In the middle of the article there's a picture of a man holding a bag of trash in one hand and the lid to the trash can in the other. He is standing at the end of the driveway and we're to assume he's in the process of dropping the bag into the can. Though the whole publication is in black-and-white, there is a certain glow to the man's eyes. It's a horrible image-as though somebody took a picture of an unsuspecting neighbor and then drew around his eyes with a crayon. It makes me laugh.
"What?" Sam asks.
"This is a terrible picture. It looks like something from Godzilla."
Sam looks at it. Then he shrugs. "I dunno," he says. "It could be real. Like you said, I see aliens everywhere, and in everything."
"But I thought aliens looked like that," I say, and nod to the blacklight poster on his wall.
"I don't think all of them do," he says. "Like you said, you're an alien with superpowers and you don't look like that."
We both laugh, and I wonder how I'm going to get myself out of that one. Hopefully Sam never finds out I was telling him the truth. Part of me wants to tell him, though-about me, about Henri, about Lorien-and I wonder what his reaction would be. Would he believe me?
I flip the paper open to look for the publishing page that all newspapers and magazines have. There isn't one here, only more stories and theories.
"There isn't a publisher info page."
"What do you mean?"
"You know how magazines and newspapers always have that page listing staff, editors, writers, where it's being printed, and all that? You know, 'For questions, contact so and so.' All publications have them, but this doesn't."
"They have to protect their anonymity," Sam says.
"From what?"
"Aliens," he says, and smiles, as though acknowledging the absurdity of it.
"Do you have last month's issue?"
He grabs it from his closet. I quickly flip through it, hoping that the Mogadorian article is in this one and not an earlier month. And then I find it on page 4.