Aliens made peaceful contact with humans a number of years ago. Well, it wasn’t so much peaceful contact as it was passive indifference; they didn’t really give a damn about us, they just wanted to eat our animals.

This was at an exhausted point in Earth’s history. They came to Springfield, Illinois, landing on a private air strip and were greeted by a weary farmer. They were lumbering, dark creatures. Bipedal. Big bodies with lanky arms. He tried shaking one of their hands but they brushed him off, completely silent, in a way that seemed like they knew the connection he was attempting to establish but just didn’t care. They walked off in a direction with no apparent destination. In the morning, they and their ship were gone, as were six of the farmer’s pigs.

Next week, four of them landed, scattered across Europe. The situations played out similar to the first contact. Numerous animals were reported missing.

Word got out to the media quickly but the people were failing, governments were nothing more than tired behemoths wheezing quietly in their rocking chairs. It was too difficult to find the drive to dispel these meandering creatures from the planet; all military forces had been disbanded since people just stopped caring about conflict, or anything for that matter. The planet was dying. Maybe the creatures knew that.

Animals were disappearing here and there, mostly cows. Old movies and fictional accounts of space craft from other planets told us that aliens loved abducting cows, so it was to be expected. Nobody thought anything of it; we were accommodating. The Earth could spare a few cows. The creatures weren’t hurting anyone.

Soon, reports of mass animal disappearances were on the news. Peoples’ pets would go out at night and never come back. Aquariums were found empty in the morning. The favored fishing spots of many retired old men were barren, forcing them home with empty hands. Hunters came home smelling like sweat and deer piss for nothing. The wild cries of monkeys and birds in the rainforests were quieted more and more. Animals were vanishing, worldwide. But we were weak. We weren’t careful.

Finally, a man in India actually witnessed one of the creatures running across a plain with a cow under each arm late at night, hastily, nervously. The media exploded but we were helpless.

The creatures became less cautious with their motives, working openly in the day collecting mammals, reptiles, fish and everything else, even insects, filling their great interstellar arcs like some bizarre Biblical tale gone horribly backwards. People gathered to watch their intricate organization methods, caging and storing devices, and the subsequent devouring of various animals raw as the days grew long, their stomach grew hungry. PETA had a conniption over the whole thing. Some people tried to fight them, tried to free the poor beasts, but anyone who got close seemed to lose all motivation, like a spell had been cast over them, and just walked away with blank expressions. These were powerful beings we were dealing with. No, we weren’t even actually dealing with them, we just watched with silent mouths and blurry eyes as they took the majority of our planet from us, hands hanging uselessly at our sides.

I remember my father weeping quietly as the news reported the last ship had departed, all evidence of sentient life on our planet, besides our own, gone forever down the throats of those ravenous celestial wayfarers.

It’s been a year since they left now we have no animals left. Not one. No fish in the oceans, no birds in the sky, no moles in the ground, no horses in the fields, no bees in the flowers, no sloths in the trees, nothing. We are a planet of wasted, fragile vegans and sometimes the silence is so agonizing you can hear the rest of the universe laughing at us, breathlessly, from the depths of infinity.