Guest Post: The Andromedan, Strange

Good evening. Bill here. Amy's husband. Bill.

Amy isn't feeling well today. Mainly it's 'cause of the broken air conditioning unit. Outside it was 96° today. Inside the thermostat read 97°. Before cooking supper. We got blowing fans. We got a window unit to help supplement the coolth in the kitchen. The whole family's sitting around in what amounts to skivvies. And Amy's eyes are glazed and unfocussed.
So here I am, doing my part to keep the flame of literacy alive. By hijacking her blog.
Enjoy.

Things – and people – are not always what they seem. Or even what they claim to be.

I had a roommate once, in a city far away. We’ll call him "Larry" because "Brad Pitt" was already taken. I had met him once before I moved in. He was looking for someone to help with the rent, and I was trying to get away to a city far away. We were introduced at a science fiction convention, which was the type of crowd I was running with at the time, and made arrangements.

“Larry?” people said. “He’s harmless enough.” So I showed up on New Year’s Day, with my final paycheck from my old job and an Escort full of my belongings. He was glad to see me, and gracious enough, and I settled in.

At some point in the following week I started noticing the peculiarities. The casual pants that were just a tad too short. The stiff curly hair combed straight out to the side like a sheet caught in a gale. The way his eyes got bigger at random moments, as if he had just had a thought that startled him. The way he stared at his hands as if in disbelief. The little secret smile.

Finally, I had to say something. He had been picking at the back of his hand and muttering under his breath. “You OK?” I asked.

He looked up, and I’d swear he was delighted I asked.

“I’ve got psoriasis!”

“Ah!” I said. “I hear that’s painful.”

“No, you don’t understand! It means something’s wrong!”

“They have medications now….”

“But it’s not supposed to happen!” Larry began waving his arms. “Something’s wrong with my shield!”

I struggled with myself. I could just walk away from him. I wanted to walk away. But the question forced its way out. “Shield?”

“The shield that’s supposed to protect me from harm,” he said, and his eyes lit up.

He wasn’t human at all, he explained, but a Star Being from Andromeda. He had been on Earth for twenty thousand years, and this was his first illness.

“I thought you were from Tennessee,” I pointed out.

“Well of course I have to change bodies occasionally. That’s where my last incarnation was. Oak Ridge.”

“Where the nuclear lab is? Do your parents know?”

Over the next few months I learned more about his special powers. His shield was impervious to bullets and knives, although he was worried that they may be failing. He could levitate whenever he wanted; he just saw no real need to right now. And it had been years since he had made himself invisible.

I was constantly astounded. Here I was, sharing an apartment with a Star Being! And to think that he disguised the fact from the world by posing as a shoe salesman at the local mall. I had to break him. Because I couldn’t afford to move out quite yet.

I looked for chinks in his logic. I challenged him to prove his assertions. I talked to friends who had known him for years. “Don’t fight it,” they said. “He’s taken down smarter men than you.”

Thanks, I thought. And I persisted. I just couldn’t help myself.

“So why are you here? On Earth, I mean?”

“We were each assigned a world to monitor. You guys just got lucky and got me.”

“And you report back to Andromeda?”

“That’s a problem,” he said as his face clouded. “I haven’t been able to make contact for years. My powers seem to be fading.”

“Like your shield.”

“Exactly! You do understand!”

One day, about three months into my ordeal, he got a twinkle in his eye and said, “You don’t really think I believe I’m an alien, do you?”

I sat back and stared at him, mildly stunned buy this turn of conversation.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

“Of course not! It’s all a game, a big joke.”

The next day I came home to find him standing rigid in the middle of the living room floor, arms out from his sides, eyes rolled back in his head. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

“Yo, Larry,” I said. “What’s up?”

He took a moment to come out of his trance. He looked crestfallen. “Oh, nothing. I was just trying to see if I could levitate again. Sometimes,” he went on with a sigh, “I think I can feel it coming back. I guess I’ll just have to be patient.”

My own patience was nearing the end. I quietly let it be known I was ready to move, and I wasn’t too concerned about having to share an apartment again.

I still haven’t made up my mind about Larry. I figure there are three possibilities.

It may have been an elaborate hoax, a character he played for at least fifteen years, that nobody was able to break, but that nobody else believed. If so, nobody thought it was terribly funny, either.

He may have really believed, which makes him one of the saddest cases of delusion I’ve ever heard of.

Or, perhaps, he really was a twenty-thousand-year-old Star Being from Andromeda. It is a possibility. Given a big enough universe, anything could have happened. In fact, stranger things have happened.

But not around here.

For more free samples of my work, see me at The Doggerel King.

Copyright © 2008 by Bill Mullis. Used by permission

Cannonball Run

I’m perched atop a Revolutionary War cannon in a position I will delicately describe as “not sidesaddle.” Behind me the water ripples out toward Fort Sumter, a major piece in the puzzle of how we managed to win independence from a country that, compared to the America of the time, is relatively the size a flyswatter looks to a targeted fly. I’ve been smiling into the sun for so long that I’ve managed to flash “Help Me” in Morse code to eighteen passers by using my front teeth, each of which is covered in grit and feels approximately the size of a sailboat.

So far, either nobody understands Morse code or they don’t want to risk having their picture taken in their vacation clothes. Just as I’m beginning to realize there’s a fine line between smiling and gritting your teeth, I hear the camera click and start to slide to safety down the back of the statue. Halfway down the cannon, my pants get hung on, to use a technical term, the "back." Two and a quarter centuries ago a soldier would stand here to light the fuse. My fuse is currently too short to light.

“Hold it! That’s a better shot!” shouts Bill, clicking away like he’s head photographer for America’s Top Model. A little more experience and he could stalk Britney with the Hollywood paparazzi.

I hang in mid air having a closer relationship with heavy artillery than is appropriate on a family outing. We are celebrating my husband’s birthday with a day trip to Charleston, the Holy City, and I’m thinking ungodly thoughts.

Ever since Bill turned the big 5-0 and got his membership packet from the American Association of Undeniably Old People, he’s been moping around like a kid who’s just found out where drumsticks come from. So for his birthday, I joined the Electronics Age and got him a fancy digital camera. Nothing like a new toy to cheer up an old birthday boy.

I don’t know much about the make and model of this baby, but the logo emblazoned down the side says Canon, and there’s enough alphanumeric characters trailing along behind it to drive the price up past what I’d normally pay for a spa weekend. With Brad Pitt.

What hubby doesn’t know is that, using my highly developed Google-Fu, I found the camera on the Internet for a fraction of what you’d pay in the store. Since money can’t buy love, I’ll use what I saved for batteries.

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those that photograph like Cindy Crawford and those whose picture always looks like a self portrait by a blindfolded six-year-old. Needless to say I’m more six than Cindy. I don’t want to say pictures of me generally look like chewed gum stuck on the bottom of a picnic table, but one look at my glamour shots and you know it’s body by Super Bubble, face by Bazooka.

As I’m dangling over the viewfinder end of the cannon, I notice that I have the attention of most of the tourists in the park. For a second, I’m a bigger attraction than the nude statue on the point. With shutters clicking all around me, I finally manage to secure a foothold on a pile of display cannonballs painted black and cemented solidly in place to withstand years of assault by squirrels, toddlers, and other evildoers. I balance on the pyramid of ammo long enough to release the hold of the big gun on my pants.

Just as hubby realizes my distress and rushes to my aid, I climb down looking as if I’d been straddling a missile made of black chalk. After checking me over for injuries and a better camera angle, he proudly displays the photographs he got while I was astride the big gun. As I squint at the display in the glare of the sunshine I suddenly realize that, new technology or old, no matter which cannon I get shot by, the results are the same.

But this time I was saved by the balls.

Plum Crazy

I recently attempted to purchase two plums at a local grocery store. It would have been easier to get elected head of the Happy Hollow chapter of Hell’s Angels than it was to buy those two plums.

“What’s this?” The cashier, who is approximately the same age as my knee replacement, held up a plastic baggie that contained two small purplish globes. The look on her face asked the obvious question. “Where did the crazy woman get the body parts and how do I alert store security without having to deal with bloodstains on my scanner?”

I remember when it took all their concentration to ask “paper or plastic?”

The trouble with parents today is that they don’t let kids peel potatoes. Back in the good old days, kids spent quality time in the kitchen, slicing and dicing and cleaning out the gunk in the drain. Kids today are too busy taking Advanced Placement classes and computing their GPR to do chores. That’s why none of them can tell the difference between a kumquat and a kiwi so that they can hold down a decent job at the Piggly Wiggly. Sure the modern kid can program a cell phone to intercept messages of national security from spy satellites, but when it comes to real life his grocery cart has a loose wheel.

“They’re fruit!” I shouted in the tone of voice I usually reserve for children who are engaged in enthusiastic games of lawn darts in populated areas.

The cashier looked at me as if contemplating a dress code change to include full body armor, and held up my helpless plums beside a picture of an eggplant in her secret cashier code book.

“Are they like apples?” she asked leafing through the pages.

“Yeah, the same way Richard Simmons is like Robert Redford.”

“Who?”

“He looks a lot like Brad Pitt.”

“Oh, that old guy from the movies.”

“Yes. Robert Redford.”

“Not him. I meant Brad Pitt.”

“Look, I’m not trying to give you brain freeze. I just want to buy plums.”

She flipped the “assistance needed” light over her cash register. This simple flashing light initiated immediate changes in shopper-to-shopper interface. A mother of two behind me ceased counting the piggies on the dimpled bundle in her buggy and fixed me with an evil eye. Her older daughter, a charming toddler dressed in pink, gave up begging for gummy bears and launched a barrage of peanut M&M’s at my shoe. Behind the Partridge turned Munster family, a balding man in Bermuda shorts dialed 911 on his cell phone and a Goth-style teenager drew a tear in her white makeup with a spiky black fingernail.

As the light pulsed on and off, a tense stillness settled over the surrounding area. In the sudden lull, the cashier’s voice came loud and clear over the microphone. “FRUIT AT REGISTER SIX!”

I can understand the feelings of the people waiting in line, but it was downright rude of them to shout AMEN!

Clean Sheets and Cat Hair

Perusing my favorite blogs around the web, I came across a topic that gave me paws, um pause, which is Old English for an idea for a post of my own when stuffy sinuses have blocked any new ideas from entering my brain. Therefore I shamelessly stole this prompt about clean sheets from the December 12th salute to Clean Sheet Day on Seven Babes A-Blogging, although I'm offering a link to their site to make amends for my theft and so they won't beat me up or stomp me with their stilletos. (Check them out at http://7babesablogging.com/).

I have more of a chance of watching Brad Pitt saunter down my driveway in a polka dot Speedo than I do of sleeping on clean sheets. In a country where almost anything is possible, why can’t I hop straight from the shower onto sheets so sparkly fresh that the Martha Stewart on the tag looks like Shirley Temple? Oh, sure I’m familiar with tales of snuggling into a freshly made bed and enjoying that indescribably luxurious feeling of high-count cotton against bare skin. But I have a trio of cats and a double dip of doggie paws patrolling my bedroom like it’s Wild Kingdom. Ringling Brothers can construct three rings and a big top in the time it takes me to change pillow cases. Nothing says, “Here, kitty kitty” like snapping on a bottom fitted sheet in a delicate floral print design.

I almost got away with it last week. I tiptoed down the hall to the linen cupboard and sprayed the door hinges with a puff of lubricant to avoid any telltale squeaks, soundlessly removed a set of clean sheets from the shelf and crept as stealthily as a ninja past curfew into the bedroom--where I tripped over Justin the Rambo cat who was lying in wait, wide-eyed and tail-twitching, camo headband tied jauntily about his ears. Like thoroughbreds at bugle-call, we raced each other to the bed. As I rounded the headboard and headed down the homestretch, I made a desperate attempt to flip open the sheet and send it floating toward the waiting mattress. Down, down the billowing folds settled, landing on the diving form of a springing cat, who had launched himself into the swirling cloud of cotton like a skydiver jumping into the waiting arms of heaven. I scrambled after him in a puff of dryer fresh scent and a cloud of tabby cat hair. By the time I retrieved Camo Cat, the covers resembled a bolt of fake fur on the clearance rack at Walmart. I snapped on the fitted sheet ignoring the fact that my bed had sprouted a cat-shaped lump and a gray tail that protruded from one corner of the sheet and twitched so fast it looked like the mattress was rotary powered.

While I’m engaged in tiger taming, in parades Lucy, the Dachshund Queen, to take up her usual resting place, nestled into the center of my grandmother’s comforter. This girl considers it an actionable offense to move three inches to the right so I can get in to bed at night. Coercing her to relocate long enough to introduce new linens requires a majority vote in the house—and I’m outnumbered paws down. It’s not long before I’m surrounded by more wildlife than you find at an outdoor picnic, the sheets look like they need to be sent to a specialty groomer, and I need another shower.

So tonight I’m sleeping in the dog’s bed. It’s the cleanest spot in the house.

Bad Bread and Broken Hearts

We all know one. The woman who collects men like other people collect salt and pepper shakers or old teapots or odd nicknames. I have a friend who is cooler than a julep and sweeter than sugar cane. She attracts men like fruit tea attracts flies. She’s had more husbands than Paris Hilton has party dresses for housepets. At a time of life when I’m shying away from getting a dog with a long life span, Raelynne’s going through suitors like a paring knife through parboiled potatoes. She’s met the perfect man. Seven times.
"I’m cutting my losers,” Raelynne fumed as she strode into my kitchen bright and early one spring afternoon. Raelynne rarely rises before noon on the weekends except in cases of extreme emergency such as news that Brad Pitt is filming nude scenes next door. She nestled into my kitchen chair like it was a vat of warm chocolate.
“You mean your losses?” I asked, pulling up a stool. If she’s up and around at lunchtime on a Saturday, there’s probably a story worth making coffee for. I popped a roast into the oven, set the timer for four o’clock, poured myself a cup of Maxwell House, and settled in to listen.
“No, when I say losers, I mean losers. I’ve reviewed my list of current relationships and found there are individuals there who no longer offer any value-added services.”
"Value-added? Sounds like romance is dead. Who's been voted off the island?”
“There's Lance,” She poured a cup of coffee from the pot and stirred in an ice cube. Raelynne says life is too short to wait for coffee to cool. “I asked him to stop by Oscar’s and bring deli sandwiches with him when he came over to do that flower bed under the living room window yesterday. Don’t you know he took so long trying to decide what kind of bread to get, he only had time to do half the flowers before dark. And to top it off, he brought pumpernickel.”
“So let Lance shop some other bakery for his hard rolls. Who else?”
“Well, there’s Sam. He’s a dear, but he's a stripper. I keep finding one dollar bills in the strangest places.”
“So much for Sam and his singles. What ever happened to Steve?”
“Oh. Steve. Well. . .” She paused and traced the ivy design on her coffee cup with one newly purchased Raspberry Rose fingernail. “I’m afraid he had a character flaw I just couldn’t deal with.”
“What was that?” I asked, spreading strawberry jam on an English muffin.
“He was in love with me. He kept asking me to marry him. I finally ran out of excuses, so he had to go.”
“But I thought you cared about him.”
“Best man for growing roses I ever met. Vacuumed my house every Tuesday, took out the garbage every weekend, and never raised the lid on the toilet that he didn’t wipe under the rim before he put it down.”
“Sounds like love to me. Why didn’t you marry him?”
“My dear girl,” Raelynne looked shocked. “What would I have told all the others?”
I thought about my own Romeo. He’s put up with a lot more than bad bread and garbage duty over the years.
Romance isn’t dead. It’s just making the rounds.