The alarm goes off at five AM. Another day in paradise. Not really. That is only something the persons say: Another day in paradise.

            Earth is not paradise. Not yet.

            Often, the persons say things they do not mean. It is confusing. They say, Another day in paradise, to signal they are not in paradise. They say, Living the dream, to indicate that their lives are un-dreamlike. Workaday. Humdrum. It is called sarcasm: saying one thing, meaning another, the opposite.

            I’m fine.

            Everything’s fine.

            Really, seriously, everything’s fine.

            These are examples of sarcasm.

            The first thing we do after waking is practice smiling. We smile into the bathroom mirror. Smiling is very important.

            The Husband’s alarm goes off at six. He kisses our neck and places a steaming mug of coffee on our side of the sink, near our toothbrush. He yawns and places a second mug on his side, near his toothbrush. He splashes water on his face.

            “What are you doing?” he asks.

            “Smiling.”

            There are two kinds of smiles: real and fake. A real smile is also called a Duchenne smile. Named after French neurologist, Guillaume Duchenne, a Duchenne smile is made by contracting the zygomatic major and the orbicularis oculi muscles.

            Real smiles are not difficult. Watch.

            See? Easy.

            Fake smiles are also not difficult. To fake smile, contract only the zygomatic major muscles. See? Easy peasy.

            Smiling is very important. That is one of the first things we learned about the persons: they need smiles. Real smiles make them feel valued. A real smile says, Person, we are glad you exist.

            The Husband undresses, leaves his pajamas on the floor in a pile. He must shower before traveling to his place of employment.

            He watches us. Our smiling. Our nightgown. Our breasts. A look swims into his eyes: glazed yet predatory.

            He places his hands on our waist. He whispers. “Are you thinking what I am thinking?”

            Admittedly, being a person is new to us. However, we are fairly confident the Husband is thinking of sex. Having it. Now. Before the children wake and the Husband must leave to supervise the quality assurances at the foam mattress facility.

            However, we are not thinking of sex. We are thinking of the world’s end.

            How nice it will be. No more smiling. 

            “No,” we say. “I am not.”

#

The rest of the morning goes not so good. As in bad. Maybe very bad.

            The Husband becomes sulky. At breakfast, we make errors. We forget the children’s names; or, we do not forget them but struggle to match them to children, and we must recite them out slowly, first, in our mind. Youngest: Caden. Middle: Brennan. Eldest: Gwenna.

            “Mom?” asks Middle. “Why are there, like, cat treats in my cereal bowl?”

            “Oops,” we say. Dumb mistake. Cat treats for cats. Duh.

            “Mom, where’s my hoodie?” asks Eldest.

            “The basement?” we say. “Check the dryer.” 

            Only after Eldest exits the kitchen do we consider our error. The smear on the basement floor, near the clothes-cleansing devices, we removed it? Of course. Did we clean it enough? Certainly, the foamy outlines of this body’s molting are gone, bleached away, but perhaps undigested bits of its original remain? A tooth? A clump of hair? If Eldest finds this detritus, what then?

            Cover blown?

            Planetary takeover botched?

            We rush downstairs and find Eldest kneeling beside the clothes-drying appliance. She has discovered the smear!

            She has not. She is at a laundry basket, rifling through clothes, only we notice this too late. We panic. We scream.

            We sort of scream.

            A person would call it a scream, and it is, in our language and theirs, a piercing shriek, only with tinny vibrato in its higher registers, like broken glass caught in a vacuum. In our language it is a warning cry. It can mean Help! or Watch out! or This lifeform knows what we are! Hurry, assist us in killing it!

            So, yes, we scream.

            Maybe a few inky tendrils of frond bleed from the corners of our eyes.

            Big whoop.

            For a moment, we entertain the dumb hope that Eldest may be one of us. Perhaps Eldest will roll their body’s eyes at our gaff and flash a reassuringly sinister grin. Or, maybe the Husband is now secretly one of us, sexual overtures notwithstanding, and he will hurry downstairs and help us crack Eldest’s skull against the floor until it shatters into bone and slop.

            No such luck. Everyone else in the house is a person.

            The Husband rushes pell-mell down the stairs. “What the hell was that noise?” he says.

            “Mom?” says Eldest in a quiet voice.

            “The furnace,” we say. “The hot water heater again.”

            “Dammit. Didn’t we pay two grand to get that piece of shit fixed?”

            The Husband bustles into the adjoining garage to check on the water-heating machine. Eldest looks confused. Her jaw moves; no words escape.

            Eventually, she speaks. “You’re not my mother,” she says.

#

After the Husband and Eldest and Middle all leave, for employment, for school, we fret over whether we will now need to kill Eldest. We switch on the TV in the living room.

            We do not want to watch. However, the body usually watches from nine to eleven. Better safe than sorry after so many screw-ups. What if someone peeks in the windows? What if the government has installed cameras in the home? What will they see?

            The body. Watching TV. Like normal. Nothing to see here. Move along.

            So, we watch.

            On morning talk shows, the world’s descent gets rehashed. Bad things are happening elsewhere. Forest fires. Rising temperatures. Rising seas. Soon there will be no place to stand.

            We send Eldest a reassuring text, to soften any doubts she may be harboring. Her teachers confiscate phones at the start of the day. She will not receive the message until, at the earliest, lunch. Still, better safer than sorry.

            Daughter, you have a good heart, we type.

            On a nature show, an animal eats another animal.  

            If we have been a victim of a workplace accident, we may be entitled to compensations.

#

Sometimes, when we are disquieted, it soothes us to visit the scented candle shop.

            So, that is where we go.

            We dress Youngest in person-appropriate clothes. Pants. Then we crush ten milligrams of Ambien and mix it with cinnamon applesauce and serve it to Youngest on a canary yellow plastic spoon. We send Eldest a follow-up: Daughter, you are conventionally attractive even without makeup!!! ☺☺☺

            Then we drive to the Circle’s Centre Mall.

            At the Homespun Candle Shoppe, we ask the sales assistant to hold the floppy child while we shop and huff our way through the shelves. We smell Holiday Cookies and Clean Cotton Blankets. We smell Crisp Autumn Nights.

            Scented candles are the persons’ signature technological achievement. No candle truly smells like its namesake. Cottage Seabreeze does not smell like cottage, or sea, or breeze.

            It smells like lavender.

            And sawdust.

            Yet there are whiffs of time, lived temporalities, boiled to Platonic essentials, not the real tang of saltwater, or stink of wrack drying on sand, but the idea of sea breeze billowing curtains of seaside cottage, goose-bumping flesh, and of tides that lull mind to sleep. A pulse, rising and falling. The Idea made Real, or Smellable at least.

            “How many would you like?” asks the sale assistant. Spittle drips from Youngest’s lip. We count the days that remain.

            Another week before their world ends? Two, tops.

            “All of them,” we say.

#

Afterwards, we visit a home improvement retailer and buy several jugs of kerosene, just in case we need to burn the house down. Then, lunch.

            We open the car’s trunk and sit amid the candles and kerosene, and eat raw pork sausage and Fun Dip in the strip mall’s parking lot. Heat haze shimmers the asphalt.

            A man in a powder blue tracksuit rages against a vending machine, pounds the plexiglass with a fist. Its sign promises frosty refreshments.

            Youngest still sleeps. Middle and Eldest will not return home for hours.

            What to do?

            We scour the body’s brain for places to visit, excuses to slaughter more time.

            It returns memories of a pond tucked between cedared hills, a swimming hole, a public beach. Frolicking there as a child. Later, skinny dipping, furtive underwater touches, and a night when a younger iteration of itself sat in the Husband’s pickup, the windows rolled down, and late-summer insect drone filled the air.

            “So… we’re keeping the baby?” it said.

            “Motherfucker best dispense me some frosty refreshment,” says the man in the track suit.    The beach is only forty-minutes away.

#

True story. Once, we invaded a clammy planet full of tar pits and intelligent bipedal gazelles. The gazelles’ name for themselves is unpronounceable for persons, given the limitations of their vocal cords, but sounds not unlike buckshot being emptied into a stop sign.

            The Buckshot Stop Signs were elegant creatures: willowy bodies, sinewy muscles, iridescent pelts. Males had evolved splendid antlers, many-branched but sinuously coiled, and tipped in seashell-y spirals. They flaunted them for mating purposes. Females swooned.

            By the time we arrived they were almost extinct.

            A scientist had invented a male antler enhancement. Males devoured it. Their antlers grew so magnificent they pinned their skulls to the ground.

            Bitches be loving my sweet antlers, they would think, even as the tar pits rose, and sugary bitumen leaked into their mouths and burned through their lungs.    

            Sometimes, the persons remind us of Buckshot Stop Signs.

#

At the beach, hornets circle overstuffed trashcans. We carry Youngest to the water’s edge. Minnows dart in the shallows.

            Everywhere, the persons blanket the landscape in stories. Toddlers make-believe they are sharks and sea monsters. Mothers gossip as they adjust the pinch of their swimsuits’ straps.

            It is exhausting.

            All the chatter.

            We want our frosty refreshment.

            Motherfuckers better dispense it.

            Sometimes, we want to scream. Just to see who is a person, and who is not.

            Instead, there is a trick we do with our eyes, a kind of squint that erases foreground from background, bringing all into focus at once, like a landscape painting so detailed it hijacks the eye. When we do it, the world appears as if petrified: each droplet, each ripple, the overcast sky.        

            It is the closest we have come, as the person, to what it is like to drift between worlds, gelatinous spores buffeted by cold solar winds. That pure thoughtlessness. That nirvana.

            A whistle jolts us. The lifeguard stands on her tall wooden chair. She beckons us back to the beach. “Ma’am? Are you okay?” she asks.

            We are chest-deep in pondwater, holding Youngest pieta-like in our arms. The sky has darkened. Our dress is soaked. On the beach, mothers stare, aghast.

            “We are fine,” we tell the mothers as we return to the shore. Water drips from the hems of our dress. “Really. Seriously. Everything is fine.”

            And though it sickens us, we tauten the body’s chains, its zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles, until the face feels like it is tearing apart. Persons, we are glad you exist, the face insists, and, slowly, hesitantly, the mothers smile back, and, for now, the person thinks it is loved.

Joshua Shaw is a philosophy professor who began fiction midcareer, mainly because it made him happier to be alive. His stories have appeared in Kenyon Review Online, Cleaver, Split Lip Magazine, Booth, Sundog Lit, and Hobart.