Alien Stories

by E. C. Osondu

  As for me I think I know more about zombies than I know about these new guys and where they are from. I can tell you five things about zombies without even pausing: zombies have no minds of their own, they move in groups, they all look shabby, they are ugly, and there is a zombie apocalypse in mankind’s future somewhere.

  Now ask me to tell you a single thing about these new guys and where they come from. Go ahead ask me. See, I have no answer. I know nothing about them. Nada. Zilch.

  So, back to my wife. She is a good woman but the problem is that she is too good for her own good, sometimes. She does not think that there is any person’s problem that should be left to that person to resolve on their own. No, my wife must take on the problem herself and would not rest until the problem is gone. She sees nothing wrong in adding all these problems to our own heavy load.

  Is someone sick, in hospital, feeling unwell in any way?

  Trust my wife to rush down to the person with different pills in different plastic containers offering them medications. In addition she would go with a flask of hot water and sachets of Milo and milk and sugar asking them to drink and feel warm.

  Is there a family that is bereaved? She would be the first to be there and she will have some beautiful thing to say about the departed person:

  “Oh, no, never again shall we see someone who smiled as warmly as he did.”

  “Each time I met her she always said something that made me smile.”

  “She loved to share and would give you the very dress on her back not minding if she walked home naked.”

  “He treated everyone like they were his blood relations.”

  “He looked so strong the last time I saw him. Ah, death is indeed evil.”

  And so forth and so on.

  My wife once took in a stray cat, too. Now, this ugly old gray cat had everything wrong with it. It was going blind in one eye. It had a limp. It was mean-spirited and never purred, but sat there with one half-shut eye looking moody and offended. Now this cat, no matter how many times my wife tried to make it stay, would run back into the woods behind our house. My wife would feed it condensed milk and the cat would lap it up, but once my wife turned her face the cat would run back into the woods and only come back during lunch time for free food and condensed milk. I nicknamed the vile rogue Old Moocher.

  “Can’t you see that the cat does not wish to stay? Can’t you see that the cat is just using you? It likes the free food but also wants to do what it likes with itself,” I said.

  “The cat needs to get used to human love once again,” my wife said.

  Whenever it got cold or was drizzling or threatening to rain, Old Moocher would saunter in as if it owned the house. As soon as the weather warmed up, there was nothing you could do to entice it to come into the house.

  “This blighter of a cat is using you. Can’t you see that?” I asked my wife.

  “We just need to be a little patient with him. You’ll see. We need to feed him with love.”

  “Some love indeed. Even your condensed milk is wasted on him,” I said.

  Old Moocher and I avoided each other. He was wary around me and flinched whenever I came close to him. For some reason he never wandered in when I was the only one in the house. I wondered what he was running away from. I thought they were reputed to have nine lives.

  Anyway, one fine day, my wife waited for Old Moocher to show up but he didn’t turn up that day or the day after. That was the last we saw of him. I wish I could say that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

  My wife was heartbroken, though. She kept saying that we had failed him. We failed him, indeed, I thought. Most likely he had found better tasting condensed milk elsewhere.

  Yes, back to the new family. People continued to ask questions of them:

  “How did you hear about our little village that made you move here?”

  “Has our reputation grown so wide that people outside have heard of us?”

  “How long do you plan to stay here?”

  The questions wouldn’t stop. But they meant no mischief. It was the same way an old maid who suddenly finds herself deluged with marriage proposals from good-looking suitors would feel and respond.

  It came as no surprise to me when I heard that my wife had invited them to our house. She would host Lucifer himself if she got a chance. I am not in any way suggesting that the aliens were like good old Lucifer. Just saying.

  “You should have told me that you were going to invite them to the house. Not for nothing, but we both live in this house and if you are going to host some aliens you should at least give me a heads up,” I said to her.

  “Of what use were you in the past when I hosted other people?” she asked.

  “Are you saying I should go hide in the closet while they are here?” I asked.

  “You will do no such thing. You will be polite and pleasant to them while they are here. You’ll do everything to make their visit a good one,” she said.

  I could tell that she meant it. One thing about my wife, she may be soft when it came to cats and aliens but when it came to dealing with me she sure knew how to crack that whip.

  I decided to change my approach when I realized my first tack was not working.

  “Remember your African friends and how nice I was to them?”

  Now, she was smiling. Was it my question that was making her smile, or the memory of her African friends? I could never be sure with her. This was what bothered me about our relationship—this quality she had of making me feel like a second-grader squirming in front of the teacher’s desk and raising his finger to indicate number one or number two.

  “You were not nice to them initially, if I recall correctly,” she said.

  How on earth could I have been nice to them? What did I know of Africa and Africans? When she had mentioned that we were going to have visitors from Africa, the first thing that had occurred to me was the movie I had seen about Africa years ago. In the movie there was this wizened guy who was very meagerly clothed following a Coca Cola bottle to the ends of the earth. The Coke bottle was carelessly thrown out of a chopper and had unsettled the hitherto tranquil life of this man and his family and the rugged fellow had decided that he would return it to whoever had thrown this bottle of discord into his family.

  I had watched the movie so many times, and each time I watched it I would scream at the man to chill and go back home, that it was only a fucking soda bottle.

  What else did I know about Africa?

  I knew that it was the birth place of Freddie Mercury. I loved Queen. I loved their song “The Great Pretender.” I loved “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  But guess what: these aliens from the African continent had turned out to be not too bad, actually. The African wife immediately followed my wife to the kitchen and began to cut, dice, cook, fry, and soon enough a beautiful aroma that I didn’t know my kitchen was capable of producing began to emerge from there.

  The husband sat with their young alien son in the sitting room with me and we began to watch football. I assumed he didn’t know anything about the game, but he told me that he understood the game and that he had actually signed his son up for Pop Warner though the boy had not played flag. He said his son loved the game, but was not a good player, but wanted to impress his dad like a good boy. He said on this cold day they had gone to play a game in another town. Something he said about the coach: he said the coach was very strict and had warned the parents that on no account were they ever to run into the field of play during games.

  On this day his son had jumped up to catch the ball, no doubt playing to impress his father, but he missed and fell, hitting his head on the ground. Another player picked up the ball and then they noticed the boy was down. The father could not run into the field to find out what was wrong with his son. He watched as the unconscious boy was stretchered out of the field. He had run to where his son was lying on the stretcher and had touched the boy’s face. The son had opened his eyes that minute and had asked
the father if the game was over.

  I enjoyed his story. The father’s anguish, clearly evident as he told the story, made me realize that Africans were people like me, too. We had all enjoyed the wife’s cooking and I had told them to come back and visit whenever they felt like it.

  Eventually our alien visitors arrived. They had a little son who looked barely a year old. I was beginning to notice the fact that aliens always had children. I welcomed them and smiled even wider than I was used to smiling—so much so my cheeks began to feel strained.

  I had to ask them what everyone in our little village had always wanted to ask.

  “So why did you guys choose to settle here of all places?”

  “You don’t have to answer any of his questions if you don’t feel like it,” my wife interjected.

  “Oh, no, not a problem at all,” the alien man said.

  My wife smiled and went to the kitchen and came back with cupcakes and orange juice for their little son. She explained that she was cooking up something for the adults.

  “Actually he cannot have any of the cake. He was just discharged from the hospital recently. If you have some white grape juice or apple juice, that’d be fine,” the wife said apologetically.

  The alien guy had not answered my question, so I repeated it. He seemed like a nice guy after all.

  “Yes, sorry—I wasn’t ignoring you,” he said. “I was just trying to remember how we arrived at our choice of this place. Yes, so we had this map of the United States and we placed a coin in the middle and rolled it, and when the coin came to a stop, it rested on your village. So we knew that this was going to be our destination.”

  I examined his face to see if he was joking, but he looked serious though there was a hint of a smile on his face.

  “Met your match,” my wife said to me with glee.

  His wife handed their little son to the man and went to the basement with my wife to look at the clothes and toys she had packed for them.

  I looked at the little boy: he was calm but seemed tired. I knew kids his age loved to crawl around and pull things down and stick their little chubby fingers into stuff. This kid looked quiet.

  “Your son is so quiet,” I said.

  “He’s been very sick. He just got discharged from the hospital not long ago,” the father said.

  To be honest it came as some kind of shock to me that this alien kid had fallen sick. I thought they were immune to such things. Thankfully, I had the self-control not to utter all my thoughts; it was as if I could see my wife wagging her finger at me in my mind.

  That same moment my wife came in with the guy’s wife and once again I congratulated myself on holding my tongue.

  “He was just telling me the little baby was sick recently,” I said to my wife.

  “He is so cute. What happened?” my wife asked.

  I had to admire my wife for following a rule she had tried unsuccessfully to teach me for years: compliment first.

  The wife was the one who answered this time.

  “He was running a temperature, so we thought we should just give him a cold shower and let him rest and he would be okay the next day. But the next day his temperature was worse, so we decided to take him to the hospital. We had to wait a long time before the doctor would see us. The doctor asked if we had his shot records and we said that we didn’t. From that moment on everything changed. They said they were going to admit him and that he would be placed under observation for a virus.”

  She named a deadly virus I had heard of on the news. It had a name that was a combination of numbers and letters, but I had not paid much attention to it because according to what I heard in the news only little kids were vulnerable to it, and since I had no kids and was not a kid myself I paid no further attention.

  “So they offered no treatment?” my wife asked.

  “Just the occasional pain reliever,” the alien wife said.

  “Oh, dear,” said my wife, apparently outraged.

  “We were in that hospital for two days and my boy was not getting any better—in fact he was looking frail with each passing day. So one night I told my husband that we would leave the hospital the next morning and look for help for our son elsewhere. My husband agreed with me. The next morning when the doctor came in, we told him that we were going to leave. He was angry. He said we would be putting our child’s life in danger and that this was a country of laws and that if anything happened to the baby we would be held responsible. We told him that we knew that already. At that point he said we should wait, that he wanted one of his colleagues to take a look at our boy. The colleague soon came. She was a foreigner. She smiled and picked up our boy and touched his cheeks and watched him wince. She flashed a light into his ears and said that he had an ear infection. She set up an antibiotic drip for him. Within an hour our boy was sitting up on the hospital bed and asking for food. By evening he was well enough for us to leave the hospital,” she said.

  “That was ridiculous,” my wife said.

  “We are just grateful that we still have our boy,” the husband said.

  I asked the wife if I could carry the baby. She nodded and handed the baby to me.

  “I have never seen you carry a baby before,” my wife said, breaking into a smile.

  “There’s a first time for everything,” I said.

  The husband nodded in agreement. The baby looked at me.

  I wondered if I was going to say something wrong. I was going to offer the baby something to eat but I didn’t know what the baby liked to eat; they were aliens, after all, and he was still frail from his illness.

  I turned to my wife. She was looking at me in a way I have never seen her look at me before. Her eyes were filled with tenderness so heavy you couldn’t cut it with a knife. I realized that there was nothing I would say at that moment that would be wrong and I began to rock the baby from side to side.

  Feast

  Everybody looked good on Alien Feast Day. It is said that even the sick became well on Alien Feast Day. Even if they were still feeling a little unwell, it was kind of hard to know because everyone came out gaily dressed.

  Little children stood listlessly in groups acting the way children are wont to act all over the world. Becoming interested in one thing then losing interest very quickly and moving on to something else. The older kids who had witnessed the festival a few times in the past tried to act like they knew it all. They strutted around. Impatient to see things begin like everyone else then acting blasé like they had seen it all the very next minute. Then they grew curious all over again, asking questions and growing petulant when their parents seemed distracted and didn’t respond quickly.

  “What color of alien was it going to be this time?”

  “If the aliens were so happy how come they didn’t smile?”

  “Why did they do it anyway?”

  “Why aliens? Why not real people like the rest of us?”

  “Was it true that the aliens got to eat whatever they chose before it was done?”

  “Was it also true that in the past an alien had asked for something that was not available here and they had to go over the hills and valleys and through many mountains and rivers until they finally got the delicacy he had requested and then they brought it for him and after he ate then the deed was done?”

  “Was it ever going to stop?”

  Shhhh. Hush. You ask too many questions, the Elders said to the little ones. Who have questions ever helped in this world, they asked? Even as they answered the children’s questions with a question of their own.

  Turning once again to the children, they told them to just watch and observe the proceedings. That was how the Elders had learned the rules. That is how the children were going to learn, if only they could settle down and watch.

  The children watched, observed, and grew quiet for a little while then like the restless little weaverbirds that they were, they began to ask questions again.

  “What color of hood was it going to be this
time?”

  “Would it be a black, white, red, or purple hood?”

  “All the rumors at school saying that the alien would not be hooded anymore? Why was a hood even necessary? Was there anything that was being hidden from their eyes? Even if they saw the proceedings with unhooded eyes what difference was it going to make at the end of the day when all is said and all is done?”

  Asking questions to which no answers were obviously forthcoming becomes boring after some time, especially for young children who do not have the patience of philosophers.

  So they began to do that other thing that children like to do even as the adults began to go about the business of the day. The adults were adept at this for they were not learning the ropes—they had done this deed many times and had become adept at what was going to be done.

  So the children began to play their games.

  They played Boju Boju, a game of hide-and-seek. They all went into hiding while the Seeker ran around saying boju boju? and looking for the luckless victim to catch who then becomes the next Seeker.

  They played There Is Fire On the Mountain Run Run Run. They ran in every direction screaming about the fire on the mountain and asking everyone to run, run, run.

  They played Tinko Tinko. The sound of their little hands growing surprisingly loud as they slammed against each other.

  They played Who Is In The Garden?

  They played the favorite game of the boys: Police and Thief. Some played the good guys while some played the bad guys. They searched furiously for the missing item until it was found.

  And the girls got tired of playing with the boys and began to yell, “Girls and girls play together.” And the boys too who were already tired of playing with the girls but didn’t want to be the first to complain also began screaming, “Boys and boys play together!”

  And the girls went off on their own to play their own game of Ten-Ten.

  And the boys found a piece of brown rope and began to play Tug of War. They stretched their little muscles as they pulled and the losing side derived a lot of pleasure as they fell on the ground screaming the word yakata.