Science Fiction Short Story

The setting was exactly how you’d imagine it on another planet (stock setting): very dry, dusty, and brown, with no evidence of life anywhere. The situation we found ourselves in was not good – we were stuck here with no way of getting back to Earth. I felt like I had been dropped into Star Wars or Interstellar (allusion). The atmosphere made it feel like we were even farther than a billion miles from home (hyperbole) – saying we were far was an understatement. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, and all I could do was panic.

Just as we began brainstorming an invention for how to get home, over the horizon came a yellow rubber glove, the kind that would be used when washing dishes. The scene was ridiculous; this glove could walk, could not talk, was coming towards us (asyndeton). The pace of its movements were slow… it would begin heading towards us, then slow down and even head in another direction (ellipsis). The glove, banana yellow and stretchy, was starting to gain on us (periodic sentence). I turned to my crew and they all had panicked faces that mirrored mine. I knew we would have to face this creature eventually, because it was coming right at us. We nonverbally decided to just stand and wait for it to approach, and when it did, it stopped. It didn’t have a face, but if it did, it looked up at us where its eyes would have been. Suddenly, it let out a loud screech that reverberated off the ground around us and left a ringing in my ears (onomatopoeia). The glove disappeared into thin air, and we were left in a cloud of yellow dust.

While I tried to recover from the noise, I turned to a member of my crew, Anna. Everyone else looked normal, but Anna appeared hypnotized. Immediately, she began walking away from us. Still dazed and confused from the events that had just occurred, the rest of us followed her to see what she was up to. Her voice was repetitive and monotone, but I could not make out what she was saying. As she walked, she slowly got faster and her voice got louder, becoming as loud as the glove’s screech (simile). Eventually, after walking for what seemed like miles, I could finally understand what she was saying: “ship.”

I didn’t want to get too excited, but as we kept walking, I began seeing things that sparked my curiosity: foot prints in the dust, blinking lights in the distance, and then, finally, a large space ship that was exactly what we needed to get home (climax). I turned to my crew and we were all astonished at this turn of events. Anna wasn’t acting like herself; she pointed to us to get onto the ship, and we all obliged – there was a weird feeling about the situation, as though we were being watched by an audience. We boarded the ship, but Anna did not – we watched as she stood behind while the door closed behind us. The ship lifted off the ground, and as we took off, I watched as Anna slowly morphed into a yellow rubber glove and began waddling away. To this day I still do not know what happened to her, but my only claim is that she is still on that planet, awaiting her turn to confuse another group and turn one of them, just as that first glove did to her.