When the aliens landed, Nina was showing a four-bedroom ranch to a couple on the verge of divorce.

“The master bedroom is too small,” the wife complained, “and the ensuite? Needs a complete gut renovation.”

Nina took in the jetted tub, the beige vanity, the fuzzy toilet seat cover. The owner of the house had died and her heirs were selling the property. The woman who’d lived here must have loved the toilet seat once, must have smiled every time she walked into the bathroom.

Aloud Nina said, “I hear the 90s are making a comeback.”

“We’re not doing a reno,” the husband told his wife. “I’m sick of you spending my money.”

This was the 27th house Nina had shown them. She longed to ghost the couple, but her manager kept telling her she better make the sale or risk losing her job. There were no other promising clients right now. High interest rates and low inventory had rocked the Long Island market. 

On the way out of the bonus room, the husband – a wolfish stockbroker with a paunch – brushed a little too close to Nina’s chest and she sensed he was one opportunity away from slipping her his work number. 

“My husband and I live in a ranch,” Nina said. “It’s great having everything on one floor.”

She’d mentioned her non-existent spouse several times in the past three weeks. The man didn’t seem deterred.

Out the bathroom window, purple lights flickered weirdly.

“What the hell?” the husband said.

 

Nina had trained to be an artist. She had her MFA. She’d sold a few paintings. But she quickly realized that with framing costs and the 50 percent galleries took, she couldn’t afford housing, not to mention food or gas.

 Her parents had retired to Florida. Her few friends from high school had moved away. She told herself she didn’t have time for a social life. She was staying in a basement apartment in Huntington, dipping into her savings to help pay rent. On her feet all day, touring listings, extolling the virtues of sixteen-foot ceilings and luxury vinyl tile. She felt sorry for each empty home she toured. She’d begun to think of houses as abandoned, transient places and wondered how people could shed the past so easily.

An online quiz indicated she was moderately depressed, but not in need of medication.  

When she wasn’t working, Nina sketched her suburban surroundings. The silky pink and cream petals on a magnolia tree. The ocean at high tide, restless, churning. A gaggle of preening seagulls. Identical mansions on a court at dusk, formidable and grandiose as aging dowagers. Small Cape Cod houses on ramshackle streets. Unseen and unappreciated. The way shadows formed on a lawn, dividing it into dark and darker. A seam in the sky revealing grey tipped clouds. 

Everything was more beautiful on canvas. Fixed, perfect, calm. 

 

As they walked outside, the wife complained that the pool was too close to the house.

Beyond the oval pool, flecked with fallen leaves and the remains of a frog that had jumped to its death, was a big cube made of crisscrossing tubes in various shades of purple. Lavender, lilac, eggplant. It reminded Nina of a large-scale art installation she’d seen in a museum years ago. A neon sculpture made of LED lights that spelled out different phrases: You are guileless in your dreams. Words tend to be inadequate. Alienation produces eccentrics. Abstraction is decadence.

The cube on the lawn made a weird noise that sounded halfway between humming and Country music. 

“Is this some new stereo system?” the husband asked.

“Yes,” Nina lied. “Made by Apple. It’s a prototype, one of the few in the neighborhood. Comes with the house.”

He seemed like someone who valued what no one else had.

“For God’s sake,” the wife said. “One more thing to clean.”  

Later, Nina wondered why she wasn’t afraid when the cube extended one long purply tendril, creating a narrow pathway atop the yard’s expensive pavers. The husband and wife drew closer to it.

“That purple is just awful,” the wife was saying. “We’d need to spray paint it black if we kept it.”

Before Nina could tell them to come back, she didn’t know what the thing really was, they were sucked inside like dust bunnies whooshed into a vacuum bag.

Nina tried to run but found herself rooted in place. Her legs didn’t work.

“Please,” Nina shouted to the cube or the universe. “I really don’t want to be with those people."

The cube hummed some more. The lights like giant spider legs, reaching, considering. The afternoon hovered behind it, then settled.

“Please,” Nina repeated, noticing how sunlight bounced off the pool’s glassy surface, how the potted pansies needed water. “I like it here.”