I wake up and jolt upright. I can’t get my eyes to focus, but someone is in front of me. I hear my friend Alice’s voice, but she sounds like she’s underwater.

“Alice?” I ask. “Are we in the cabin already? I don’t remember arriving.”

I was driving to the cabin. That’s the last thing I remember. I was meeting Alice there, and Amber was coming too. I don’t remember actually getting there, or seeing Alice or Amber. Did we get completely wasted as soon as I got there? I feel weird, but not hungover.

We were going to spend the weekend at a cabin we rented. We weren’t planning on drinking that much. I wanted to go hiking in the morning, so why would I have got completely sloshed?

I look around the room, my eyes searching for something that could make sense or explain where we are. I see faint purple light, as if the walls were glowing. I blink a few times, trying to snap everything into focus, or to will the surroundings around me into something that makes any kind of sense.

“It’s not the cabin,” Alice says.

She looks away from me when she says it. My eyes are focused enough now to see how scared she looks.

I look around again, and I realize that there is something completely wrong about where we are. It’s as if it couldn’t possibly be real. I look down and realize that the thing I’m sitting in is wrapped around my naked body. It looks like it’s swallowing me, so I pull reflexively away from it.

Alice catches me before I crash into the ground, and I realize that she’s naked too. Did some freak kidnap us? Did he drug us, and that’s why I don’t remember where we are?

I look up at the thing that was swallowing me, but it looks just like some weird bed now–a completely flat shape rather than something that could have been wrapped around me while I sat up.

“Why are we naked?” I whisper to Alice.

Alice has been awake longer than I have, but I fear her answer. I can’t think of a single good answer she could give that would be anything other than terrifying.

Instead of answering me, she asks me a question. That is somehow worse than any answer.

“What was the last thing you saw?” she asks me. “The last thing you remember?”

I was driving to the cabin. That’s it. But then, as I stare at the strange purple glow of the wall, a buried memory works its way back up to the surface. I remember seeing a purple glow high up in the dark black sky. I can feel my foot pressing on the brake, and I remember leaning forward to look up at that light through the windshield after I pulled off the road. I remember seeing it flash bright. I struggle for memories past that. I hit a dead end.

“Some purple light,” I say. “Getting brighter. Getting closer I think.”

“Were you driving?” Alice asks.

I nod.

Alice looks at me, and says in a flat and perfectly serious voice, “I think we’re inside that purple light, Elsie. I think it’s an alien ship.”

I pretty much lose it right then and there. I had an ex-boyfriend, Derek, who insisted aliens were real, saying he’d even seen one of their ships before. He also thought 9/11 was an inside job, and I eventually broke up with him when he told me the Israeli special forces were tracking his every move.

Alice doesn’t have a crazy bone in her body. She’s solid as a rock. She runs her own photography studio, she does her taxes months before they are due, and she is always the one who slaps me back to reality when I’m freaking out and being paranoid about something. She was also the one who told me to break up with my crazy ex well before I realized how bad he was. I even remember her once saying something like “anyone who believes in little green men is an idiot, Elsie.” I remember repeating that to Derek, and him responding: “They aren’t green, they’re greys! Or do you mean the lizard people? The jury is still out on them.”

Now she’s telling me we’re on a freaking alien ship. It’s too much. I sit back onto the bed, and it swallows me up, moving like a living thing trying to form a chair. I jump off and step away, looking at it like it’s a snake.

“There must be another explanation,” I whisper. “It’s some weird prank, or–”

“I saw them,” Alice says. “The aliens.”

I glare at her. “Tell me Derek wasn’t right. Tell me it wasn’t a ‘grey’ or a ‘lizard person.’”

Alice sighs. “Derek was crazy. But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and a guy like Derek believed in thousands of paranoid things that weren’t real. It turns out he was right about at least one thing…”

“Jesus,” I say, pacing back and forth and gasping for air.

“The alien,” Alice says. “I saw him. He was...don’t look down on me when I say this, okay?”

“What?” I ask. “What could you possibly say that would make this any weirder?”

“He was gorgeous,” Alice says.

I start laughing, a kind of crazy and breathless laugh. If this were a prank, then I’d assume Alice were the one doing the prank. Not that she’s the kind of woman who would ever do something like this.

“Think of the ideal body,” Alice says.

“I’m not in the mood,” I hiss.

“So imagine the most red shade of red you’ve ever seen,” she says. “The reddest of red. Then imagine you open your eyes and see something twice as red, something that shouldn’t be possible. An impossible color. That’s what this alien was, but just an impossibly gorgeous man.”

“Maybe your brain is just misfiring,” I whisper. “To cope.”

Alice shakes her head. “I couldn’t have imagined it,” she says. “And he was teal. And he had horns.”

This time I laugh even longer. Tears form in my eyes, at first because I laughed so hard, but later because I’m terrified and sad and hopelessly confused.

Alice hugs me, and I look up into her big green eyes and sigh. “Did he hurt you?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know, but he’s the one who brought you in. Slung over his shoulder.”

“Jealous?” I ask, winking at her.

She scoffs, but I see her cheeks redden.

“Wow,” I say. “He must really look good. Are you sure he looked totally human? And how do you know he was a ‘he,’ did you see his–”

“Shut up!” Alice says, giggling and hitting me on the arm.

I realize with a sudden intensity that I have to pee. That I’ve been holding it for a long time. I remember stopping at a gas station just to pee, but the bathroom was out of order. I look around and see nothing even resembling a toilet.

“I have to pee,” I say, looking around in desperation. Maybe Alice found the bathroom and can teach me how the thing works. I assume the toilet will be as weird as the shapeshifting bed.

Then I see her looking around, and I realize she hasn’t thought of it yet. We’re stuck in here with nowhere to pee. Maybe the aliens don’t even know we have to do that.

“I’ll hold it…” I say, not quite sure I really can.

Alice starts pounding on one of the walls and shouting that we need food and water, and that I have to pee. I realize there is no door at all. How did I get in here? Did Alice really see a super hot alien with horns and teal skin haul me in here, or did she just dream that, and we both woke up here?

I pull on her shoulder and try to get her to be quiet. If there are aliens holding us prisoner, the last thing I want is for Alice to get them angry with us.

Alice pounds harder, and I pace nervously back and forth, mostly just because I have to pee so bad.

The wall flashes brighter, and I look up and squint at the sudden surge of light.

The wall melts away, and I wait to see the most gorgeous alien man I’ve ever seen. Absolute monsters walk through. Short things with huge heads, bug-like eyes, and weirdly proportioned limbs.

They scurry in like insects, and I see that their skin is a bright, vomit-green color. Not teal.

One of them is holding a long, metal object, and it strikes Alice with it. Her body twitches as if she were jolted by electricity, and her body crumples to the ground.

I scream and run, soon finding myself cowering in a corner. They move so much faster than they should be able to, crouching down and moving like animals.

I shield myself with my arms, but the electric rod hits me in one of my forearms. I feel the jolt all through my body, but it hurts worst in my teeth. I don’t even remember hitting the ground. I just look up and see that I’m on the floor, and every muscle in my body is sore and aching.

My only solace is that they left me alone. They are all leaning over Alice, holding glowing machines up to her body. They poke and prod her, and a shudder runs through me when I wonder just how deep they might probe us.

“You said they looked human,” I try to say to Alice. My voice comes out in a slurred jumble, and I wonder if she can even hear me. She said the alien was gorgeous. I look at these things, like vomit-colored radiation victims who move around like cockroaches. Maybe Alice’s taste in men is even worse than mine.

“These ones are different,” she says, her voice as mushy and hard to understand as mine must be. “The other one was…”

She seems to lose strength and go limp. She probably imagined “the other one.” If I were alone and saw these horrible things, I might just have imagined seeing something else as some type of coping mechanism. Something I’d wish I’d seen. Anything but these disgusting green things.

I’m a psychiatrist, and I’ve worked with patients who have even more vivid hallucinations than this in order to cope with external traumas.

The wall melts away again, and I consider just closing my eyes. The team of green monsters that is going to probe me might be coming in, and–

The thing that fills the opening in the wall is different. The silhouette is all I see at first, an impossibly tall and perfectly sculpted man. Only when it steps forward into the light and I see his teal skin do I realize it’s not actually a man. Alice didn’t imagine it, and even though my breath catches in my chest, and my stomach drops at the sight of his perfectly sculpted body, fear fills me more than anything.

Does it matter how attractive the thing holding us captive and torturing us is? Somehow it makes it worse, because from this gorgeous and muscular teal man I’d expect some form of humane treatment. I’d hope for something better. But more likely than not he’s just in charge of these green things, and he’ll show no mercy to any of us.

He looks at me for the briefest of moments, his eyes a glorious shade of violet. His face is utterly perfect, but he spares me no more than a fraction of a second’s consideration. He looks away from me almost at once. It’s only after he turns away that I notice he’s holding a woman over his shoulder. He throws her down. It’s Amber. So they got her too.

The teal alien faces the green, insect-like aliens and Alice, and he shouts and growls in some alien tongue. The green aliens pull away from Alice. They hesitate, but he growls even louder, and they rush out of the room on all fours.

The alien crouches down beside Alice, looking at her as if she were the only woman in the room. I try to move closer, but my muscles still feel like rubber. I see Alice and the alien lock eyes, and the way they look at each other makes me feel like I should look away. It’s the feeling you get when you see two people making out in public, or doing something even more than that, but the two of them are simply looking at each other, and it feels like I’m watching them fuck.

The alien’s mouth moves, and I hear a nervous laugh from Alice.

The first thing I can make out from the alien is him saying, while looking down at Alice’s naked body, “You have good breasts.”

I can’t help but laugh at that, even as I’m surprised he speaks English with a gruff and strange accent.

“You have good lines. Nice shape,” he adds.

He holds his hand out toward her, not touching her, but tracing the shape of her through the air.

“Jesus,” I say, not sure if I’m jealous now.

The alien turns and looks at me for the first time since Alice caught his attention. I find myself hoping he’s going to tell me how nice my shape is, feeling stupid and giddy like a schoolgirl with a crush. Instead he glares at me for the briefest time, then fixes his gaze back on Alice.

I do look away this time, as he crouches down beside Alice. He’s clearly taken by her, and not by me. I don’t know if I should be happy for her or not, because this is all too weird for me. Given our situation, Alice is either the luckiest woman in this room, or the unluckiest.

Maybe Amber and I will be set free, and Alice–as the greatest prize–will be held here forever.

Alice has big, wide hips, and breasts to match. Her green eyes are framed by long lashes, and it’s honestly no surprise to me that she has been chosen by the big, horned alien.

I’ve always been mousey, and even though I like to work out and go biking most weekends, I still don’t have the nice big ass that men seem to like so much these days. It seems even aliens have similar taste to men on Earth.

I see the alien stand from the corner of my eye, and I look back up at him. I feel a painful longing all through my body, knowing that he has eyes only for Alice. Logically I don’t want him–not at all–but something deep within my body aches for a man that looks like him. Alice’s explanation of a color redder than red is exactly how I feel. He’s a man that is more masculine than any man on Earth, something I’d never had been able to imagine, had I never seen him.

He stands within that opening in the wall for a long moment, his body mostly darkened again to pure silhouette. I can see only those brilliant purple eyes almost glowing down at us from his towering height.

He opens his mouth, and I feel the tension build between Alice and me. Amber is still asleep. The alien seems ready to say something important. Maybe it’s a profound insight on the human condition, maybe he’ll tell us a great secret about the universe, or at least he’ll tell us why we are here and what our future holds.

His eyes narrow, and he looks from Alice to me. “You may pee in your beds.”

“Excuse me!” I say, standing up on wobbly legs.

“Food will be sent,” he says, and then he’s gone. The wall shuts behind him as soon as he steps away.

I stumble toward Alice and crouch down beside her, just as the alien had.

“What did he say to you?” I ask. “He would barely even look at me...but he was like, magnetically drawn to you. Alice, What did he say? Other than that he liked your boobs.”

I see her hesitate. She bites her lip and look away from me. After a long moment she says, “Just more of what you heard. He’s a perv.”

I can tell she’s lying to me, but not to hurt me. I already feel hurt, mostly in my kidneys, which are about to burst.

I look over at Amber and see she’s still asleep. I frown, feeling jealous at how soundly she’s sleeping. Jealous that she’s still completely unaware of what has happened to us, of where she is.

“We should let her sleep,” Alice says.

I nod.

* * *

After a long debate, we decide that I should pee in the bed.

Alice made some long argument where she dropped in a bunch of fancy sounding physics words like “nanotechnology,” assuring me that her big alien boyfriend wasn’t just messing with us.

“I swear to God,” I tell Alice. “If I pee on this bed and it just gets soaked, then I’m taking your bed.”

“Fine,” Alice says.

Without going into too much detail, the bed does absorb everything. When I’m done, there is no smell or hint that I just peed all over my bed.

“Did it work?” Alice asks, covering her eyes with her hands.

“Yes,” I say.

“Thank God,” Alice says. “Because sooner or later one of us is going to need to poop.”

We see Amber stirring, and when she wakes up, Alice and I spend a good hour or two bringing her up to speed. She takes it worse than I did. After she finishes the initial denial and accepts the reality of our situation, she just goes into a fetal position on her bed. Her eyes look withdrawn, and she ignores Alice and me talking to each other.

“You know, Amber,” I say, looking over at her. “It’s kind of like the cabin in here. The three of us are together, and we’ll probably be here even longer than just the weekend we planned for.

She glares at me, just like the teal alien did.

I shrug.

Seriously, it could be a lot worse. I imagine what it was like for Alice, waking up here totally alone.

The wall glows again, and I take Amber by the hand. “Let’s hope it’s the teal one and not the green ones.”

I feel her shudder. That probably wasn’t the most comforting thing I could have said.

When the shadow fills the entire frame, I realize it’s the teal alien. He struts into the room, but doesn't spare Amber or me so much as a glance.

He grabs Alice by the hand and he pulls her toward the door. His large, wide back blocks her from view, and I hear muffled words from each of them.

When I see him pulling her toward the door, I rush toward him. I just got done thinking about how bad it would be if we were alone, and now he’s going to try to take Alice away? Not on my watch.

Just as I reach him, he shoves his hand toward me. I try to weave around it, but he just moves his arm, and his wide palm presses into my face. When I push forward, he stiffens his arm and holds me at his massive arm’s reach.

“I have only room to take one of you,” the alien says, looking at me for the first time since he entered the room.

He growls, and if it weren’t already painfully obvious, he tugs on Alice and says, “I take her!”

Tears are streaming down Alice’s face as the alien pulls her toward the door. I dig my nails into his arm, trying to fight my way past him, but he holds me at arm’s length as he backs through the door, and just as he goes through, he pushes me. Hard.

I stumble backward, barely able to stay on my feet, but the door shuts tight before I can even regain my balance.

And just like that, Alice is gone.