And then one day, in the blazing hot summer, Donna Temple-Noble is at her daughter's wedding, and the sky goes dark, and something in the back of her head shakes with a warm golden hum, and she feels, for just a second, as though she can see and know everything that will and won't and could and should happen. It's all around her, in a banana-shaped web that's neither shaped like a banana nor in any way like a web, really, but it doesn't matter because she sees it, for a second, and then the whispering explosion in her mind takes her into the darkness and she doesn't wake up for a while.
And when she does, eventually, everyone laughs because silly old Donna missed another alien jobby, another bloody invasion, and lucky for her she fainted on a nice soft patch of grass this time and not the sidewalk like she had before. And Donna shuts away the memory of that golden hum and that web that wasn't a web at all, shuts it away like a door in her mind, and sometimes when strange things happens it'll open, that door, but otherwise she keeps it shut, feels around the edges to make sure the seals are good, never dares to crack it open.
Because despite how glorious she felt when that happened, when she saw it, she also saw, as if from the very worst corner of an eye with very bad vision, what would happen if she kept it. And so she fainted, chose to live half-blind rather than flare out as the best version of herself. And maybe, she thinks to herself sometimes just as she's falling asleep, as the door in her mind relaxes slightly and something shiny and cooing throbs behind it, maybe that makes her a coward, maybe that's the wrong choice.
But then again, maybe that explosion of gold will be needed someday. Maybe one time she will see that strange thing that's neither a banana nor a web and she'll see what she needs to fix or heal — heal, that's an odd word, wonder why she thought that — and she'll catch fire and shine like time itself and make it right, one more time. One more time, as if she'd made it right before, which is stupid, of course, she's just a temp from Chiswick who won the lottery and meets doctors wearing bowties sometimes and does odd things like buy books no one likes and convince herself that the prime minister's an alien and see webs shaped like bananas that aren't anything like that at all and dream about flying phone booths and doodle singing aliens with worms on their mouths in the corners of her notebooks sometimes, aliens who look so sad and hold up their hands and she's not sure why that's what she doodles or why it makes her cry sometimes, but by then she's going to hit menopause any month now and so that's what she tells people when they're rude enough to ask.
And then usually, in the night, when she's thinking about all of those things in a sort of haze of Shaun's snoring and the tides of sleep tickling the door in her brain, the blackness of sleep takes her and she doesn't think about the door again for a while, almost as if her mind is tiptoeing around it, keeping it a secret from herself.