Joshua Vigil
After the alien boy landed on our yard in a soft, fleshy pouch, a pouch that crackled as I approached, hot and ash stinky, I led him into our house and chucked him into the ice bath my stepfather Blub installed in the basement. Blub was an amateur bodybuilder, chest and arms always oil-slick and smelling sweetly of banana. He said he needed the tank for recovery.
When his skin touched the ice water, the alien boy wailed, and he hugged me, giving me some deep look, three eyes leveling like a slot machine until I was squarely trapped by his gaze. Upstairs, I pushed him into the closet with a bundle of sheets and pillows. Now we sleep, I said. Don’t you know anything about circadian rhythms in outer space?
Days passed and our life together began in earnest. Small gills rippled at the side of his cheeks while his alien tail kept getting longer. In the mornings, I tried teaching him human stuff. I told him about sidewalks and George Santos and fluffernutters and when I tried explaining that pointing at people was bad, he bit my finger off. Mom cut a glance in my direction at dinner. Are you really missing another finger? she asked.
In the garage, weights slammed as I slid beside Blub. From below the bench sweat spritzed my face. Watch it, he said. Enough of that sweat and you’ll be just as big as me one day.
Promise? I asked.
Blub winked. Cast to the side was his bag, the one with all his little potions, the ones that made his muscles scream and throb until his biceps were larger than footballs, not to mention those watermelon-sized thighs.
I told the alien boy that bad men do bad stuff all the time, but when you add a little zhuzh, it should really be okay. During my lessons, he liked rolling in my supplies, finding the glitter and swallowing it. And because he liked to shit in the bath, I always woke to a splatter of glitter across the clawfoot’s porcelain.
Some years later and the gills sorta glued shut and when he finally learned language, he said, Would you marry me?
I told him he had to stop watching A Walk to Remember on repeat. A movie I knew he liked because of the comets and telescopes, it reminded him of home.
He showed me the ring he stole from the neighbors. Marry me!!!
I told him it would be wrong to get married, not because it would be a little gay or a little bit interspecies, but because I sorta imagined I was like his father.
That is wrong? You love Blub.
Do you know about Freud?
We’re not blood relatives, he said, I know this. I came from the stars. Besides, I love you. It’s a love so big and pure it sometimes makes me shudder and cry. I’ll love you till China and Africa meet, and the river jumps over the mountain, and the salmon sing in the street.
Now you’re just quoting Auden, I said. I’m impressed by your knowledge of not only literature but world geography. Did you know China and Africa once did meet?
So impressed you’d marry me?
No.
Bring out the coffin!
Then: Do you remember when I bit off your finger? I bit off your finger because, one day, in the not so distant future, it was going to make you sick. A bad bad cancer.
Finger cancer?
I saved you. Yes, come to me, it’s okay to cry. See? It’s a love like no other.
We did all the normal things people in marriages do. We hosted dinner parties that sometimes became events for swingers, fish bowls filled with watches kind of thing. We mowed our lawn and kept to the HOA bylaws. We voted. We went to marches. We voted. We became a little socially and fiscally conservative. We called the cops when strange men loitered down the block. We bickered. We had less and less sex. We went to track meets. Our children had come out of my husband quickly, and they grew fast and large. But they were beautiful in their grotesqueness. Not unlike Vikings, I thought. Vikings with green-tinged skin and three to four eyes.
Forty-seven years into our marriage and the government wanted to get involved. They said they had to launch him back into space. It was the only way to prevent the coming galactic war. I told them they’d have to go ahead and launch me too.
You’ll die if we do that.
I have these gills now, you see, being with him for so long has changed me. I think I’ll survive.
The catapult was large and practical, a design I saw plenty at our middle school science fair. The kids and Mom cried as I got flung into space, but it was Blub who cried the most. My gills opened up. I floated, and floated, and deep in that hazy expanse, where I saw hundreds of other star-crossed lovers, also floating with deluded purpose, I found my husband in the distance. He told me it was his turn to take me home, and then in a pulpy pouch, I landed on a yard somewhere out on planet XX-ExYss.
The pouch sputtered. I took a sniff, I was so hot, I smelled smoky and foul. I wailed like a baby. Because, somehow, I was one. Life had started over.
The next several years become a bit foggy. I had trouble adapting to my new planet, I couldn’t learn the language, I felt danger lurk in every corner, I accidentally pulled someone’s eye out, then claimed it was because I thought a bad cancer would come for him, and because of this lie I was sent to the tribunal, and they sentenced me to lifetime imprisonment. My husband tried explaining I didn’t know any better. But his objections went fruitless.
I’ve spent the remainder of my new life in prison. I’m old now, so old, who even knows how old. We get conjugal visits but those always end in arguments. I tell him I miss Blub. He says, He was more of a figure than a presence.
This is God punishing us, I say, for interspecies copulation.
You still believe in God after all this? He laughs a sad laugh. There’s no God, not on this planet. My husband reaches out for me but he’s gotten so sweaty and slimy since arriving on his home planet that I avoid his touch.
From my little window, I look for the sun, but all I see are stars. In the rec room, the inmates sink into hard-edged couches and watch TV. All the movies are alien movies. All but one. This one reminds me of home. The telescopes, the comets. I watch it on repeat.
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Joshua Vigil is a writer and educator living in the Pioneer Valley. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Joyland, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His chapbook Shapeshifter is out now from Bottlecap Press.