HAND SIGNS

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      after Steven Spielberg

 

      #

 

The UFO phenomenon, as studied by my colleagues and myself, bespeaks the action of some form of intelligence... but whence this intelligence springs, whether it is truly extra-terrestrial, or bespeaks a higher reality not yet recognized by science, or even if it be in some way or another a strange psychic manifestation of our own intelligence, is much the question.

 

— J. Allen Hynek in an address to the United Nations, November 27, 1978

 

       #

 

      I. G

 

Ask me if I remember you.

 

I was just a kid then, after all,

and you were crying in the bathtub—

 

and more than I remember you

I remember what owned you:

 

the song, the craft, the mountaintop. 

 

I remember a windowless room

and sheets of onionskin paper

 

and the words abduction, voluntary,

and learning how to sign my name

 

just to consent to your abandonment.

 

I remember that unhemmed Indiana night 

when you swept us all into the truck—

 

sunburned, manic, spitting 

love and wonder on the windshield—

 

and we went reckless down the backroads

and Mom’s laughter ran through us like thread

 

and you told me look up, look up.

I remember how fun it was, how vital,

 

until it wasn’t.

 

I remember the living room, after

Mom had carried Toby up to bed:

 

it was me and you, with one lamp on 

and dawn settling on the sills,

 

and you whispered to me what you’d seen

and what you would search for tomorrow

 

and you told me it was beautiful

and I did not really believe you

 

until I did. 

 

I remember the tears first,

then the rest. 

 

       II. A

 

Ask me if I miss you.

 

Where you are, I guess it’s just a matter 

of degrees—if I held up your absence

 

next to UY Scuti, for scale, it would not be visible

at all. My life expanded wider without you, years,

 

only little years. It isn’t a contest. 

Should the universe miss a single chunk 

 

of space debris? Should the Hildas miss a penny? 

 

I miss the old garage in Muncie

and your strange clay mountain in it

 

and the five-note song that you would hum

and the summer at its deepest—

 

long dusk, distant thunder,

the tiny lives of fireflies—

 

and the sky, the bottomless sky

without threats or possibilities.

 

I miss knowing you, like anyone,

were ruled by gravity. 

 

       III. F

 

Ask me if I noticed you were gone.

 

I noticed that there is no equal

to the emptiness you left behind—

 

the Dad-shaped hole at the dinner table—

the Dad-shaped hole in the bathtub—

 

the Dad-shaped hole next to my bed,

each night shrinking by an increment

 

until I could mistake it for something 

as earthly as chipped paint, or a cobweb, 

 

or a memory. 

 

I noticed the merciless infinity of the sky 

at night, the constellations streaking

 

as I rode my bike home, wondering 

why they took you, wondering

 

if you could see me or if you would even look,

and imagining that I was up there with you, 

 

cinching Orion’s belt, imagining your hand 

was on my shoulder and you were saying 

 

something true enough to be immortal—

 

even though I knew that this would never happen;

even though in the architecture of your life,

 

I was just a permanent unknown—

a fragment of a lesser place—

 

a hold-down clamp on the launchpad 

of your dreams, built only to be broken at liftoff.

 

I noticed I was getting older, and coming to understand

that for the short moment Earth and all its creatures 

 

were a sound that you could recognize,

I was always calling out to you

 

and you were barely listening.

 

I noticed the hole,

and not what filled it. 

 

       IV. F (8vb) 

 

Ask me if it hurt.

 

What hurt was talking to those guys in suits

in that windowless room divorced entirely

 

from the season where my life fit,

and signing all those forms, and being told

 

that by some cosmic miracle, some

selfish happenstance, you had been chosen

 

from the brave dozens clustered lost

at the crown of Matȟó Thípila,

 

that your ordinary cells had danced

to that five-note song; that there was

 

no stopping it, that kind of love—

that you had gone to tell the universe

 

that we were worth something, and that

you knew, or hoped, or just assumed 

 

that we would understand—

but that like an absence next to UY Scuti,

 

the understanding was irrelevant.

 

What hurt was the irrelevance

of pennies to the Hildas, 

 

and traffic signs to Jupiter,

and earwigs to Hoag’s Object,

 

and me to you. 

 

What hurt was smallness,

and all the sounds it made.

 

      V. C

 

In another life, you take me with you.

Your face is still burned, 

 

grazed by an otherworldly heat

on just one side. You lean close to me

 

and teach me with hand signs 

the song that means existence. 

 

I don’t have to know that I am not enough. 

I just have to know that I’m not everything.

 

In this life, you never come back.

I watch the sky for traces of you,

 

configurations of lights

I can’t identify, evidence

 

that something out there lives. 

 

In this life, all I need is the not knowing

and the not naming, the unidentified

 

and just like that: I find you.

 

Look up, look up. The sun sings to me

in a voice like yours. Five notes,

 

the cell-defining question

you once taught me how to ask.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIO: 

 

Gwendolyn Maia Hicks (they/them) is earning their M.F.A. in Fiction at San Francisco State University. They are an alumna of the 2022 Clarion Workshop and a 2025 Lambda Literary Fellow in Speculative Fiction. Their fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Heartlines Spec, Trollbreath Magazine, Kaleidotrope, and Hearth Stories, and their poetry has appeared in Small Wonders, where it is currently a finalist for the Rhysling Award. They are this year’s Lead Fiction Editor at Fourteen Hills. They love green things, yearning, and the Mountain Goats.