Cosmic Correspondent

by Pen Avey

  Okay, I know what you are thinking—I should have stood up for my little sister; but the thing is, Killian’s lovely—I mean right. The strange thing is that Shriekfest didn’t go loopy and start screaming like at home when she doesn’t get her own way. Instead she just started asking questions about the fluppies. Killian turned out to be quite an expert on them!

  For instance, she told Shriekfest that fluppies mate for life and can have up to four litters of three flips (baby fluppies) a year, so when you see a herd of them roaming around they are all from the same family. I took the chance to show off my modest fluppie knowledge and told her that fluppies have an unlimited amount of teeth and if they lose one it simply grows back. Killian seemed really impressed by this, so rather than admit I’d read it on the back of a cereal box, I made out that I was really interested in them too and we actually had a proper conversation for the first time ever. She even told me about how she’s the chairperson of the Fluppie Lovers (or F.L. for short), and invited me to a meeting at her house next week. Fluppies may not be able to fly, but it felt like I flew home on a cloud of happiness!

  I’ll tell you all about the F.L. meeting in my next letter.

  Your friend,

  Dethbert Jones.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dear Earthling,

  I am so embarrassed. You know the F.L. meeting that Killian invited me to? It seems I grabbed the wrong end of the spatula and thought she was asking me to the meeting, but it turns out she was actually asking if Shriekfest wanted to come along. I arrived at her house only to discover that Fluppie Lovers is a group to educate preschool children about all things fluppie related. The rest of the group had an average age of three.

  Luckily there were loads of little kids there, so I think Killian was relieved to have someone not still sucking their thumb to help keep them all in line. I spent the whole meeting in a whirl of toilet trips, wiping snotty noses, and colouring in pictures of fluppies.

  I still don’t get how it was educational, as the only thing they seemed to learn from Killian was how to colour a fluppie picture within the lines, and the only thing I learned was that Shriekfest is quite normal for her age and I don’t really like small children whether they are related to me or not.

  After the meeting when all the little kids had been picked up by their parents, I hoped Killian would be so grateful for my help that she’d ask me to stay and hang out with her for a while. Disappointingly, she just handed over a fluppie picture to take home for Shriekfest and shoved me out the door.

  I haven’t felt so deflated since going to that silicon chip collectors convention last year with Andi and his parents. The highlight of the whole weekend was the unveiling of a chip with a 8,192 wide memory bus and over 28 billion transistors. This factoid seemed to make Andi vibrate with excitement but left me feeling slightly underwhelmed.

  I cheered up a bit when I got home from Killian’s and gave Shriekfest the fluppie picture though, as she promptly screwed it into a ball and ate it.

  Maybe she’s not so bad after all.

  In other news, I gave a presentation about you in Space Cadets this week and was finally awarded my Cosmic Correspondent badge!

  The Space Cadets were very interested in life on Earth and wanted me to ask you some questions on their behalf:

  How do you see outside at night when you only have one moon in your sky? (Crank has seven.)

  How do you protect yourselves from dinosaurs? (We’ve seen the pictures—they are very scary creatures.)

  Please can you send the recipes for every flavour of Earth cake? (This one was from Sergeant Megatron 5000—he’s cake obsessed.)

  Do you have any robot friends? (This one was from Andi, who has yet to find a suitable pen-pal. He tried writing to an industrial vacuum cleaner in Australia, but so far has had no response.)

  I’ll leave you mulling these over and eagerly await your reply.

  Write soon!

  Your friend,

  Dethbert Jones.

  CHAPTER 13

  Dear Earthling,

  Thank you for your letter and the answers to the questions raised at Space Cadets.

  I was interested to hear that you have electric lights in the street to help you see at night. Who goes around turning them all on? And off again in the morning?

  As for your news about the dinosaurs dying out: that’s sad, but it must be a relief to not worry about possibly being eaten at any moment.

  Also, I will pass on the home baking book you kindly sent Sergeant Megatron 5000 and explain that it does not contain every cake recipe on Earth. It’ll certainly keep him busy for a while.

  Finally I’ll break the news to Andi about there being no robots that can actually think for themselves on Earth. This is very surprising to me, as most things that contain electronics on Crank have evolved some sort of personality. Even my toaster says good morning to me (I’m always sure to be polite and say good morning back—the one time I didn’t, it burned my toast on purpose).

  I’ve had an interesting few days, as my Great Aunt Grumbeloid has come to stay with us for a while. She’s extremely old and has a bushier beard than Dad (I wrongly pointed this out when I was little, and if looks could kill, my mum would have taken me down on the spot).

  She is also very forgetful and keeps calling me Kicky (which is my Aunt’s name) and accusing me of drinking her heartburn medicine.

  I enjoy listening to her stories though. She talks about her childhood like it was only yesterday.

  For instance, when she was young, people got milk from massaging the udders of cows!

  I know—gross right?

  One downside to her being here is that Shriekfest has temporarily moved into my bedroom. I tried kicking up a stink and even suggested she’d be better off in with my parents.

  At this, Dad laughed like I’d told the funniest joke ever, then walked away shaking his head, so I guess that meant no.

  I was very clever though and catalogued everything in my room and its condition using a 3D imaging unit. Now I can claim damages from my parents if Shriekfest ruins anything while she’s in with me (lets see who’s laughing then, Dad).

  The worst thing about Shriekfest bunking in with me is that she’s an extremely light sleeper so I’ve got to tiptoe round in my own room in case she wakes up. You see, once she’s awake she forces you to play with her against your will. I don’t know how she does this, but it’s pointless resisting as she just grinds you down until you give in.

  I usually put up with it, but last night I was having a nice dream where Killian and I were tying wings to fluppies and teaching them to fly. We were both really happy and she turned to me and gave me a big hug. I was overjoyed at first, but then she hugged tighter and tighter until I felt as if I couldn’t breathe! I awoke gasping for breath to find Shriekfest sitting on my chest, her face mere centimetres away from mine, staring at me intently. I completely flipped out, mainly because she had pinned my arms down with her legs, totally trapping me. As I bucked and yelled in the attempt to dislodge her, she simply laughed, probably thinking I was pretending to be some kind of one dollop ride outside the Mega-Market. Luckily, my shouting alerted Mum, who rushed in and dragged her off.

  The upside of the whole episode is that Dad has (reluctantly) put a camp bed in his laboratory, and I’m going to sleep there for the rest of Great Aunt Grumbeloid’s stay.

  Dad trusts me about as much as I trust Shriekfest though and has used the 3D imaging unit to record all his stuff. I can’t wait to have a (careful) nose round tonight.

  Wish me luck!

  Your friend,

  Dethbert Jones.

  CHAPTER 14

  Dear Earthling,

  I am in big, big trouble! After I finished writing your last letter I spent my first night in the lab. I know to be extra careful with Dad’s things b
ut I’m afraid something terrible happened, which has changed the way I look—possibly forever!

  I’d been having a very careful snoop around in drawers and cupboards when I spotted a large jar with a sheet over it. I thought about leaving it alone, as obviously Dad had covered it over for a reason, but as I have a very active imagination, I guessed the horrors I’d come up with in my own head would probably be much worse than what was actually in the jar.

  I WAS WRONG!!

  I pulled back the sheet to reveal a HUGE, FOURTEEN-LEGGED SPIDER suspended in a jelly like substance.

  Personally I think eight legs are creepy enough. Those extra six sent me right over the edge! I panicked and accidentally knocked into a beaker of yellow slime that was on a low shelf behind me, and some of it splashed onto my bare ankle. I really should have wiped it off straight away but was in such a hurry to put the cover back on the mega-arachnid that by the time I got a paper towel, the mystery gunk had sunk into my skin and left a yellow stain.

  The last thing I wanted to do at that moment was sleep in the same room as the many-legged horror, but I knew if I went downstairs, I’d get into big trouble for snooping. In the end I dragged my camp bed as far away from the covered jar as possible and after a long time fell into a fitful sleep.

  When I woke up the next morning and stretched, I felt something hairy under the covers touching my foot. You can probably imagine what I thought it was! If there is a Grimace World Record for leaping out of bed, I smashed it that day.

  The truth of the matter was much worse than I’d feared though. The yellow slime is some kind of hair growth formula that my dad’s been working on, and where it had sunk into my ankle, I now had a thick patch of dark hair!

  I quickly put my socks and shoes on, but the hair was so long it poked out of the top of my sock! Not sure what else to do, I combed it round like some sort of leg scarf.

  By the time I got to school, it had grown even more. I confided in Andi, and after he’d finished rolling on the floor laughing, he agreed to help me.

  Luckily, he has a multi-tool hidden within a slot in his hip (which can deal with anything from unblocking a drain to soothing a crying baby), so we went into the boys toilets where he used the folding snippers to cut most of the hair away.

  I was relieved at first…but by munch-time it had grown back worse than ever, so we had to go through the whole process again.

  When I got home from school, I had to smuggle a pair of snippers out of Great Aunt Grumbeloid’s sewing basket so that I could have a secret trim each time I went to the bathroom. At first I flushed the clippings down the toilet, but when it started to get clogged up, I began stuffing them into my spare pillowcase.

  As I write this I have a whole extra pillow, and the hair growth is showing no signs of stopping. I think I’m going to have to tell my parents in the morning, as I do not have any more pillowcases.

  Did you ever have to confess to a wrongdoing?

  Your friend,

  Dethbert Jones

  CHAPTER 15

  Dear Earthling,

  The story you told about accidentally breaking your kitchen window but not admitting it until your dad threatened to call the police, cheered me up a bit.

  We don’t have police on Crank any more. It’s so rare anyone commits a crime that the local Mayor deals with any accusations of wrongdoing. The last recorded incident was two years ago when Strangler Richards borrowed a lace tablecloth from his neighbour, accidentally burned a hole in it, then gave it back folded up without saying anything.

  This shocked the local people. The trial lasted three weeks. Strangler was found guilty and ordered to buy his neighbour a new tablecloth; plus he was banned from borrowing anything from anyone for ten days. I know what you’re thinking and I agree, that punishment seems harsh to me as well.

  I’m very relieved to tell you that I’ve been spared from confessing my wrong-doing, as the morning after I sent your letter, my ankle hair suddenly stopped growing. This was lucky, as Dad came up to the lab before I’d gotten out of bed (it was the weekend so I didn’t have to get up early for school.) I took the opportunity to ask him a few innocent questions, starting with “What’s under that sheet?”

  This actually led to the answer to all of my questions. It turns out the creepy spider isn’t a spider at all, it’s a spider skin from “Sectoid,” a planet populated by giant insects.

  Dad told me he’d ordered it from The Everything so he could extract a gene for a formula he’d been working on—a hair removal formula. At this, he picked up the jar of yellow slime that I’d splashed onto myself.

  I had to bite my lip very hard to stop blurting out that his invention had the opposite effect, but then he went on to explain how it works and it totally makes sense now.

  Apparently the formula forces all of the hair that you would have normally grown in a lifetime to come out in a matter of days, after which the part of your skin you’ve treated will never grow hair again.

  Of course, this means that I now have a permanently bald patch on my left ankle, but no one will notice until I’m an adult. Hopefully by then Dad will have invented a hair growth formula.

  By the way, I saw a picture of an Earthling with drawings all over their arm on The Everything today. What’s that all about? (One of the drawings was of a human skull with a snake coiled round it, if that helps).

  See if you can find out for your next letter.

  Your Friend,

  Dethbert Jones.

  CHAPTER 16

  Dear Earthling,

  Thank you for your letter and the information about “tattoos.” People actually stab themselves with needles on purpose!? And the pictures never come off? Surely it makes more sense to simply draw on your arm with colouring pens? That way it would be painless, and you could change the design each week if you wanted to. I encourage you to suggest this idea to the next person with tattoos you come across and see what they think.

  In other news, I went round Andi’s earlier, but he wasn’t in, so on the way home I hung around outside Killian’s house for a while in the hope that I might bump into her.

  I’d been squatting behind a bush at the end of her driveway for about twenty minutes (I’ve taken to hiding there because her dad comes outside and tells me to go away otherwise), when who should come out of Killian’s front door but my old archenemy, Stabwell Phillips!

  I watched through the leaves as they chatted for a while and was upset to see Killian actually laughing at something Stabwell said (maybe he was telling her about the time he “accidentally” punched me in the stomach?).

  I was concentrating so hard on the scene before me that when I felt a tap on my shoulder I nearly leapt out of my skin. It was Andi, who’d come looking for me. Before I could say anything, he loudly blurted out: “WHY ARE YOU HIDING IN THAT BUSH, DETHBERT JONES?”

  I had to think fast and come up with a credible story, as Killian was heading up her driveway with a face like thunder, followed by a smug looking Stabwell.

  I turned to Andi and said (in what I hoped was a believable voice): “I thought I saw a fluppie run into this bush. It looked injured.”

  Well, that took Killian’s mind right off my activities, and Stabwell might as well have not been there (two for the price of one) as Killian started frantically searching for the imaginary fluppie. I started to sidle away, dragging Andi with me, under the pretence of going home to get my fluppie net to catch it in (my imaginary fluppie net, as I don’t really have one) when to my surprise Killian came out of the bush cradling something in her arms.

  It was a hedge-podge that had probably been blissfully snoozing until Killian stomped into the bush, but as far as I was concerned it had just saved me a great deal of embarrassment. I could have kissed it for that, prickles or not!

  Anyway it’s all worked out well as Killian is going to put it in a
box in her garage, and I’m helping her nurse it back to health (even though I’m 99.99% sure there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it).

  What’s even better is that Stabwell pretended he was interested in the hedge-podge (the big phoney), and as he went to stroke its chin, it bit him (on his good hand).

  Anyway, I’m going back to Killian’s later with some hedge-podge food and an old blanket I’ve promised her for its nesting box, so I’ll do some digging and find out why Stabwell was round there in the first place. I’ll let you know how I got on when I next write.

  By the way, do you know what hedge-podges eat? I think it may be snapples but I’m not sure.

  Your friend,

  Dethbert Jones.

  CHAPTER 17

  Dear Earthling,

  I found out what hedge-podges eat, and it’s pretty disgusterous. They actually eat FLUPPIES!

  Luckily they also enjoy munching on snapples, just like I thought, so while Killian is looking after the hedge-podge (who she’s named Spike), he’s going to be a firm vegan.

  I also tried to find out why Stabwell was round Killian’s house when we found Spike, but she avoided my questions, which makes me worried that she may actually like him.

  So I went for a different approach and said something unkind about Stabwell to see how she’d react. I mentioned that he smells pretty bad (vinegar and earwax) and is very spotty. Killian replied that this is because he’s turning into a teenager, and hadn’t I noticed that he’s even growing a moustache?

  This devastated me. Killian has noted this fact about Stabwell, yet I could grow an extra head and she’d barely raise an eyebrow. Still, I have to be positive. At least now I’ve got a good excuse to go round her house at any time to see Spike.