They’ve been washing up on the coast for years. Great, gelatinous, purple jellies that catch the sun in rainbow sheens. A wave brings a new catch to the shore and leaves them to glisten like melted gummies in the sand. For all their shimmering, they smell of rotted flesh and stagnant sewage.

 

Tony doesn’t mind the stink. Never did. The beach parking lot is empty, just Tony and the swirl of sea spray and rot. Even from here Tony can smell it.

He drags his shopping cart past boarded-up mansions and through the dunes until his rubber boots touch the surf. The retreating water leaves a film of iridescent, violet-tinted scum on his hand-me-down wellies.

 

Tony rummages through his cart, pushes the sleeping bag and tent out of the way, and pulls out a smashed candy bar he found yesterday. One of the jellies is rotting on the sand, just out of the water’s reach, buzzing with gnats and flies. Tony scratches his beard and nods his head in greeting. “Is this seat taken?” When the blob doesn’t answer, Tony sits next to it and digs his heels into the sand.

 

They have names for the purple jellies, names Tony can’t pronounce. The scientists are the only ones still at it, out there, twenty miles from shore with their blinking lights and boats and rigs. They’re still poking and prodding and studying and lying.

 

But Tony saw the crash. He was sleeping under the oceanfront bridge, wrapped in newspapers, when the night sky exploded and rained down stars like embers. They said it was a bomb. They said it was Russia, then China. Everyone believed the news until the purple jellies started floating up.

 

There were other things too. Strange little metal objects that glowed bright hot and red. The tourists came first, hoarding up everything they could find. They jabbed at the jellies and gagged on the smell. The men with pressed suits and fake smiles came next and stood in front of cameras and argued about where the jellies came from. Tony would push his shopping cart right up to them and tell them the truth. The jellies were the night sky and parts of the moon and a little bit of the Milky Way — the stuff of stars. They would laugh politely, staring at their cameras until someone else would pull Tony out of the way and tell him to beat it. Sometimes they would even hand him a dollar.

 

Then the government men shut the beach down and took everyone’s trinkets. They even took Tony’s trinkets from the shopping cart — the driftwood and seashells and smooth pebbles of glass. Trinkets Tony collected long before the crash.

 

But the purple jellies kept coming, more putrid and rotten than the last. They said it would take decades for the last ones to come up. Something about the ship out there under the water and trapped gases and whatever else they brought with them from wherever it was they came from.

 

The smell got too bad for the government men so the scientists took over. The restaurants and the shops closed and the rich folk boarded up their houses like a hurricane was coming. Then it was only Tony and the jellies.

 

Now Tony finishes the candy bar and pulls out his favorite trinket — one he hid from the government men. It washed up two years ago in a tangle of pus-filled lavender kelp. It’s a long piece of that special metal, with holes right where you’d put your fingers like a flute. The scientists would give it a name, something he couldn’t pronounce, but Tony calls it a flute and wonders who it belonged to. A child perhaps? A child with purple hands.

 

Tony had seen his share of stiffs, homeless drifters dead for a week in the summer sun. They turned into pink and yellow blobs that swelled and oozed pink and yellow pus. The jellies were no different, they just oozed purple. Some of the blobs had things like hands, and little swollen strands like fingers. Some even looked like heads.

 

Eventually the scientists figured it out, something about the jellies misjudging the weight of our atmosphere. Everybody got mad because those things had the gall to blow themselves up right over the best beach in town.

 

They bellowed and hollered and pointed angry fingers up at the night sky. But no one cried. The same way no one cried when a drifter died.

 

Tony wraps his hand around the flute, places his fingers over holes worn smooth by somebody else’s fingers — purple fingers maybe, but fingers all the same. He puts his mouth over a hole and breathes. It’s a shrill whistle, floating and hovering and trilling over the crash of waves. Some people would say it wasn’t music. To Tony it sounds like little bits of nebulae, twirls of galaxies, shards of the moon — the stuff of stars.

 

Tony glances at the purple remains next to him and imagines it saying, “Go on. That was nice. Play another tune.”

 

The other jellies out in the surf join in. Some applaud his performance, others make a sound like laughter.

 

That’s when it gets to him, when they start talking to him. Tony drops his head in his hands. He might as well be the only man in the world. For no one else cries when an alien dies.