by Zen DiPietro
I don’t know whether to laugh or be terrified.
Before I can decide, we’re standing in front of a Throw the ball and knock down the cans game.
You and I both know these games are rigged. Those cans are made of lead or some shit. Maybe a person can knock the one off the top, but the other two will barely even move.
I look at the cans.
I look at the carnie.
I look at Pinky.
This is going to be something special. I just know it.
“We’ll take a hundred tickets.” Pinky slams her thumb down on the credit transfer device, stabs in her code, and it spits out a stream of bright-yellow paper tickets.
Just watching this is all the entertainment I could need, but then Pinky drops ten tickets on the ledge in front of her and squints expectantly at the carnie.
I feel a wave of malevolent glee that is entirely unlike me. It’s just that it’s so rare to get a front row look at someone nailing a swindler’s ass to the wall.
The carnie smiles. He’s an entirely nondescript man of nondescript origins. He could be human, or maybe something else. He could slip into the crowd and I’d never be able to describe him sufficiently for anyone to ever identify him.
Which is probably the idea.
The carnie hands Pinky a big white ball. In her hands, though, it’s like a golf ball. This is the first moment when the carnie looks uncertain. His smile slips, but he puts it back into place.
“You’re going to want to stand back,” Pinky warns him.
“We’re not allowed to leave our booths,” he says. He moves as far to the right as he can, though.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn ya.” Pinky brings the ball to her chest, winds up, and her arm flies forward.
I don’t even see the ball. I see a blur of white and an explosion of cans. They fly in opposite directions, with one bouncing off the back wall with a dull bong sound and coming right at us.
Pinky snatches it out of the air. “I win.”
She sets the can on the ledge.
By now, the carnie knows he’s in the shit. “Uhm, yes, you’re a winner! You can pick any of these as your prize.” He gestures to a variety of stuffed animals and insanely oversized hats. He gives her time to decide, restacking the cans.
“I want to go again.” Pinky looks at him expectantly.
“I…um…” The man fumbles for words. He brightens. “Hey, for such a clean shot, why don’t you take one of our top prizes?” He indicates the other grouping of items—an assortment of even larger stuffed animals.
“I want to throw.” Pinky frowns at him.
He scrambles for a ball, hands it to her, and leaps over the wall to stand next to us. Behind Pinky. “You bet! Go right ahead.”
She throws again. And again. Funny thing, he’s not even charging her tickets now.
Finally, Pinky tires of her sport. “All right. I’ll take the flamingo.”
We all look at the car-sized flamingo, bright pink, smiling, with shiny eyes the size of my fists.
“What?” she says when we all look at her. “I like pink.”
She doesn’t seem encumbered by the thing, even as we stop to let Greta play a ringtoss game then feed the fish in the grotto. Pinky’s lashed the flamingo below its legs with a rope, which she’s tied around her waist like a belt. She’s pulled its long wings down over her shoulders, so she can hold them with one hand.
Basically, she’s giving a giant flamingo a piggyback ride.
It’s almost too much for me.
I want to laugh whenever I look at her, but it feels like the wrong move. So I shove it all down, to the point that I think laughter is filling my abdominal cavity and threatening the overall health of my liver and spleen.
Greta, I think, feels the same. She looks unusually wide-eyed.
We march on, playing the carnie games, teasing one another, and laughing. Greta wins a purple hippo and little gray manatee, and, every now and then, bumps their faces together to make them kiss.
It’s a little weird. But I don’t say anything about that.
I don’t win any prizes, but I don’t stab my eyes out throwing darts at balloons, either. Which is a win for me.
Before we hit the arcades, we stop for some goodies. Pinky props her flamingo friend on a bench and sits next to it while Greta and I stand in line for sopapillas.
If you don’t know what sopapillas are, and they’re served somewhere on your planet, go find some. They’re a kind of fried dough. They puff up with the right mix of tender flakiness and crisp friedness. Then they’re sprinkled with powdered sugar and covered in honey.
I’m on the fence about whether or not the harvesting of honey equates to the enslavement of bees, but dammit, for sopapillas, I’m willing to look the other way.
I’m sorry if that makes me a monster.
Greta carries her plate, and I carry both mine and Pinky’s. She and her flamingo take up a whole bench, so Greta and I sit on another.
We dig into our sopapillas. So light. So flaky. So…I take an inopportune breath and choke on the powdered sugar I’ve inadvertently drawn into my lungs.
I cough, aware that my mouth and cheek are sticky with honey but I can’t do anything about that right now. My lungs are rebelling against the sudden attack on them.
Then Pinky’s there, pounding my back. “You need another Heimlich?”
I flap an emphatic no with my arm. Last time she did that, I was sore for days.
“Here, drink this.” Greta puts a cup of water in my hands.
I clear my throat, hard, and take a long drink.
Finally, I can breathe.
“You okay?” Greta asks, concerned.
“Yeah. I’m good.” I eye my remaining sopapillas.
I decide it would be silly to let them go to waste. I’ll just have to better ration my breathing.
Afterward, Pinky gets her flamingo back into place and we hit the arcades. It isn’t easy. People have to make way for Pinky and her prize.
I approach a race car game. “How do these things work?”
“You’ve never been to an arcade?” Greta seems amazed.
That’s me, the rube who’s never been to one. There aren’t a lot of them on Earth, and such boisterous gathering spaces have never been my thing.
I say, “No.”
I fish a ticket out of my pocket. “Where does this go?”
“Oh, they take tokens,” Greta says. “I’ll go get some.”
She sprints away before I can say anything. Pinky has lagged behind. People keep asking to take pictures with her and, surprisingly, she agrees every time. She even seems pleased about it.
I’m standing there, patiently waiting, when a familiar face comes around the racing game. I’ve seen this face before, although only briefly.
It’s my wife, Oollooleeloo.
Her people, I suppose, are handsome in their own way. They have a roughly human shape, though their necks are as wide as their very big heads. On the sides of their necks, they have gills, which move with their breathing. Alongside their mouths, they have catfish-like whiskers.
I never meant to have a bewhiskered wife. I know it happens sometimes, but usually only after you’ve been married for forty or fifty years already. Starting out that way seems like a cheat.
I want to run, but she’s right there, facing me. What kind of adult runs away when he comes face-to-face with a problem?
I do. Turning, and perhaps—okay, definitely—flailing a little, I run.
Behind me, I hear her gurgling speech, but I’m having none of it.
I see Greta as I run out of the arcade.
“What…?” she begins.
“No time!” I shout, not slowing down. “Fishwife!”
Greta’s a good friend. She hears that, and she hip checks the woman beside her, moving her out of my way. Then she takes off after me.
I run down the main thoroughfare, past the carnies, past the food carts, and beyond the crowd. On the
outskirts, I find a photo booth and duck in. Greta follows me in and closes the curtain behind us.
This is no ordinary photo booth. It’s huge. There are costumes in here. Old-timey ones, cyborg ones, fluffy-bunny ones. The people on Garvon VII have gone next-level on their kitschy keepsakes.
“Are you okay?” Greta asks.
“Yeah. I just freaked out a little. I mean, why does she keep hunting me down? I talked to her for like two minutes.”
“I don’t know,” Greta says slowly. “But maybe it’s something good?”
I laugh, but don’t feel amused. “That’s your life. For me, with all of my experiences, this can only mean something bad.”
She frowns. “Okay. But…what if it isn’t? Your luck’s been different with me, right?”
“You stepped away. I was outside your luck radius.”
“I was really only ten feet away. You think that’s enough distance?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She nudges me. “So, what if it isn’t something bad? Maybe it’s something good. Or just something interesting?”
“How could it be? This is me we’re talking about. I know I put up a good front, but the truth is, I still struggle every day. I won’t even wear carpenter’s pants in case the loop were to catch on something and, I don’t know, pull me into a chipper-shredder or a pulper or something.”
She put her arm around me. “I know you’re working hard. That’s why we do the fork exercises. Maybe we should work on pants next.”
“Maybe. I can’t think about that right now.”
“Right. Your fishwife.” She sighed.
“You really think it could be something not terrible?” I ask.
“Yeah. I’d like to think so. I know my experiences are different than yours, so I can’t understand how hard you’ve had to work at things. But I respect that you’ve survived all that and are working so hard to overcome it. That’s pretty amazing to me.”
“Really?” I turn my head to look at her. How could anything I do seem amazing to her?
“Really.” Her face goes all soft and smiley and her lips look so pretty. I can’t look away. Help. HELP. I can’t look away! I’m being weird! Oh no!
The curtain yanks back and a giant flamingo attacks us.
No. It’s not an attack. The flamingo just bangs into Greta, which causes her to knock heads with me.
“You two okay?” Pinky asks. “I got here as fast as I could, but it’s hard running with this thing.”
In my mind, an image unfurls. Pinky, running, her long, muscular legs churning, while a giant pink flamingo bobs its head up and down with every step.
With an unmanly, high-pitched sound, I start laughing.
Greta looks startled at first, then she connects the dots and starts giggling. Then we’re falling over each other, laughing hysterically, tears running down our cheeks.
I start to wind down, but Greta emits a sharp squeal and a snort that get me started again.
By the time we’re done, my stomach hurts and I’m swiping my hands over my cheeks.
“You two done?” Pinky hasn’t moved. She and the flamingo watch us.
“I think so.” I look to Greta.
She giggles behind her hand, but nods.
“Okay,” I say, trying to calm myself. “Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Pinky, I have a problem with my fishwife. Should I keep avoiding her or find out what she wants?”
Pinky shrugs, which makes the flamingo nod. “Deal with it. Get it done.”
Of course she’d say that.
I look from Pinky to Greta. I trust them. They’ll help me. “Let’s make a plan.”
“What plan is there to make?” Pinky asks. She’s crowded into the photo booth with Greta and me, and I keep getting whacked with a flamingo beak every time she turns to look at me. It’s soft and all, but it still hurts when it hits me in the eye.
Pinky continues. “All we have to do is pick some central location. I’ll stand with Mingo here, and Greta will just be there. Your wife will show up.”
It might seem like not much of a plan, but I’m sure it’ll work, based on Greta’s luck and Pinky’s sheer strength of will.
“Right,” I agree. “First, though, let’s get a picture made. We’ve never done that.”
Greta nods enthusiastically. “Yes!”
Pinky shrugs and I get thwapped in the nose with a Mingo wing. “Sure.”
Which, from Pinky, is practically a singing, dancing celebration.
We take our photo, and each get a copy. This will make a nice memento.
“You know,” Pinky remarks as we walk along, looking for a suitable location for our fish stakeout. “Mebdarians invented photo booths.”
“Mm, interesting.” I try to sound convinced.
“I didn’t know that,” Greta says, with a synthetically bright tone.
“This looks like a good spot.” Pinky stops next to a cotton candy stand and installs herself like a very large appliance.
Greta looks to one side and then the other. “Yes, this ought to do.”
We’re not far from the grotto, and I see a couple of human parents holding handfuls of fish food for their little girl to drop. They’re cute, in a nuclear-family sort of way.
When Oollooleeloo arrives ten minutes into our vigil, I’m not surprised. I know how Greta’s luck runs.
I’m startled all the same, though, at coming face-to-face with my wife.
I wish I could read her, but I don’t know anything about Albacore facial expressions. To me, she looks wide-eyed and kind of crazy. All Albacore do.
That’s not me being species-ist. That’s just me admitting I know nothing about them, and my frame of reference does not match up with their reality.
“Charlie,” she says, sounding like she’s gargling.
“Oh, hello.” I’m so stupid. I ran from her thirty minutes ago like a man with his ass on fire, and then I just say, ‘Oh, hello.’
“I need to talk to you,” she says.
“About what?”
She opens her mouth to speak, then notices Pinky. I guess she assumed I was standing next to some sort of display or decoration, because she stumbles backward and makes a gulping sound.
Edging away from Pinky, she says, “About our situation.”
“I’m not cool with paying alimony,” I blurt. “I don’t even know you.”
“It’s not about that,” she says. “If you give me a few minutes, I can explain.”
It’s not easy to understand her. I have to concentrate very hard, and after she’s stopped speaking, it takes me a full five seconds to be reasonably certain of what she’s said.
I look to Greta and Pinky, who nod.
“Okay.”
Oollooleeloo points to the grotto. “Can we go over there?”
Is that outside of Greta’s luck-zone? I look to her and she nods encouragingly, so I agree.
At the grotto, my wife and I lean against the rail, looking down at the fish, who look at us, their mouths opening and closing, expecting food.
I look from them, to Oollooleeloo, and feel uncomfortable.
“I apologize for the suddenness of our nuptials,” she says. “My parents have been pushing me to marry and have kids, but I don’t want kids. I thought if I married a different species, they’d have to leave me alone about that. And when you seemed amenable…”
“Wait, what do you mean amenable? You asked if I wanted you to show us around, and then things somehow went very wrong.”
Her semi-transparent eyelids flick closed three times in succession. I suspect this means confusion. “Show you around?”
“I thought you said, ‘Should we go on the ferry?’”
She gapes at me. “I said, ‘Should we get married?’”
“Why would I marry someone I just met, who I can barely understand?” I demand.
“But…I slapped you across the face.”
I’m utterly confused. “Yeah, and I thought you were a jerk. That
’s why I slapped you back.”
She puts a hand to her head. “That’s an Albacore wedding ceremony. What is wrong with your people?”
“Me? Well, we don’t go around hitting each other to get married, I’ll tell you that! We have fancy clothes and lots of floofy words about love and forever and blah blah, then we eat cake and a few years later we sign papers to put an end to it all and pretend it never happened. Like civilized people!”
We stare at each other. We’re so different, I’m not sure how we’re even supposed to communicate.
“I didn’t file the alimony papers,” she says. “It was my parents. They took out some bad debt with people they shouldn’t have, and…don’t judge them too harshly. I’ll take care of that so no one will bother you anymore.”
“Okay. Thanks. It would be nice not to be on the hook.” I cringe. Why did I say that? What a terrible thing to say to a fish person.
She grimaces, but doesn’t respond.
“So why are you here?” I ask.
“I feel guilty,” she says. “I didn’t realize that by marrying you, the people my parents owe money to would take an interest in you.”
“Wait, what?” My eyes go to Pinky.
Oollooleeloo wrings her hands. “They said that if they aren’t paid back, they will get the money from you.”
“I don’t have any money!”
“You don’t? But you live on a tourist ship, like a bigshot.”
I grip the railing harder. “Luck, mostly. I make a modest living, but nothing more.”
“I am sorry.” She blinks at me.
Is she? Is that what a sorry Albacore looks like?
“So people are going to come looking for me, and if I don’t pay up, what then?”
“Not good things,” she admits.
“How much do they want?”
“Twenty thousand credits.” She hangs her head.
“What are your parents doing to get into that kind of debt?”
“Not good things,” she repeats.
I wipe my hand over my face. “I’ll have to figure this out. Will you be okay, Oollooleeloo?”
“Call me Oolloo. And yes, I’ll be fine. Only the males in a family can be beaten to death for their relatives’ misdeeds.”
Oh. Well, great.
I’m glad I don’t need to sit down and have dinner with my in-laws, because I don’t think I’d have anything pleasant to say to them.