I was six when it happened. She walked into my room — without even knocking, as she would normally do — lingered in the doorway, I remember her hair was put in a ponytail, pajama pants on, she gave me that head to toe glance, that then went on searching the walls and shelves as if she was taking a shapshot of this tiny little space, you know, like taking a photograph with your mind, and then her eyes came back to mine.
She said: “Look,” and she kind of paused (if only you can imagine pausing within such a small portion of time which itself might be considered a pause), but it wasn’t “Look, over there!” although she was stretching her hand towards the window. Neither was it a “Look, we need to talk” type of pitch you may expect from a person that rushes into someone else’s room without a knock, with this fiery look and all shaking.
It was more like “Look, I need to tell you something,” spoken in the tender voice of Sara Connor recording pastoral messages to her as yet unborn son, but drastically distorted by the real-life understanding that it is not possible to pass all this knowledge to a six year old boy in the course of a one-tenth of a second.
She was moving her tongue from the bent position of “l” to the straightened position of “k”, because it was all she had time for, and I was slowly turning my head to where she was almost pointing (I say “almost”, because she actually only started to raise her right hand in order to make this distinctively human gesture), but before any of the details of the black blur that was hovering on the outside came into my sight so I could deduce the shape of a hovering spaceship, in that very moment they took her away.
Jan Vaschuk 