Gravity

Trudy sat stunned as she watched Earth explode outside the port she crouched against in a spaceship she was still uncertain as to how she’d boarded.  Certainly it was through no conscious effort on her part.  Until this very moment she had never even believed in UFOs, much less known anyone who had ever claimed to be abducted, or particularly care for the science fiction genre in general.  She preferred stories with dragons, thank you very much.

She wondered, absently, if she should have a towel.  Somewhere in the recesses of her mind was a vague reference, possibly something her eternally odd friend Barry (or, she guessed, now to be considered the late Barry) had said to her once, in which context she didn’t have the vaguest of clues, and wasn’t about to begin trying to remember now.

It was dark, wherever it was she’d found herself in the ship, so even if she wanted to guess about that, she didn’t want to try.  Trudy tended to guess poorly.  In high school she’d had a particularly sadistic science teacher come up with a mock game show, and she’d been a poor contestant.  For some reason she kept coming up with the same obviously (obviously!, she still screamed inside her head, even now) wrong answer, and saying it in different ways just as if that would make a difference (although to be fair, Trudy’s British accent is top notch, which she wondered might come in handy now, all considered), which of course it didn’t.

Strange, the things you’ll think about in times of crisis, which Trudy assumed this must be, just as she had to believe that whoever it was that had inexplicably kidnapped her at a time like this had not done so to any expansive degree.  Which was to say, she was likely the sole survivor of the planet, the last human.

That was when she started to cry, in horror of all the things her imagination told her would be different about the aliens anatomically.

Sheer panic was the only thing that prevented anything worse from occurring to her, in the immediate sense.  Later, Trudy would experience all the emotions and thoughts that are no doubt, and in fact have been, occurring to you as you’ve attempted to keep up with this gibberish. 

When the door, or whatever variety of such a thing it happened to be, for brevity’s sake, opened the very next moment, Trudy caught herself in the midst of preparing a wild retort, since after all she wasn’t sure whether or not to be grateful, if indeed there was anyone on the other side.  Except there wasn’t, and so she determined to go in search of someone to address, if not for answers then for something to eat.

Because, just before the world ended, Trudy had been enduring intense negotiations with what she would soon find out to be the responsible party.  It was then she regretted having run for office in the first place.