i was trying to land this trick, skating the alley behind the house we rolled, just shy of 2 am, a kickflip with a back toss, the trucks hitting in parallel, and it just wasn't happening but i didn't give up, because that's what it means to be a skater, and when i saw the lights it felt as natural as the current of wheels on air and they were green like you've read about but moving in ways most lights don't and then they were there, 8 of them, shaped like 8, two circles stacked, a body and its head on top, looking more like a number than a mammal but moving with life, which is how i knew they were aliens, and i told them that and they made a movement that sloshed like laughter and communicated to me not through words but something like radio that it was more like 8liens, and they watched me, hovered near me as i rolled, and then the nearest 8 tilted its circles toward me and i understood, the way you understand things in dreams, that i should follow, so i pushed off harder than i ever had and the alley just kept going, the asphalt unspooling past the dumpsters, the back fences, the streetlights, and then the sky itself, and i was skating up the dark on a road of their green light, the 8s rolling alongside me like pack dogs made of math, and we sk8ed the universe, ollieing over dead stars, 50-50ing down the spine of something enormous and sleeping, carving up the inside of a nebula that smelled, impossibly, like the grip tape on my first board, and they laughed their sloshing radio laugh the whole way, eight hearts each beating for the dumb soft miracle of a kid who wouldn't quit, always counting 8, and i was so happy i forgot to be scared, and that's when i tried the trick again, up there in all that nothing and didn't land it, i caught the air wrong and the board spun off into the black and my body kept going and the green went white and the white went out, and then nothing, and then the alley, 3 am, the same crack in the same asphalt, my phone face-down in gravel, no lights, no 8s, no road in the sky, no sign they were ever there, just me standing up and i don't know why but i set my board down and pushed and tried the trick one more time, the trick that started all this, and it landed under my feet clean and quiet like it was never once a struggle, and i rode out the end of the alley under the sky but didn't look up because i already knew that the 8liens saw.