Toxic Room

I've seen the spaceship. I've breathed the toxic air. The probing lights and quiet tones.

I lay on the table, above the cloth draped over it. My body immobile, paralyzed and my mind unable to comprehend what I was seeing. A light hung somewhere above me. It floated from left to right, like a child on a swing. I could hear a voice nearby, though I could not see it's source. It spoke in a tongue I couldn't understand, low with slurring syllables. The voice came closer and what might have been a head appeared above me, blocking the ball of light. The head had no mouth or lips, devoid of a nose and scratchy black holes where eyes should have been. A thin pencil like neck steamed from it's head, attached to it's perfect rectangle that was it's torso. Branches for arms, hands and fingers, it laid it's hand on my neck. I would have screamed, but my voice must have been lost back on Earth. It's wooden looking fingers closed around my neck, and I felt them as if they went through my neck to block my windpipe. I tried to breathe, but the air inside the room had no oxygen. My eyesight left me, but I remained conscious, and aware. I heard sifting and felt the hand on my body being joined by another. The second hand pressing on the bone connecting my ribs. My sternum pushed by a great weight. The weight was lifted soon, at my great relief. I became aware of how cold my arms and legs were in the toxic room, but I couldn't tell my limbs locations. Were they even still attached to my body? The pressure on my chest returned and I could hear the grunts of the alien language pounding in my head. So cold, so heavy. I tried again to scream. The voice told me to keep quiet, to make it easier on myself. I couldn't disobey. I tried to fathom how a creature that made such rough and brutal noises could reconfigure it's vocal chords to our language. As I tried to imagine it, my mind joined my eyesight, and I fell into unconsciousness.

I awoke in a white, unfamiliar room, with a blue blanket wrapped around me. I was curled in a corner, hoping it had just been a dream. The pain in my chest and neck told me it had all been real. I saw my phone lying on the floor, and reached to it, to call me a taxi to take me home. No, not home, anywhere but here and home. I wasn't ready to go home and look in the mirror, at my damaged body.

I'll never know what the creatures wanted with me. Frankly, I don't want to.