The Last Performance

Challenge Accepted: My piece about a mime in a spaceship who has to warn Earth about an impending alien invasion. @AndyBetz

The ship slid silently through the black, a sliver of glass against the endless dark. Inside it, a single human sat in white paint and stripes, the last person on Earth who still made a living from silence.

A mime.

He hadn’t volunteered. He had been taken. One moment he was in Paris, his face painted white, pretending to press against an invisible wall while tourists laughed. The next, the sky cracked, and he was swallowed by light.

The aliens never spoke. Not in words. They pulsed in colors, hummed in waves, their meaning pressing into his skull without sound. Somehow, they believed he could understand them. And he did, just enough. He saw what they showed him: worlds burning, fleets descending like storms, Earth in their path.

They had given him a task. Not mercy, not salvation. A task: warn his world.

And now the ship descended, Earth swelling blue and bright in the window. He placed his gloved hands against the glass and imagined the performance he would give. The only one that mattered.

When he appeared on the runway, soldiers surrounded him. Politicians, translators, cameras, they all waited for words.

But he had no words.

He began. He shaped Earth with his hands, rolling it gently between his palms. He traced fire over its surface, the sweep of wings, the fall of ships blotting out the sun. His eyes widened, face painted with terror, arms raised against invisible fire. He showed oceans boiling, cities breaking, shadows falling. And then he collapsed to his knees, clutching nothing, shaking with silent sobs.

They stared. Some laughed nervously. Some cursed. The world’s last warning had arrived in greasepaint and pantomime.

The broadcast went global. It was replayed as comedy, as scandal, as art. Nobody believed.

And when the skies broke, when the real swarm appeared exactly as he had shown them, it was too late. No defense grid, no fleet, no resistance. Just fire and silence.

In the end, the mime stood among the crowds as the sky fell open, pressing his palms against the invisible wall of air, as if he could hold it closed. His painted face cracked, streaked with ash, his silent cry swallowed by the roar of the end.

The wall never held.

Earth burned.

And the mime, like everyone else, was erased.