* * *
The wedding reception was incredibly small. We only invited close friends and our ‘favorite’ relatives. We didn’t believe in the big, white, expensive Christian weddings where nobody knows each other and everybody feels jealous and bored. It was a small function between people who cared greatly for each other’s company, and more importantly, for the bride and the groom.
It’s also much more socially acceptable at smaller weddings for the bride and the groom to drink so much alcohol that their blood becomes flammable.
Mark was quite a good swing dancer, which is fine and all, but I’m not. It’s actually quite easy to follow in swing dancing when you’re drunk. It’s easier to toss around a woman weighing forty pounds less than you when her reflexes and joints aren’t putting up a fight.
At last, it was time to retire to the hotel room for the last, and arguably the best, part of the wedding.
Here is where things got odd. Not with Mark, but my cell phone. First of all, I knew I had turned it off. Secondly, I hadn’t even brought it with me. But still it rang.
My purse was sitting on the nightstand. I reached inside and pulled out the new phone I had bought the previous week. I was so startled that it was even there at all, that I dropped it. When I picked it up… perhaps it was the alcohol that made me see this, but the screen was cracked again, just like my old phone. I'll be damned if the crack didn't look just like an aloe plant, or a fern. Furthermore, the number that was displaying on the screen wasn’t a number at all, but a series of odd symbols that I knew my phone didn’t know how to display.
In any other circumstance I would have just shut it off and continued my business with my new husband, but these strange situations compelled me to answer it.
“Hello?” I said.
The voice on the other end was quite troubled. “Miss Jones?”
“That’s Missus Jones,” I said. When Mark and I got married, he actually got my name. He knew who wore the trousers.
“Er… well,” the voice continued. “This is G’nurrlgaaath. Your agent.”
I didn’t know what to say. “You’re that jerk from NASA again, aren’t you?”
Mark smacked his forehead with his palm and made a reach for the phone. I pulled away.
“No, Caroline. This is G’nurrlgaaath again. Your agent from the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy.”
I thought about that for a good two minutes. There were too many odd happenings for me to keep believing that this was just another corny prank. The crack on the screen. The symbols when the call came in. The fact that the phone was not supposed to be there in the first place.
“Well… what can I help you with, G?” I said.
“Missus Jones, there has been a… problem. Your book… well, it’s selling quite well, you see. Astronomically so. Nothing else in the galaxy sells quite like it.”
“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Well, the reason it’s selling is… because, well, there are a lot of different, shall we say, interest groups… with different interpretations of your work.”
“You mean, like teachers using different study guides?”
“More like genocidal maniacs and their armies.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s a cheesy detective thriller about a senator who’s murdered with a bow and arrow while he’s having sex with his mistress in a crappy hotel room. How could that possibly inspire an entire war?”
“Er… well,” said G’nurrlgaaath, “That’s the thing… you’re from another galaxy. Not all of your words translate perfectly. And while we’re a small galaxy, we’ve got more than a billion different dialects and languages…”
“Okay, I see it. But it’s not any reason to kill people over.”
“Well, you’re not really from here, you see.” G’nurrlgaaath was starting to sound genuinely frightened. “Money, religion, power, government, heck, even literary agents… we’ve never had them before. Your book introduces all these things to us and, well… some people are overcompensating.”
I sat down on the bed. “My book is… killing people?”
“Of course not,” said G’nurrlgaaath. “People are killing each other over your book.”
Mark was looking genuinely puzzled. He ran his finger though his hair, and flopped down prone on the bed. “Not how I ‘spected m’ hunneymoon to start,” he muttered.
“So… so what do you want me to do?” I said. “I mean, I didn’t want any of this. I was just trying to get published.”
“I need to know…” said G’nurrlgaaath, “Why was the senator engaging in sexual relations with another woman while he claims to be a champion of family values? It’s very important that I know the true answer to this.”
I shrugged. “Well, he’s a scumbag hypocritical Republican male. They do that.”
G’nurrlgaaath didn’t say anything for a very long time. I could tell that my answer had made him unhappy.
“No… no…” he said with a trembling voice.
“G?” I said. “What’s going on? What did I say?”
“We… made a pact. My people, that is, and a neighboring planet. Whomever’s interpretation turned out to be correct would take the other population as prisoners. It was the only peaceful solution we could come to.”
“But… G!”
“I’m sorry, Caroline,” said G’nurrlgaaath. He was making an odd noise. I think if I were to equate it with anything, it would be whimpering. “I’m going to go with my family now. We’re going to be on a slave world but at least we’ll be together.”
“Wait!” I said.
But G’nurrlgaaath had hung up.
I put down the phone. I didn’t know what to think, or say. Mark sat up and put his hands on my shoulders. “Who was that?” he asked gently in my ear, making a great effort to articulate his words. “I thought you weren’t going to bring your phone today.”
“I didn’t.”
“But it was right there. In your purse.”
“I know,” I said. “I don’t know how it got there.”
Mark processed that for exactly five seconds. “Well,” he said. “However that phone got there, we still have a wedding to finish up.”
I smiled. “I suppose we do,” I said.
The Devil Still Has My Lawnmower & Other Tales of the Weird Page 9