The miserable specimen of a husband didn’t even look up when she said she was going out to get some cigarettes.

For weeks, she’d taken long drives and trolled the radio waves for messages from the Mother Ship.

MR CHIPS AND THE MANGO-TANGO MOTHER SHIP BY ALICE HATCHER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 36

Marylou was breaking it off with the human race once and for all, leaving the whole miserable lot for good, and this time for real. The whole thing had been a mistake from the start, an ill-conceived mission to gather data about evolutionary dead-ends. High time to drive out into the desert where she’d been deposited so many years ago–thirty-five, not that there was any point in counting since no one had ever given a cold crap about her birthday or bothered to determine its exact date–to meet the Mother Ship and shake off the dust of this wreck of a planet.

She’d already loaded the ’96 Buick Century with her go-bag and a variety of human cultural artifacts (including the Twilight series in paperback and a collection of scratched CDs by the Go-Go’s and Philip Glass), all the while nursing hopes that no …