Dog was fast asleep when a spaceship crashed into his living room. It was catastrophic. Glass everywhere. Furniture smashed. Unfairly, spaceship completely intact. Inside the spaceship was Alien. Dog didn't see Alien at first. Alien appeared as heat haze. So Dog bumped into it, and Alien went "ow."

"Sorry," Dog said, "I didn't see you."

Alien asked, "What is sorry?"

"It's just what you say when you've done something wrong," Dog said.

Alien asked, "What is wrong?"

Dog thought about that. "What's wrong is you've completely destroyed my house. It was a nice house. Now it's a bunch of rubble."

"Sorry," Alien said.

"Thanks, I guess," Dog said. "Are you going to help me with this mess?"

Alien observed as Dog started to sweep up the glass and the broken furniture and pick up all of his things that were scattered across the floor. It tried to pick something up, too, but it couldn't grasp anything in its formless state. So Alien morphed into something else.

Dog finished putting away his broom, returned to the living room to take care of the spaceship, and gasped in surprise. Alien had become something that looked exactly like Dog.

"Why?" Dog asked.

"I am going to help," Alien said. "If I am you, I can help."

Help, it did. Alien helped tidy up and throw out the garbage (properly, in accordance with local garbage-throwing laws) and buy new furniture online (Dog and Alien browsed ikea.com) and bring that furniture home (Alien turned into a car).

Alien joined Dog in his day-to-day life. Alien came to understand most everything about Dog. His daily schedule, what he liked to eat, how he spent his free time, what he did for work. It even understood things that Dog's friends didn't know about Dog.

"This thing is so funny," Bird chirped. She was Dog's tall coworker friend that Dog had an obvious crush on. Alien knew what crushes were because Bird loved to talk about hers around Dog. "You can really turn into anything? What about me?"

Alien turned into Bird.

"Wow!! That really is freaky."

"Alien isn't a thing, really," Dog told her.

"But you call it it. Is that just what it wants to be called?"

"... I don't know."

Dog and Bird looked at Alien expectantly.

"Dog calls me Alien," Alien said. For some reason this made Bird burst into laughter once more.

The drive home was quiet and peaceful. Alien liked this life that Dog had. It thought that maybe it liked it because Alien was like Dog in many ways. For one, it looked and sounded exactly like Dog, most of the time.

Dog looked out the window. "What are you?"

The question was followed by an alert kind of silence, and held breath. Though it was possible Dog was talking to himself, Alien said, "I'm a car."

"When you're me," Dog asked, "what are you?"

Through its mechanically accurate radio speakers, Alien said the obvious: "I'm you."

.

When Alien woke up the next day the house was empty. Dog was gone. The spaceship was gone. Dog was often gone to places like the library or the supermarket. But he was never without his phone, never unreachable. In a desperate measure Alien went to the supermarket to wander around until it bumped into Dog by chance.

Alien was distracted by the thought of turning into a pile of oranges when a familiar voice said, "Dog! I didn't think I'd catch you here on a weekend."

Bird grabbed Alien by the shoulder and started chatting to it about her shopping list, her grand plans for lunch and dinner, and oh, remember that girl she was talking about yesterday, turns out she wasn't really interested in a relationship after all—"Hey, is something wrong?"

"Dog is gone," Alien said.

Bird stared at Alien. Her eyes cleared with recognition. "You're Dog's friend, aren't you?"

"Dog is missing," it stressed.

"Oh, no," Bird said. "We'd better find him."

Bird told Alien that in order to find him, it couldn't keep looking like Dog, otherwise it might confuse her. And it couldn't look like Bird, either, because then it might confuse other people. "Dog might be fine with that, god knows why, but we shouldn't both be Bird. I'll be Bird. Got it?"

After much trial and error ("you can't be a pile of oranges, either."), Alien eventually settled on heat haze once more. A haze that could stretch thin over the entire block, or the street, or the city. People noticed when it passed over them. Turned their eyes about, searching, just like Alien was. But no matter how thin Alien went, Dog was nowhere to be found.

"Do you think," Bird wondered, "maybe Dog went to space?"

.

Once, Alien did not exist. Then it did. In the dark of space it arrived at being, at moving, at becoming hot. Then it found an object with more mass than itself. A spaceship, though Alien would learn that name much later. The ship wanted to go somewhere. It was moving very slowly. Alien felt compelled to it.