Alien Stories

by E. C. Osondu

  Soon they all decided that they’d have more fun by playing together and they gathered again both boys and girls and began to recite a poem about two blackbirds sitting on a tree, two blackbirds that had the odd names of Peter and Paul and how Peter soon flew away and then Paul seeing that Peter had flown away also decided to fly away and then there were no more blackbirds sitting on the tree.

  All that playing had made them hungry and now their mind was on the food that they were going to eat after the hanging. The entire event was really about the feasting after all. So once again they returned to the subject of food.

  Like the well brought-up kids that they were, they began to talk politely about the food that the alien was allowed to eat before the hanging.

  “So if the alien wants a cake as big as a house, they’d order the cake?”

  “Was it true that even if they wanted a big tub of ice cream they could get it?”

  “Was it true that the alien could order any kind of sweet, toffee, candy, gum, that they wanted and it would be given to them?”

  The answer to all their questions was of course yes. Just before the hanging the alien could request for any kind of food or drink. Any quantity and it would be provided.

  They still found it somewhat difficult to wrap their heads around this fact. That it was even remotely possible to request for a food or drink or a type of candy and it would be provided with no questions asked. These children lived in a world where it seemed like they were always asking for things and in this world it was always the job of the adults to say no to their requests. Perhaps, the fate of the alien was not a bad one, really when you thought about it.

  And the phrase it wasn’t so bad rang like a song that played over and over again in their young heads.

  It wasn’t so bad… it wasn’t so bad… it wasn’t so bad…

  “The day is far spent,” the Announcer said.

  It was funny how the Announcer came up with new expressions every year. Was there a little book he consulted from which he pulled out the expressions?

  “We must begin to do what we have gathered to do,” said the Announcer.

  This too was a new expression. In the past he had used words like:

  “Now the hour has come.”

  “It is that time of the year once again.”

  “OK, let’s do it.”

  “And now, let us do as we have always done.”

  They brought out the alien. The alien’s face was not covered. The aliens had the option of having their faces hooded or not.

  According to the Elders this idea of deciding whether to have their face covered or not was yet another proof of how much choice the alien had in the matter.

  Once again the Announcer cleared his throat and intoned:

  “Accept our little sacrifice which we offer up on to you.”

  The alien was led to the stage. The rope was fastened around the alien’s neck. The lever was pulled. The neck snapped. The alien was dead.

  It was the children that started the race to the Feasting Hall where the food was already prepared and waiting. Soon they were joined by the adults.

  They fell on the food and feasted with both hands. It was one day when they could eat as much as they wanted and even more. There was nothing wrong with stray pieces of food falling on the floor or drinks spilling from cups that were running over. It was allowed. That was even the point of the feast.

  And that night, everyone slept soundly because on Alien Feast days everyone slept uncommonly well.

  Some said it was the food.

  Some said it was the drink.

  Some said it was the salubrious weather.

  Some said it was a sign that the alien sacrifice had been an acceptable one.

  What no one could argue about was that after the hanging of an alien everyone always slept soundly. And the only sound that could be heard all through the night was the relentless musical song of deep snores.

  Mark

  When I was young there were three things my grandmother loved to do: sunbathe, smoke her tobacco pipe, and tell me stories about the Red Planet.

  “Make me my pipe and I will tell you a story about the Red Planet. My eyes are beginning to dim and I don’t want to spill the tobacco all over myself,” she’d say to me.

  I would make her the pipe. I packed the aromatic tobacco tightly into the pipe the way she preferred it. She did not like to light her pipe with safety matches, so I had to go to the kitchen and scoop burning pieces of charcoal with her metal gong the way she taught me to do it. She would nimbly pick up the coal with thumb and forefinger without a wince and drop it into her pipe. She would draw the pipe and slowly let the smoke through her nostrils. Her craggy face soon became relaxed and only then would she start telling me one of her stories.

  “When the earth was still very young,” she would begin.

  “How do you mean young, Grandma?”

  “So young one had to walk slowly and gingerly like a chameleon otherwise the earth would cave in.”

  “The earth was that young?” I asked.

  “Yes, so young you did not need a hoe to dig the soil. You simply scooped up the dark earth with your hands before planting your crops.”

  I placed my foot on the earth and pressed. It felt firm.

  “That must be a really long time ago, Grandma,” I said.

  “Long to you, but not so long ago to me. Anyway, you must let me continue with my story or I will forget what story it was I was going to tell you,” Grandma said.

  “I am listening, Grandma,” I said.

  “Many years ago, the sky of the Red Planet hung over the earth like a low-hanging fruit. And here was the best part—the Red Planet was totally edible. You could cut and eat a piece of the Red Planet for food. The amazing thing was that it tasted so good. The reason why it tasted so good was because the piece that you cut transformed into whatever you desired to eat. So if your craving was for yam pottage you simply cut a piece of the overhanging Red Planet and it tasted like the best yam pottage you ever had.

  “The inhabitants of the Red Planet did not mind people cutting and eating their planet as food because no sooner did you cut a piece than it grew right back. But there was one simple rule: one must cut and eat only the quantity that was enough to fill them. If you cut a bigger piece than would fill you, the Red Planet became angry and moved further away from the earth.

  “For a long time everyone obeyed this rule and there was no problem. But as the earth began to get older and the number of people continued to grow, people began to worry if the Red Planet would still be there when they woke up the next morning. So what did they do? They began to cut more of the Red Planet than they could eat. But a sad thing was also happening. The piece they hoarded grew wormy and inedible. And another thing began to happen: the Red Planet began a fast dialogue with its legs and began receding further and further.

  “One day the people of earth woke up and the Red Planet was gone. Gone to where man could neither reach it nor cut it to eat. That was how the Red Planet ran away from us. It ran so far away and did not look back.”

  Grandma paused and closed her eyes. She was silent. The only sound was the sound of her cold pipe as she moved it from one side of her mouth to the other. Her eyes were closed.

  “Are you sleeping, Grandma?” I asked.

  “Sleep? What am I doing with sleep? I will die soon and sleep forever, so what is the rush? Make me a fresh pipe,” she said.

  “But Father says you should smoke only a few pipes a day because of your health, Grandma,” I said.

  “And when did your father start caring so much about my health? Did he worry about my health when he nearly tore me in half when I was giving birth to him? I never smoke more than my body needs, and besides, tobacco is not planning to run away,” Grandma said. “Make me a fresh pipe and I will tell you a story about the most beautiful girl on earth and how she ended up marrying a very ugly man from the Red Planet.”

  “The most beau
tiful girl, you said, Grandma?” I asked.

  “I see that I have your attention now. You are just like your father,” Grandma said.

  I prepared a fresh pipe for her.

  “So back when the earth was still young there once lived this girl who was so beautiful that her beauty could only be compared to the radiant sun and the ocean and to beautiful flowers. She was nicknamed Enenebejolu, meaning entrancing beauty that made one forget to go to the farm. She loved her nickname. She was not bashful, not one little bit. Soon enough everyone forgot her real name and began calling her only by her nickname, Enenebejolu.

  “And then it was time for her to marry. Men from far and near began to ask for her hand in marriage. But for each suitor that came to propose she had a reason why she could not marry them.

  “‘Go away, you are too short,’ she said to the short one.

  “‘You want to marry me, you who is as tall as a palm tree.’

  “‘You want to marry me? You are too dark-skinned. How will I see you when it is dark?’

  “‘No way can I marry you. Your skin is too fair. Are you a woman that you should be this fair-skinned? Please leave me alone. Must you get married? If you must marry why not look for your own kind?’

  “A suitor with long hair she turned down by calling him bushy-haired.

  “The hairless suitor she hissed at and sent away because he had no hair. ‘How can I marry a bald-headed man when I am not a vulture?’ she asked.

  “No suitor was good enough for her.

  “To the poor suitor she said, ‘I can’t marry you. You want me to leave my father’s house to go and suffer in your house? No way am I doing that.’

  “To the rich suitor she said, ‘Oh no, not you. You want people to say I married you because of your wealth. No way. I want a husband I can work with so we can both grow rich together.’

  “And soon Enenebejolu’s news reached the Red Planet. You know how news travels fast even to the most distant planets. Now, you may not know this but the Red Planet has the ugliest men in the universe. The men from the Red Planet are rather harsh on the eyes. When news reached them that there was a beautiful girl down here who was turning down all the men who asked for her hand in marriage, they decided to send one of their own people to try. Now, don’t forget that I had mentioned earlier that the men of the Red Planet were ugly, but one thing they had in abundance was resourcefulness. So they came up with a plan. They each decided that they would contribute the most attractive part of their body to the man from their planet who was coming to ask Enenebejolu for marriage. One contributed his straight legs, another an impressive nose, and the other contributed his gleaming set of teeth.

  “On the market day, the man from the Red Planet came into town. As soon as Enenebejolu set her eyes on him she fell in love with him. Before the man from the Red Planet could open his mouth to ask for her hand, she agreed to marry him. And that same day she agreed to follow him back to his planet. As they entered the Red Planet, her new husband began to return all the body parts he had borrowed to their original owners. Soon he had returned them all and he stood before Enenebejolu squat and ugly, and right before Enenebejolu’s eyes was the ugliest creature she had ever seen. She realized her folly and she began to shed tears. First her eyes shed water, then they shed blood. That was how sad she was. To worsen matters, nobody in the entire Red Planet called her by her nickname.”

  Grandma rose and stretched.

  “You have heard enough stories for one day. It is time for me to go inside,” she said.

  And then Grandma didn’t come out of her room. I went to her room when I came back from school and I found her sitting on her palaver chair. She was wearing her olive-green sweater and her black beanie cap.

  “Make me some tea,” she said.

  I poured the tea leaves into her black whistling kettle and added water. When the water with the tea leaves came to a boil, I took it off the stove and let the tea build some body, then I placed a tea-strainer on her large green metal cup and poured out the pitch-black tea. I gave her the cup, she pursed her lips and blew the top and took a little sip.

  “Drink, Grandma. Tea is good for you. Soon you’d be strong again,” I said.

  I went to turn off the stove, but Grandma told me to turn it down low, but to leave it on. I could see that she was cold even though it was quite warm and I was sweating.

  “All my friends and age-mates already left. They are calling me to come with them on a journey,” she said

  “What journey, Grandma? Can I come with you?” I asked.

  “Heaven forbid that you will come with me,” she said. “The journey is far and I am not quite ready. Traveling to a distant place requires preparation,” she said.

  The next day I went with Grandma to the forest to get some herbs from the Ebenebe tree for her fever. The tree stood alone in the forest as if other trees were scared to come too close to it. The tree had a white bark.

  Grandma leaned on the tree and began to speak to it.

  “O, highly respected one, we come to you to take of you to heal our body. Cutting into you is like cutting into our own skin, but we do it to make us better. We revere you and love you and will never hurt you. Give us your healing power, dearly venerated one. May we be healed of whatever ails us the way your bark heals after we cut you for our needs.”

  And then she gestured to me to cut and I did.

  When we got back home Grandma emptied the bark into her pot and added water and placed it on the stove. Her stove was the old-fashioned type that needed to be pumped. I pumped the stove hard and soon the flame turned from orange to blue. The pot began to boil and the herbal aroma of the bark filled the room. I turned down the stove at Grandma’s instruction and she removed the cover of the pot and moved her palaver seat so she was sitting directly beside the pot. She placed the pot between her legs and draped her blanket around herself so she was completely covered and began to breathe in the hot aromatic fumes from the boiled bark.

  When she removed the blanket she was covered in sweat. She smiled.

  “It is broken. I feel better,” she said. “Come back tomorrow and I will tell you another story.”

  The next day Grandma was back in her usual place sitting in the sun.

  “So where did I stop?” Grandma asked.

  “You said you were going to tell me a new story,” I said.

  “I did? I wonder why I said that because I don’t recall finishing the last story that I was telling you about the beautiful girl who married an ugly man from the Red Planet.”

  “I thought you did, Grandma.”

  “I didn’t,” Grandma said.

  She leaned back on her chair and cleared her throat. She got her pipe going.

  “So she began to live her new life with her new husband on the Red Planet. But to be honest she absolutely hated her new life. Remember, there was nobody to call her by her nickname, Enenebejolu. She worked from morning to night breaking rocks. First she attacked the hard red rocks with a little hammer and when a chunk fell off she had to break the chunk into little pieces. But why the breaking of rocks, you ask? Because that was what they ate on the Red Planet. They ate rocks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Some have speculated that it may be the reason why they had such hard faces. She had to cook the rocks too, and you know how long it takes for rocks to be cooked.

  “Then one day she decided she had had enough and she decided to flee. She ran and she ran. Her husband gave chase. I told you how far the Red Planet was from our own, but she ran without looking back. And her husband ran after her without stopping.

  “Just when she thought she would fall down and die from exhaustion, she glimpsed the line that separated the Red Planet from ours. As she went to cross the line her husband tried to grab her but she was too fast for him. Unfortunately his long nails made a groove on her back in the area between her shoulder blades. This is the reason why there is a line that runs the length of our backs.

  “Now you must go, I ne
ed to gather my strength,” Grandma said.

  Towards the end of that year, I left for boarding school. When I returned, my grandma had left for the journey that she always talked about. The news was hidden from me because my parents were worried that it would affect my academic performance.

  It has been many years since Grandma told me the stories about the Red Planet, but today I looked up at the sky over New England and the sky is red, mostly scarlet. It looks almost as if I could touch it if I tried. The color calls out to me, reminding me of my grandmother and her stories about the Red Planet.

  Spaceship

  I must have been about ten or eleven when an alien spaceship landed in our village. Clearly written on the side was Tatuala. We would spend months trying to crack the meaning of the word just as we had tried years ago to decode the meaning of the Latin expression Domini Opera written on the tailboard of a passing mammy wagon.

  The alien who emerged from the spaceship did not appear much different from us. The only thing about him was that though dressed in a military uniform, he looked quite short. The village Elders remarked that he would probably not qualify to be a soldier here in our country on account of his height. And one other minor thing was that he walked with both feet at once. Otherwise, in every other aspect, he acted like a man whose vehicle had broken down in a place where he did not know anyone.

  As was the usual practice with anything that was unusual, the village Elders gathered to find out what he wanted. He explained that he was actually on his way to another planet when his spaceship began to lose velocity and he was forced to land in our village. How exactly did they converse? In what language did they speak to one another? The Elders would later tell us that though the alien had only moved his lips slightly, they could understand everything he said. He had somehow communicated his words clearly into their heads. His only request was that he be granted permission to leave his spaceship in our village while he traveled back to his home planet to get the parts he needed to repair his broken-down spaceship. This was not an onerous request in any way. The Elders agreed. He signaled to his planet with a small pinging device that looked like a Walkie-Talkie and they sent another spacecraft to come and ferry him back. The spacecraft that took him back did not land on our village soil. It hovered above the ground and our swarthy alien guest jumped in and the spacecraft took off.