I was born nine months after first contact, in a wave of births the media would style the "Babypocalypse." Apparently, when the news broke that an interstellar vessel of advanced alien manufacture had cropped up between Uranus and Neptune, a sizeable chunk of humanity prepared for Arma-get-it-on (I'm sorry for that pun. But not sorry enough to erase it).
Mama vehemently denies this was the case of my conception, but she's not fooling anyone. I'm sixteen, my sister is twenty-five, and my brothers are twenty-seven and thirty-three. I've also got a nephew who's two days older than me. That fateful night, clearly nobody thought they'd be around in nine months to change diapers.
I live in northwestern Arkansas, spitting distance from the Oklahoma border and a rambling stretch of wilderness called the Ozark National Forest. For the past decade, there's been a steady trickle of people filling in the land left idle by failing farms, drawn by the gravity of Walmart and Tyson Foods and the promise of a house and a lawn and a two-car garage, but that tide is yet to reach us in the sticks. Our dairy farm was started by my great-grandfather; now my dad and oldest brother, Lyle, keep the books, but we all pitch in—let's just say I know my way around an udder.
It's different now from my grandfather's day, obviously. He was able to subsist on a herd of ninety-five cows, selling plain old Grade A milk at the minimum price. Back before I was born, farms like ours were given a choice: become giant, with hundreds or even thousands of cows, go artisanal, or go bankrupt. So gone are my grandfather's grain-guzzling Holsteins; now we have a small herd of hearty Swedish red-and-whites, and hipsters in Oklahoma City and Nashville buy our grass-fed, organic milk for three times the going rate (bless their little hearts). We're not rolling in green—you don't want to roll in the kind of green we've got, trust me—but I've never gone hungry or cold, which is more than a lot of other people can say, so that's something.
But you're probably wondering why I'm still talking about cows, when I could be talking about the tanta.
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The Floating Cradle
Science FictionSixteen-year-old Sarah hasn't seen her sister Allie in nearly a decade thanks to a family feud she can hardly remember. But the world waits for no grudge; around the time of Sarah's birth, a race of aliens known as the tanta made first contact with...
