Cubicle Refugia
Ditching biology, my favorite class, to take a call at 9 a.m. American time, 2 p.m. my time. The boy’s toilets in the sixth form block at school, and not a soul there but me and the spiders. The crack in the stall barrier between this cubicle and the next had long ago become a fault line threatening to reveal too much, whichever side you sat on. The small slit of a high window let a brief, blinding slice of sunlight cut across me, dissecting me in UV, before blinking out behind a cloud. The real ditchers were out smoking weed behind the hill, or sniffing poppers, drinking vodka. Maybe filling balloons with nitrous oxide. It was worth ditching to take a phone call from Hank McCaw. I’d rather that be my reason than just plain old getting fucked up.
This time last week in biology we’d learned about cryptic refugia—areas of warmth surrounded by ice sheets in the Last Glacial Maximum that miraculously allowed some species to survive. There was nothing cryptic about the graffiti in here. Cocks, tits, diagrams with arrows pointing to clit. Insults like sea punks suck. Above a phone number, the word Shag. A million standard <insert name> woz ‘ere tags, like this was just some innocent and out-of touch kid’s comic from the 1950s. I hoped the bullies with sling shots and rockabilly quiffs weren’t about to burst into my cubicle refugia, bringing the chill of the past and present into this warm pocket of time.
The phone vibrated in my hand.
“Hi, is this [REDACTED]?”
Like any good UFO story I’ve redacted my name from this document, my girl name. [REDACTED] woz ‘ere. A sudden thudding in the corridor and past the loo entrance made me hold my breath for an instant before I could answer, but whoever it was hurried on late to class.
“This is Hank McCaw.” As though I wouldn’t recognize that husky voice from the Appalachian mountains. I listened to The McCaw Report every week like my life depended on it. Sacred geometry, unidentified aerial phenomenon, crop circles and golden ratios. The kind of guest speakers known as cereologists, ufologists, others who believed that the government, no, all governments, were hiding the real extent of human encounters with extraterrestrial life. I never expected him to email me back, let alone call me, but there he was, Hank McCaw, connected to my phone. I shifted on the lid of the loo, my arse sliding on the cool, smooth surface.
Hank’s deep voice, a raspy edge like the beginning of a tiny fracture in an iceberg, explained the recording process. I made affirmative noises, not really taking it in, feeling my heart thump just to be on the phone with him.
I began rambling, nervously at first, about how the lights weren’t orbs the way you always hear people describe, how they were longer, more like cylinders.
“Start with how you got there,” he said. I had been out there in the field at 1 a.m. It felt good to sneak out and have time alone on the dark roads of the village while my family slept, to become a nameless entity darting behind an allotment, through holes in fences in the cold of the night. Overgrown bushes scratched at my skin, causing hot lines to rise up, pinpricking blood. The aerial photo had been all over the local news just that afternoon—two large circles joined by three parallel lines. Smaller circles and wavy lines formed an intricate border of swirling constellations. When I found the right field, the sky above it seemed to be as much cable as it was sky, pylons stretching forever across the countryside. My spiky hair mimicked aerials that tried to reach out to those cables, to connect me to searing wires and thick metal.
The rhythmic crackle of the wheat bled sound from my soles into the farmland. My chest tightened when I reached the largest circle, my breathing reduced to a shallow whisper. Those night-damp stalks had given under the pressure of whatever—whoever—made the circles. They’d been tested almost to breaking point, roots desperately holding on to the Earth. I wondered if they would be forced to measure out the rest of their lives horizontally. Grass-dwelling creatures of unknown taxa scurried far away amidst the occasional eerie snippets of birdsong. A booming thud shook the ground and my body vibrated. A kssssht like paper tearing as the wheat parted somewhere nearby—
—Above me in the loo, the spiders spun their own patterns, too many to count. Fat drops of water hung from the moldy pipes, never quite managing to fall.
“It got freezing then, really cold.” Hank made a sound, as if this was exactly what he expected me to say. “I was in the center of the largest circle after moving through some of its constellations. I felt this pressure, like I might be flattened as low as the crops. And that was when I saw the lights above me. White and red, the cylinders.”
I told him how they seemed to dart too fast in insectoid spurts, then halt dramatically. How they seemed to be miles above me and then in seconds as low as the pylons and power lines as though they might rain down on me, shower me in light.
“Then I heard the wheat parting again, and this thudding like the footsteps of some huge animal.” I told him about the glimpse of the figure in the rustling stalks, how it looked too small to make so much noise. The featureless face. The shape almost exactly my own, only stretched out with spikes that grew up and up, fading into the night.
“Now, [REDACTED], you know that on this show we like to look at things from all angles, particularly the skeptical. Our listeners might be thinking the lights were just a plane, or maybe…” and he went on with explanations of why what I was saying might be a mistake, an untruth.
He asked me what I’d say to the skeptics. A shadow darted across the window slit, and the briefest flash of red then white flickered through the cracked stall. The skeptical would explain that away as a bird, a trick of the light. I took a marker out of my bag and began writing on the wall by the fault line. Ben woz ‘ere. Stephen woz ‘ere. Clive, Michael, phoenix, Jeff. I tried out the names one by one to see if any of them were mine.
“[REDACTED]? Are you still there?” I let the silence hang a little longer.
“No,” I said, gently pressing the end call symbol.
I drew a circle round the name I liked best, connecting it with three parallel lines to the break in the wall. The shadow crept under the door, spikes slowly lengthening to meet me.
© 2022 Jackson Jesse Nash
About the Author
Jackson Jesse Nash (he/him) is a trans writer from Essex, England. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Channel, Rattle, TypeHouse Literary Magazine, Impossible Archetype and others. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Creative Future Writer’s Award. Jackson is a fellow of the Lambda Literary Retreat, and has been selected for the Next Up 2022 writer's development programme. He has a PhD in Gender Studies with a thesis on trans representation in YA. He lives in Brighton with his partner and their Maine coon.