Upwardly Mobile

by Jeff Baker

“Oh, crap!” Alonso said. “There goes another one.”

The two men stood in the supermarket parking lot and watched as a beam of white light from the sky lifted up one of the parked cars and took it away.

“Glad it wasn’t mine.” Edward said.

“Hey, yours is an old junker,” Alonso said. “Besides, it’s still in the shop, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Edward said. “Hey, thanks for the lift anyway.”

“Anytime,” Alonso said.

The aliens had arrived several months before. They had established little contact and their ships hadn’t landed. They broadcast a message to the governments of Earth that Earth was in the section of space that they owned and they were “borrowing” things.

Mainly unoccupied cars.

It’s like a bad SNL sketch,” Edward’s Dad had said. “THEY have arrived and THEY want our cars.”

So far nobody had figured out why.

“Looks like yours is still here,” Edward said, pushing the shopping cart as Alonso fished his key out of his pocket and clicked open the trunk.

“Yeah,” Alonso said as they started loading the trunk with grocery bags. “Hey, somebody on NPR said most of the cars are being taken from public lots, not from people’s driveways.”

“Tell that to my neighbor,” Edward said. “She says space people took her car from her driveway last week. I think it was repoed.”

They slammed the trunk shut.

“Hey, thanks again for…Watch out!” Edward said.

An intense white beam of light shot down from the sky. In another moment, the empty shopping cart rose into the air and soon disappeared into the clouds.

Alonso and Edward stared up after the vanished cart.

“Looks like the store’s not getting that one back,” Edwardo said.

“Hey, I bet the aliens are bored teenagers!” Alonso said.

—end—