Tilted View

Somebody told me it'd be like this.  I'm out of food again.  My wife is waiting for me back on Earth, and that green slimy thing just won't wake up. 


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We were drinking beer earlier together, and he was able to make food out of the beer.  He rearranged the particles with his nose, he extended like a magnet sticking through the air.  He was a pleasant alien, very slimy, and squirmy.  He communicated to me through a bubble over his head, in English.

It was interesting how he first began to talk to me.  He knew we had a language barrier, it's obvious to all creatures of intelligence that there's going to be a language barrier.  First he showed pictures, they were odd, they reminded me of Egyptian hyreoglyphics. 

Then the pictures flashed on and off and smoothed into Hebrew looking letters, into Greek, into Italian, into Old English and then finally Modern English cursive.  It was like he was reading my subconscious human mind.  He was an offbeat kind of character, I took to the humor of drinking a beer with a kind alien like him.  I couldn't wait to tell my buddies at home about this experience.

But what if I never saw them again?  He was sleeping, like he was in a coma.  Was it the atmosphere?  He had never told me how or why he had gotten to the moon.  He had his little octagon silver spaceship.  I tried using it, but it needed his hands for fingerprints to enable it.

So I needed him to be awake to fly his ship, and to eat.  And the companionship wouldn't be that bad either. 

I looked back at Earth, the blue oceans dazzling me with their mystery and beauty.  All the traffic unseen, mountains and buildings, and people scurrying and making love underneath trees and stars in this black sky.  While underneath this black sky, in this low atmosphere kind of scenic moon with just beer to guzzle, I had a slimy green, lumpy alien, who almost looked like a shapeless obese human dressed in a green custom.

But we talked a little bit before he fell asleep.  He told me other aliens like to laugh at humans a lot.  They don't understand the laugh box at comedy shows, they think it's quite odd, because the humans are comedic creatures, they display quite compassion towards each other, yet they can be so sadistic and cunning towards one another.  And this makes the aliens across the galaxy laugh.  Because each planet is either negative or positive- either on the side of compassion or sadism.

Hls planet, he said, is on the side of compassion.  So humans he said, is an odd planet to the galaxy.  A planet that the rest of the aliens just don't understand.  Why don't they  just choose?  It's an easy choice he thinks.  The alien guzzled some more beer.  He offered some beer to me.  I'd offer you some, he said, but I'm getting a buzz.  I observed, that's not sadism, that's just hedonism.  Hedonism is a perch on the mountain to sadism, but it's far from it.  Compassion is on a rung all of its own, but, hedonism is only a flutter of a wing that you can just play around with as you practice compassion, as a distraction.  Sadism is completely destructive, compassion and sadism don't go together at all.

I stared at the beer can.  I looked at the letters, outlined, gold.  Colors seemed paler to me. 

I thought of my wife, with her straight black hair, and her hoop earrings, and her long lean legs.  I hadn't kissed her goodbye, I hadn't hugged Katie fully last time.  I hadn't given her a bear hug like I wanted to when I thought about it as I was boarding the shuttle.  Katie with her pig tails.  Her eyes going to the side, as I imagined  all the trials she would go through where I wouldn't be able to hold her hand.

I threw the beer to the ground.  I kicked the moon dust.  I yelled, and there was no echo.  The alien stirred, and his slimy belly jiggled.  I opened my mouth, and my eyes grew wide.  I bent down, and hastily tried to recover the beer can, but already most of the liquid had leaked.

I poured the rest of the beer on the alien, and he woke up with a giggly stir.  I had tickled him.  His thought bubble came up, with an exclamation point, and a question mark. 

I asked him if he knew how we could get back to Earth, and he said, yes, he believed he did.  But it would require some strategy,  I sat down next to him, and we sat, me breathing the moon's atmosphere, and him, just sitting there being a slimy green alien.