flutter like shutters as he sits up. I look closely, leaning toward him. I stare into Ebbett’s eyes. Is a little green man staring back at me? I lean in closer and look.
He’s finally awake and stares at me a few seconds, blinking.
“Get out of my face,” he says calmly.
Is that old Ebbett talking? Or a little green man?
“What color are your eyes, Ebbett?”
He looks confused.
“My eyes?”
“Yeah – your damn eyes. Both of them.”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? Fuck you, Ebbett. What damn color are your eyes?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Just tell me the fucking color.”
“Green,” he says after a moment. “They’re fucking green. Happy?”
“Hah!” I say, easing back in my chair. “They’re green.”
“What are you so hah-hah about?”
“Nothing. Not a damn thing.”
“You’re on about something. I know that look.”
“Yeah? Well, you don’t know shit. Maybe we don’t know nothing at all about each other. Maybe nobody knows shit about anything.”
“Maybe,” he says, chuckling, and his eyes suddenly look funny, sort of lit up.
“There!” I say, pointing at his eyes.
“There what?”
But his eyes are normal again.
“Never you mind,” I say.
He scowls.
“You’re mental. Always have been.”
I stand and glare at him, my fists balled, but slowly they unclench like they have minds of their own.
“Time to go to work,” I say.
On the way out to the truck, I glance in a hallway mirror and stop. I step right to the glass, my face almost touching it, and look into my eyes. They’re brown. Always have been.
But that don’t prove anything, I realize.
I could be one of them, too.
We pull into a far corner of the Circle K lot, over where I’m pretty sure there’s no cameras. We’re not in the town we live in. That’s how you do this trade. You move around. You keep the old low profile. You get in and get out. No fuss, no muss.
“I’m the lead this time,” old Ebbett says as he fishes his red bandanna from a jacket pocket.
“Says who?”
Is that old Ebbett deciding or a little green man telling him what to say? I watch him tie up the bandanna, slip it up over his nose, and put on sunglasses.
“Says me.” He looks at himself in the rearview mirror.
“But who are you?”
He shakes his head.
“Just put on your bandanna.”
I do it, fumbling a bit to get the knot just right to hold it up.
“Are your eyes really green?” I say, injecting a round into the barrel of my Glock.
“Does the Pope shit in the woods? I told you they are – okay?”
We walk quickly to the door, passing under a mirror above it, the kind that distort images, and old Ebbett’s head grows very wide, like how I imagine a space alien head to be. Mine’s suddenly big, too, and I shudder, wondering if there really is someone inside me, a dreaming green man pulling my strings.
“Michael Loyd Gray’s prose unspools with the unmistakable cadence of a storyteller.”
–Stuart Dybek
My stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, La Piccioletta Barca, The Brussels Review, Alligator Juniper, Arkansas Review, Aura Literary Arts Review, Sagging Meniscus—The Exacting Clam, I-70 Review, Litro Magazine, Socjeta Literary Review, Adelaide Literary Magazine, FictionWeek, New Plains Journal. Westchester Review, Flashpoint!, Black River Syllabary, Verdad, Palooka, Hektoen International, Potomac Review, Home Planet News, SORTES, The Zodiac Review, Literary Heist, Evening Street Press & Review, Two Thirds North, JONAH Magazine, Press Pause, El Portal, Shark Reef, Cholla Needles, The Waiting Room, Burningword Literary Journal, Your Impossible Voice, Litbop, Flare Journal, Fictional Café, The Mantelpiece, Deep Wild Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, WINK, Bone Parade, OpenDoor Magazine, Brief Wilderness, Timada’s Diary, A Plate of Pandemic, Deep Overstock, SamFiftyFour, Otherwise Magazine, Taj Mahal Review, The Vincent Brothers Review, Commuter Lit, Sensitive Skin, BlazeVox, The RavensPerch, and Johnny America. I’m a member of the Society of Midland Authors and author of eight published books of fiction and fifty published stories. My novella Busted Flat, winner of a Literary Titan Gold Award, was released in October 2024. My novella Donovan’s Revolution, winner of a 2025 International Impact Award for Contemporary Fiction, was released in June 2024. Forthcoming for January 2025 — Night Hawks, a novella. My novel The Armageddon Two-Step, winner of a Book Excellence Award, was released in December 2019. My novel Well Deserved won the 2008 Sol Books Prose Series Prize and my novel Not Famous Anymore garnered a support grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation in 2009. My novel Exile on Kalamazoo Street was released in 2013. My novel The Canary, which reveals the final days of Amelia Earhart, was released in 2011. King Biscuit, my Young Adult novel, was released in 2012. I am the winner of the 2005 Alligator Juniper Fiction Prize and 2005 The Writers Place Award for Fiction. I earned a MFA in English in 1996 from Western Michigan University, where I was a Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society scholar (3.93 GPA). I was also a fiction editor for Third Coast, the WMU literary magazine. At WMU, I studied with MacArthur Fellow Stuart Dybek, Writer in Residence at Northwestern University, and John Smolens, former head of the MFA program at Northern Michigan University. I earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, where I studied with Flannery O’Connor Award winner Daniel Curley. For ten years, I was a staff writer for newspapers in Arizona and Illinois.
losing our grip on purpose 