Todd woke up to the hum of his maid’s vacuum cleaner. But he couldn’t open his eyes; they were glued closed by gunk. He writhed in bed, pounding his love patches with a motion resembling that of a child feverishly making snow angels. Recognizing the regularity of the thuds, the maid burst through the door and plunged her thumbs into Todd’s eye sockets, while anxiously shrieking the procedure Todd had reminded her of in times past: “DIG, DIG, DIG, SCOOP, DIG, DIG, DIG, SCOOP.” With her deft hands, the maid managed to shovel out the gunk and, after a tug of war with Todd’s inner eyeball, his tear ducts. Todd pulled up his jockeys, thanked the maid, and walked out into the coastal sun, leaving his tears behind him.

Tumble-seaweeds rolled across the beach in the foreground; one even steamrolled into Todd, knocking him to the ground. But Todd liked the sand; it never seemed to hate him for crushing it. The maid would hate him for crushing her just like the fire ants on his porch. As it was just Todd and the sand, however, he let his feet burrow deeper and deeper yet, as if gouging out the sand’s eyes, knowing the entire time that the sand was enjoying the experience as much as he was.

Todd remembered the crab he ate the other day and thought it might be wise to begin to shuffle, crab-like. He didn’t want to be seen. If one of his neighbors spotted him walking on the beach, they might be suspicious. They might begin to think. Nothing good ever came of that, Todd knew. He shuffled under his neighbor’s porch, sat there for a while, and then scrambled out again. He shuffled into the dunes, crouched low, and nibbled on a blade of grass. Then he shuffled out and stood up in the middle of the beach. He began to bury again. Until his feet disappeared, Todd wouldn’t stop.

Todd had been burying for a while now. His hole was straight down and deep. To his strong disappointment, he realized that science was wrong. As you bury closer to the center of the earth, it doesn’t warm up. His feet now were colder than they were when he was at the surface. As his only objective in burying was to find heat, Todd decided to leave. But the hole was deep and Todd had failed to notice the collapsing sand during his burrowing. The sand hadn’t just immobilized his limbs; it had piled so high that he couldn’t move his chin. It was trapped in its own little valley of sand. So, from the maid’s vantage point inside the house, only the very top of Todd’s head was visible. To the maid, Todd’s unkempt bushels of hair were, in fact, the hedgehog that returned each day to plunder Todd’s planters. As Todd had never paid the maid enough, it never crossed her mind to shoo away the mole. Her stare never broke as she clung to her lukewarm coffee mug

The rains that night made Todd even colder. After hours of shivering and convulsions, his hypothermia suddenly forced his body to shut down entirely. Todd slept, trapped in his igloo, his head resting on one of the valleys of sand. He dreamt of burning up on the sun.

All the sand had washed away. Now only his lower body was trapped. Todd reasoned, however, that all men should be able to liberate themselves from such a hold… Todd was a man. Todd wasn’t cold anymore. And Todd realized for the first time that he didn’t like the conditional.

The air wasn’t damp at all, as it should have been on the water after such a storm. Todd peeled a piece of fresh eczema off his arm and crumpled it into a ball, which he proceeded to roll between his fingers while he walked towards the sea…Todd had to see the sea, just to make sure it was still there. It had to be.

But it wasn’t, and in its place a rancid smell drifted upwards from the now sunlit depths.Todd thought of his maid, who refused to shower more than once a month, and got himself walking downwards, into the dunes.

He saw tons of aliens on the walk. All of the storybook tales Todd had read as a child had led him to believe that aliens were clever beings, possibly even more so than him. But, above all, these tales scared Todd. The idea of a being as ruthless as a three legged, limegreen eye was concerning. How could Todd prepare for the invasion that most of his literary champions had labeled as inevitable?

The advanced species Todd saw caked in the sand didn’t impress him. All of them had exceptionally deer-like expressions. From what he could tell, their methods of communication were two-fold. One: for those who were endowed with the gift of mobility, a movement of an extremity sufficed as a sign of truce. Two: for those who liked to suck in air sometimes, a quick spittoon of water at a neighbor served as a war declaration… Todd, ashamed that he was so quick to judge, accepted the complexities of the alien’s grasp on war and peace. He walked on, stepping carefully as he went, wary as to not offend any of the hypersensitive globs.

After passing a striking ten-foot-tall bouquet of flower-like rocks, Todd came to a cliff. Todd knew that this place was cool. The cliff opened into a slither of a ravine, which plummeted down into the most accurate definition of darkness Todd had ever known. Todd the Jaguar could have made the leap across. Beyond the ravine sprawled a sea of dried up dunes, slowly descending but further downward, where Todd could frolic. But Todd the Jaguar was asleep, and was in no sort of mood. With the wind whipping around him, he would barely have to consciously comply if he wanted to fly into the ravine. It was somewhat like the decision of whether to permanently become a sea monster or not while underwater. In that moment, the everyman is halfway there; he just has to decide to stay. Todd closed his eyes and thought of his maid, who by now had probably found the new TV he had bought and had stolen that too. He needed someone’s advice though, and he knew she was no numb-nut. Todd asked himself, and the maid, if he would he finally RSVP to the wind.

The wind answered Todd’s question for him with one blistery, bitingly cold gust. Todd now hated the wind and crossed his arms; it had made him cold again. He realized that throughout the walk he had been cold and the wind had only reminded him of this. His body heat actually had plunged since he left the beach. What he hadn’t anticipated, however, was the makeshift footpath that would lead him all the way to the floor of the ravine, which, at that moment, was all Todd wanted. The wind, in this case, did help Todd. As he wanted to escape the cold, Todd made a quick one for the path’s entrance.

During his descent, Todd couldn’t see. Todd couldn’t see anything. He knew close to nothing, too. The only thing he was sure of was, if he turned back, the maid would leave him. So he kept going for her sake.

On this epic footpath, Todd felt like he was snaking. He also felt like, with each footfall, the ground gradually grew more and more unstable. What Todd thought he mistakenly heard was a low, eerie groan; but he wasn’t mistaken, for he did indeed hear this groan.

Todd had reached the floor of the ravine. He had also located the source of the groan. Although it was thick blackness down there, and Todd knew that the advanced species around him were likely the only species capable of seeing through such thickness, Todd saw. What he witnessed was peculiar, verging on the unimaginable.

Curled up, at the pit of a pile of jagged, metallic rubble, was a naked creature that resembled a man. He was lying there in the fetal position, his eyes seemingly glued shut by a globular material. His feet had sand on them and were ghostly pale, along with the rest of his body, and his expression, curiously Todd thought, was blank. Every bone in his body was visible through the skin that didn’t fit him.

He looked cold, and Todd wanted to give him a blanket. But, as Todd was also cold and didn’t have a blanket for either of them, Todd reasoned that the only solution was to share his body heat, or whatever was left of it, with the poor man. He began sliding down through the jagged rubble, ripping up his feet with every inch of progress. But, before Todd could get to the cold man, the skies erupted… He wasn’t surprised. Somehow he had known it was coming. Through the slit of light marking the top of the ravine, a thousand leagues of bellowing sea roared down upon Todd and the cold man… Todd held his hands pathetically above his head to shield himself.

But after the seas settled, Todd was still Todd. And the water, although cold, did not make Todd so.

Todd looked for the cold man. Yet, in the spot where he had been at the pit of the pile of metallic, splintered rubble was a gigantic slab of rock with the same texture. There was no rubble, no shards of stone. And the man was gone.

Another man tapped Todd on the shoulder. He was glowing. Todd liked that. Todd asked this man what had happened. The other man welcomed Todd and told him not to worry about the maid, that she would be fine. He grasped Todd firmly on the shoulder, smiled at him warmly, and took him on a tour of the ravine.