“You see, your skin was blue when you was born,” Judy’s mother would tell her every night before bed. “Eyes big as saucers themselves.” She would brush a curl out of Judy’s face and give her a kiss light as snowfall. “We’re from the stars, girl.”

She never told Judy about the umbilical cord, and how it’d tightly coiled around her frail little neck.

Only once Judy asked, why she “weren’t blue no more, mama?” And her mother grabbed hold of Judy’s wrists tight, so tight they left a mark, and said, “You’ll learn the hard way, but sooner you know, the easier the hard way’s gonna be.” And she leaned in close with breath rank from the warm beer and a secret on her tongue and said, “We blend in, you sweet thing. Otherwise, they’ll getcha. But you and me, we don’t belong here.”

Judy asked where, exactly, they did belong then. And Judy’s mother looked towards the window and out to the desert sky, pointed to a cluster of stars in the Milky Way, which you could see on a clear night, and said, “Ain’t it beautiful?”

Judy, doe-eyed, nodded.

“And that’s where your daddy is, too.” And she told Judy about her father, and how he had, years ago, landed in the desert on a big spaceship and put Judy in her tummy.

“But he had to go back to the stars.” She said, “Promised he’ll come back, though, when you old enough and good and ready. It’s a long way to travel, girl.”

But she didn’t tell Judy that when her father’s truck broke down all those years ago, he’d been making his way toward the western coast and neither had any plans to stay nor love to give a child. Never promised anything, either.

Still, Judy knew that what her mother said was true. She could feel it in the way she was always so desperate to go home– didn’t matter if she was tucked underneath the same, cool sheets she slept in every night, in a room that had always been hers, in a house that she’d never left. Didn’t matter where she was; the longing was proof enough.

#

“Think they’ll come tonight?” Judy’s mother would sometimes have a drink while they sat on the old swing set, huddled beneath a blanket. She’d told Judy on her thirteenth birthday that she was old enough now to make the trip back home, and that, “They could be comin’ back for us. Any day now.”

Most nights, she would fall asleep on the couch with a Walkie-Talkie curled next to her breast like a baby doll while the television flickered into static and the ice melted in her whiskey. Other times, she would run into Judy’s room after midnight and drag her out to the swing set and wait for Them to come.

“Don’t wanna get left now, do ya?” She’d say, leaving her hand’s imprint across Judy’s cheek when she groaned and asked to go back to bed.

“Now tell me. What do you think it’s gonna be like up there?” her mother would ask once they were good and snuggled up, sitting among the dried brush and debris that had piled up in their yard over the years.

It would be a flying saucer; the ones she’d seen so many times on the cover of her mother’s science fiction books. Sleek steel, cold, with glowing blue orbs. And it would come on a night that held change in the air, a change you could only feel in your bones– like spring becoming summer. They would hear it before they saw the lights, a distant chirp and hum and whirring from somewhere behind the silhouette of the dusty mountains. And then the saucer would rise against the dark sky like a giant mechanical moon, still chirping and humming and whirring.

Her mother would run towards it, her pink nightgown and her long, greying hair rioting against its wind as she fell to the ground beating her chest. Judy would inch forward behind her mother, unsure, now,

about leaving the only world she’d ever really known. Still, she would help her mother up from the dry, cracked dirt, and they would hold hands as the beam of sterile white light descended upon them.

She’d wipe a tear from her mother’s cheek, and Judy’s mother would squeeze her hand, as their feet slowly lifted off the ground. Suspended in midair, and rising still towards the opening of the craft, Judy would look out across their plot of land, at the old house, the slouching mountains and the Joshua trees; her broken bike with the tassels, still leaning against the garage door. And she’d think about how it all looked different from up there, better. Peaceful, even.

Then she’d turn to her mother to ask if she was sure, but Judy’s mother wouldn’t bother to look back. So Judy would turn her head upwards, too, and that would be that.

But she was too scared to say that part out loud, about not being sure. So instead she said, “I think it’ll be great, mama.” And her mother would nod and sometimes give her a sip.

“You and me, girl. Home at last.”

#

By seventeen, Judy would usually come and go as she pleased. Delicately closing the front screen door with a hushed click, she’d hold her breath as she tiptoed across the wooden floor as though it were a landmine, its creaky spots unpredictable.

More often than not, though, Judy’s mother would still be on the sofa partially awake, the drone of a rerun lulling her in and out of restless sleep. She was determined to stay up until Judy came home– not because she was worried, but because by then, Judy had forgotten where she’d come from.

“You remember, now, that boy you been sneakin’ around with ain’t one of us.” She’d remind Judy from the darkness of the living room. And Judy’d sigh a heavy sigh at being caught, though she expected it almost every time.

“You hear what I said, girl?” Her mother would snarl from behind clenched teeth.

When Judy’s mother first found out she’d been sneaking out to the dunes, she locked Judy in her room every night for a week, and Judy had worn herself out pounding against the hard, chipped wood.

“What am I supposed to do if They come back and you ain’t here?” Her mother had cried from behind the door she’d locked from the outside.

And now, though there was a threat still hidden somewhere beneath the grit of her mother’s voice, Judy knew that her mother was too tired and too old, now, to force her to stay. Still, some nights Judy could hear the remnants of that fear– the dread of one day having to choose between leaving without Judy or staying for Judy. And though Judy had long since concluded that their “home in the stars” was just a nice story like Santa Claus or Jesus, she figured that for her mother, it was real. That, in her mind, one day the choice would surely come.

So on those nights where fear hid behind her mother’s words, Judy would curl up next to her on the sofa, massage her mother’s swollen calves, and imagine the choice her mother’d make. She couldn’t say for sure whether she’d stay or go.

“Maybe it’s good enough that I found somewhere here to belong, at least.” Judy had said one night to let her mother know that she could leave her behind if They ever did come. But after Judy’s mother slapped her and told her to “never forget there ain’t a place on this planet you belong,” Judy avoided the sofa and, from then on, continued to her bedroom when she snuck back in at night, the smell of cigarette smoke woven into the thread of her clothes.

#

When it finally happened, They only took Judy. There had been no white lights, no whirring or humming, no view from above, no holding hands as they departed for the stars. There was only a pale, morning sun that’d broken through the blinds to wake Judy’s mother from a distant dream, where hushed footsteps had crept across the floorboards to the front door and an idling engine rattled softly from somewhere out in the cold desert night.

But they’d been right about one thing, all those years ago. Even as she cleaned the whiskey from the carpet, which must’ve spilled out of the bottle she’d forgotten to cap– Judy’s mother could feel an invisible change hanging in the house like stagnant air.

She could feel the distance, an absence, even before she crept down the quiet hallway in her quiet house. Before she even got to the doorway of Judy’s quiet room, where empty drawers hung open, their mouths ajar; where a closet was no longer filled with clothes; where pictures had been torn down from a wall.

Judy’s mother slid down and sat, stunned to silence, in the doorway of an abandoned room. This planet, the stars, a house full of things that, once gone, would just as soon forget her– there was no place, anymore, she belonged. And as she cried, she came incredibly close to realizing what Judy must’ve at some point before she’d left.

That home had never really been a matter of where.

END