Bruno is the author of The Colletta Cassettes, released by Inkspot in May 2025. His sent me this story with the full F bomb in the title, but I’m squeamish about headlining with it. Bruno is in his final year at Birkbeck, and is therefore ‘down with the kidz’ whereas I am a middle-aged matron who is clearly showing my age!
Here’s his story: Fucking Aliens:
I heard the aliens before I ever saw them.
‘I hear voices,’ I said.
‘Don’t we all,’ said the psychiatrist, and sniggered. ‘When someone’s speaking,’ he added.
When someone’s speaking within earshot, said the voices.
It wasn’t an auspicious start. While the aliens were pedantic but correct, he managed to be both obsequious and insolent.
Tell him, said the voices, that he’s a wanker.
‘Shut up,’ I said.
‘Sorry?’ said the psychologist.
‘Not you,’ I said.
The voices giggled and brayed.
‘What language do the voices speak to you in?’ The psychiatrist brought his hands together and his index fingers to his lips. He looked at me from above his fists balled below his chin, his nose and fingers forming one long equine snout.
‘I don’t really know.’ It was a good question. ‘They kind of speak my thoughts, you know?’
Of course he didn’t know.
‘Whatever language I think in. It’s like they speak Thought.’
Well put! said the voices. That’s what we speak!
‘I see,’ said the psychiatrist, and closed his eyes as if to present me with an oxymoron. ‘And these… voices – are they embodied at all? Do they have bodies?’
‘No,’ I said.
Oh yes we do! chorused the voices. Do you want to see them?
‘No!’
‘There’s no need to shout,’ said the psychiatrist starting and opening his eyes wide. They spun behind thick glass lenses. ‘I heard you the first time.’
I was gripped by a momentous fear of what I might have been presented with if I’d replied in the affirmative, of the possibility that, my having brought them into physical existence, they would never leave. I heard them laugh – sounds of waterfalls and bells, and of thunder and kettle drums.
That evening – a Monday – the psychiatrist having reminded me of a horse, I reached for Gulliver’s Travels and reread Part Four, in which our hero travels to the land of the Houyhnhnms and befriends the native, talking horses. I fell asleep, with the book open on my chest, only to wake in the early hours of the morning to find my room packed with horses – or Houyhnhnms – I didn’t know what to call them.
‘Aliens’ is fine, they said. Though, of course, as far as we’re concerned, you’re the alien.
They were courteous and gentle creatures who tried hard to minimise the damage they caused but they still broke furniture, chewed the curtains and shat everywhere.
On Tuesday evening I started Girl in Landscape and read about the Archbuilders, to wake to a number of them sitting on my bed. Imagine a creature taller than a human with a big bushy moustache that extends from its top lip to the top of its head and down its back to meet its big bushy beard that has grown down its chest and arms, hands and fingers, and to its legs, feet and toes. All this under green hair like a mophead. Now imagine eight of them sitting on your bed – which was only possible because they were double-jointed in every joint.
On Wednesday a friend called to ask if I wanted to see Godzilla vs. Kong, and I shrieked, ‘No!’ and slammed the phone down. I thought I’d think of angels but decided that would be weird, so I tried to think of pussy cats until I remembered I was allergic to them, so I desperately tried to think of nothing and managed to sleep the night through.
On Thursday, I picked my old copy of Animal Farm up, and woke to a room full of pigs. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t know what was worse – the long, early hours debate on the merits or otherwise of communism, or the shovelling of pig shit from my bedroom.
I kept my mind blank for some days, which was exhausting, and troublesome, as I didn’t shop and grew hungry and I fell behind with my work, but I noticed the voices had gone silent. I assumed the aliens had found me tedious and left. Bored and lonely, I logged onto Tinder and followed a link that took me to OnlyFans where I met a very nice, naked lady who showed me a lot of her nakedness.
That was a big mistake.
She was buxom and lithe with brown hair everywhere and two wicked smiles, and, later that night, one of a dozen or so excitable identical creatures on my bed who had ideas other than the assessment of a political system, namely, the exploration of every orifice and protuberance that was a novelty to them. Now, I had never participated in an orgy before, and certainly not one with aliens, but my great sense of shame was no match for my greater, uncontrollable lust.
Mortified, disgusted with myself, I saw my psychiatrist the following morning. ‘I fucked an alien.’
‘You fucked an alien.’ His eyes widened behind his bottle-top lenses.
‘Not just one.’ I pressed my hand to my forehead.
‘What was it like?’ he asked.
We enjoyed it! clamoured the voices.
‘They enjoyed –,’ I started, then, ‘Shut up! No, not you. Sorry. I’m not mad,’ I added, in the hope of being helpful.
Over the next few evenings I read Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes to distant cries of Boring! and chants of OnlyFans! OnlyFans! We want OnlyFans! but I slept without interruption.
It was only when I’d read The Tale of Peter Rabbit to my nephew and woken to soft rabbit droppings underfoot when I’d got up to go the loo that I had my idea.
I dusted my old copy of Metamorphosis down.
I bought a box of cockroach killer powder that I emptied all over my bedroom floor.
And then I read late into the night.