IT was a Monday morning, and like any weekday mornings, I was walking to my school. I had been forced to take another unfamiliar route due to the under construction building on the road that I would usually take. The road I took was an abandoned alleyway so I walked steadily.

I suddenly saw what seemed like a ball of light, floating in the middle of the alley. I had a sudden urge to touch it. As I touched it, I felt as if an electric current was going up my fingers and down my spine. Then, things started to get blurred and I fell to the ground.

When I opened my eyes, I was in a glistening white room, on a soft bed. I immediately remembered myself fainting and thought I was in a hospital, but what I saw next suggested that I was on another planet. For in the very same room there was an abnormal creature with pale green mottled skin and three eyes with slits for pupils. Each delicate feature was set into a large angular face. I thought I was dreaming, but when things remained the same even after rubbing my eyes hard, I realised that it actually was an alien.

My first instinct was to jump out of the bed and run out from the room, but I didn’t and couldn’t, partly because I was curious to see what the alien wanted, and partly because I was strapped to the bed. The alien turned to a small table which I hadn’t noticed before, and reached for a pile of cards. It held them up one by one so that I could read them. The message said:

“Greetings hyoo-mun, I am Gamay. I am a scyentist. I am goiyng to conduct some experiments on you to collect information for a new book called ‘The Lyfe of a Hyoo-mun’. I also hope that you will cooperate and give me the secret formula of the hyoo-mun delicacy ice-cream. First a simple scan and x-ray, then you will give us the ice-cream formula or we will declare war on earth.”

I was feeling strangely calm considering the circumstances. First, they scanned me with a device that looked like a barcode reader in a supermarket. Then, they x-rayed me with a relatively ‘man-made’ x-ray machine, but I didn’t know what to do when they asked me for ice-cream, so in the end, I simply wrote what I remembered of an ice-cream recipe on a cooking show.

Surprisingly, when they tried it out, they seemed to like the resulting mess. They cheered (I guess, as they were making sounds like ‘hooo hooo’ and jumped for a long time). Then, I was left alone in that white room where I saw another light appear which drifted towards me and went straight into my heart. I felt a chill that ran down my spine.

I simply blinked and I was back in the alley, and I wondered out loud, “Were those aliens, or a dream?”