Flash Fiction 1st Place: My Brother, the Alien by Josh Lowe

Ma didn’t tell me Luke was back in town, so when he meets me at the school gate, hair slicked back, Wayfarers on, looking like John Travolta, I barely recognise him. 

“Sup, Squish?” he says. “You’re getting tall.”

I wanna punch him for ditching me in this shitty place, but settle for a hug instead. 

“Where’ve ya been, dipstick?” I say, squeezing the air out of him, but I ease off when I feel how fragile he’s gotten. 

He doesn’t answer my question, just nods towards his Commodore, and says he’ll drop me home.

“This an abduction?” I smirk.

“Only if ya struggle.”

Bob Hawke’s on the radio when the engine starts, talking about the crisis again, but he only gets a few words in about condoms before Luke flips stations and cuts him off with the Y.M.C.A. The lyrics carry more weight now that I’m old enough to know better.

“They still make you dance to this in PE?”

“Relentlessly,” I say, which gets a laugh from Luke, but it’s wheezy and heavy. 

Sweat beads on his neck and trickles over a rash of red stars that protrudes from his collar. His knuckles whiten as we drive past the old church, the one Ma’s dragged me to every Sunday since Luke told her what he was. 

“This is your father’s fault,” she’d said that night. “Should’ve been here. You needed a male role model, now you’re just gonna be… alienated.” 

The words had spilled from the kitchen into our bedroom, so when Luke crawled back to his bed across from mine, cheeks glistening in the moonlight, I asked: 

“You really an alien?”

“What?”

“Ma said you’re an alien, I heard her.”

“No, that’s not what… never mind. Yeah, fuck it, I’m an alien, Squish. Don’t tell anyone though, right?”

“Secret’s safe with me,” I’d said. And it was, but it didn’t matter, people found out anyway. Boys yelled jokes about anal probing. People at church whispered about “his kind” between sermons, and sometimes Luke would come home with skin painted purple. I think even Luke himself started to believe he wasn’t human, and this town was more like his own Area 51 than a home.

The car door groans when I close it, but Luke stays seated with the engine running.

“You coming in?” 

“Nah,” he says. “Already made Ma lose her shit once today, better not push it.”

He extends a shaky finger through the window and I reach out and touch it with mine.

“E.T phone home,” he says, and I laugh.

“You better.”

He flies off down the bitumen, but I never see him again. 

When a man with an extra-terrestrial twang like Luke’s calls to say he’s passed, the quiver in his voice tells me, in the end, Luke wasn’t alone. 

And I don’t ask where he’s buried, because part of me will always want to believe he’s not gone — he just finally found a way to get home.