Blue Blood or Green Blood?

The heavens screamed with light; they flared with bright sound, and it burst forth to shed its burden upon the face of the earth. An eye-burning meteor streaked through the entire spectrum and then some, from outer ultraviolet to deepest infrared and all the hues between. The stellar bolt crashed to earth with a resounding roar that rose in pitch until it escaped the range of human hearing, and a blue broil of flame marked its impact.

Bethany Aldzor ran towards the crater, blinking the after-image away. This could be the moment. This could be a vessel from another world, come to take her away from this depressing mudball. She pulled on a baggy sweater, squirming like a walrus in pain. Her round creamy belly and pale love handles jiggled violently as she writhed her way into the ill-fitting outfit. Her stretch pants somehow managed to be three sizes too large but too tight at the waist. Consequently a little curve of pale flesh kept poking out over her waistline and her pant legs trailed inches after her. Just as she reached her destination she trod upon her lagging leg-wear and became airborne. Her thick brown hair billowed out in an amber crown, her sweater swelled with harsh night air, and her glasses lurched from pallid brow eager to be free of the world. Every inch of her body luxuriated in the weightless void for infinite moments until the envious fists of gravity hammered her against the cold hard ground.

Bethany savored a few lazy minutes lying just as she fell, her body resting from the shock while her mind drifted beyond the reaches of her vacant stare. Pain and wetness called her attention to a small cut on her arm. She stared at it, her ruby eyes capturing every mote of light and reflecting it into two unsettling beams of glow like the red light of an answering machine, her abnormally-long canines glinting softly in the moonlight. It bled slowly, the thin liquid shedding its rich green light into the night. It spread along the surface of her skin, foaming gently as it went. She rose, brushing herself off and Wait, there’s something wrong there…the hell?! How often do I bleed green? She began sifting through the possibilities. Radiation? No. Trick of the light? Definitely not. Did this happen the last time I cut myself? Wait, when was the last time I cut myself? There was only one rational explanation.

*************************************************

“Alien-human cross fertilization?” Bethany repeated, pensively gnawing the receiver. She leaned back in her office spinney-chair, she slowly rotated, waggling her legs as she lovingly surveyed her room. The tasteful taupe door with its double-lock nicely juxtapositioned the bright purple walls. Rotating further she came to the roll of toilet paper on a peg, just above the plastic wastebasket and the functioning toilet and sink (her parents had originally planned to build a third bathroom here and never got around to having the plumber remove them.) Beneath the window was her mini-fridge stocked with: a few root beers, half a bottle of chardonnay, some lime-flavored seltzer water, raw cookie dough, a half-pound of brie, coffee-flavored milk, and a cold cut. Over on the wall opposite her was a wide, deep bookshelf with a 14 inch television and a VCR/DVD player mounted on top. Beneath it is a treasured assortment of such classic sci-fi films as “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, “Star Wars”, and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. There were great books in that shelf by Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. As she slowly circled on the chair, her attention drifted down to the patchworked shag carpeting. The parts of it that weren’t covered with old cookie packages or half-empty bags of snack food or candy-bar wrappers were coated with stains. Each of those stains had a story: there was the reddish stain where she had a three-day-nosebleed that began with a rather hard sneeze; there was the faint amber mark where she spilled a root beer and never properly cleaned it up; there was the faded brown streak where she had dragged her butt across the carpet like a dog just to see what it was like. At the center of it all was her broken futon fold-out-bed, permanently caught somewhere between its two forms, with a heavy blanket, a thin sheet, a lumpy pillow, and a green teddy bear with velvet antennae and a third googly-eye she had attached herself. Her eyes migrated back to the computer screen and the wall phone, completing their three-second journey, and her attention locked back onto the phone.

“Yes indeed. It’s funny, back in the older days; people thought such hybrids were half-fairies. In fact, people generally mistook anything strange or abnormal for the work of magical beings. How silly now that we know all of that stuff can be explained away by natural phenomena and the alien technology trade between the denizens of the horse-head nebula and the Freemasons. But anyway, cross-species hybridization fell into two categories actually. There was the Leadman-Kennedy xenosangric bio-engineering program, and then the massive cross-species breeding experiments formed by the grays and organized by the Freemasons and the Oreo Company to build an army to ally against the Reptilians of Alpha-”

“Um, Stark,” she interrupted, “these…hybrids. Do you know anything about them? Like, w-what distinguishes them from normal humans?” Bethany normally was eager to listen to any of the long-winded ramblings of the conspiracy-nut who had raised her with her all-but perpetually absent and neglectful parents, but the unsettling events earlier begged to be explained.

“Well, there’s any number of possible things that could turn up. Psychic abilities, resistance to physical damage, photokinetic manifestations, phosphorescent blood, and of course blatant physical abnormalities like enlarged eyes, teeth, or noses, extra digits, odd skin hair or eye colors, and the like. Now, one particular case involved a man who had dayglow-yellow eyeballs and three foot seven…”

At that point Stark’s voice was cut off by Bethany choking. She had been anxiously gnawing on the phone, and there had been enough things to catch her attention that when she inhaled deeply to brace herself she managed to lodge the telephone in her trachea. When she managed to extricate it from her windpipe, Stark wasn’t on the phone anymore, nor was there a dial tone. A dull buzz hummed in here ear, and through it, a barely audible voice murmured like a muffled firestorm. “…come to…hill on…” was all she could make out. As she went to hang up the phone, she noticed that it had been off the hook for several minutes.

*************************************************

Bethany furtively sidled into the Rite-Aid pharmacy, squeezing her cumbrous frame through the whitewashed aisles of hair products and Easter candy under the flickering fluorescent light. There weren’t many other customers, and she soon founder herself facing the cashier. She was a well-built woman in her late thirties, blond and perky without appearing ditzy. Her frame filled out into the employee uniform with a firm plumpness that added to rather than subtracted from her beauty, providing a hint of mature vitality like the edge of a well-aged wine. She leaned forward, the “Hello, my name is Laura Fingle” tag protruding at Bethany in an imperative manner.

“May I help you?” She asked in a neutral tone.

“Hi mom.” Bethany said.

“I’m sorry Bethany, but I’m really busy with work right now,” she said, with all the maternal warmth and affection of a state penitentiary Public Address system. “Unless you have something to”

“Well I do,” Bethany said, curtly but not rudely, as she slapped down a packet of Tension Tamer herbal tea on the counter.

“Very well. That’ll be three ninety-“

“Momwho’smyfather?” Bethany spilled out before her mother could finish, with a curious combination of determination and introverted hesitancy.

“-five.” She finished, as if the interrogation had been nothing more than a sneeze. ”Thank you and have a nice day.”

Inside her head, Bethany roared the primal scream of a dying sperm whale. Outside, she slapped down a packet of tampons.

“Mom, who is my father?”

“…Jean Aldzor, you know that perfectly well.” She said, with blend of curtness and unease that would have betrayed her uncertainty even if the look on her face didn’t give it all away.

“That’s five dollars and ninety-nine cents. Thank you and have a nice day.”
Bethany’s face flushed. Her nose twitched, and she blinked three or five times before speaking. “Mom…who is my father?” she said in a soft, almost pleading tone, with the unspoken but understood word "real", lowering a box of facial tissues. Before she could even set the Kleenex economy-size pack down on the counter, her mother had two forceful arms on her and was gently but irresistibly herding her out the revolving door.

“Thank you.” She said.

*************************************************

Bethany flung herself down on her broken futon bed. She slammed against pillow until her checks stung and her side ached. She inhaled a bag of Doritos in between sheet-muffled sobs. When those were done she angrily flung the bag aside and picked out a 12-pack of gingerbread men.
“I’m Laura Fingle,” she ventriloquized upon the gingerbread cookie. “I’m such a whore I don’t even know who the father of my only child is and whether he fucking exists or not. That’s all okay, because I just want to get my jollies and I don’t give a flying fuck about whether my daughter’s alive or dead.” She then mimed a few disturbingly accurate screams of horror and pain as she devoured the cookie. Bethany repeated the exercise, biting of the head, swallowing it whole, biting off one limb at a time, each time inventing more horrific ways to symbolically displace her voracious anger.

Bethany rolled onto her back, her bloated gut rising and falling slowly and painfully, as psychologically drained as she was physically full. She let empty tears trickle the last bits of catharsis down her cheeks, sighing deeply. “I just want to know…just want to know,” she murmured. At least she had some hope. There was a lot of hope. Reach…that’s it. Stark said something about psychic powers. Maybe if I just reach out…reach out…I could…contact…contact…contact…

Bethany was asleep and dreaming. Unlike most of the time, she knew she was dreaming, even though there was nothing that strange in her surroundings. She walked through the familiar woods towards the voice that was calling her in her thoughts. “You seek the answers little one. You seek the answers half-child. Come and you shall find.” It drew her down old and unused roads, over a small river and stone bridge, and into a tiny hollow. The green grassy mound rose up at its center, a perfect dome with a hole at either end, and the curious feeling that each of those holes neither led to nor from the same place. She knew that all her answers would be there, if she could just get inside-

WHAP!

Bethany awoke with a start. She shuddered, pulling the blankets tight around her. She briefly examined the “7:13AM” on the clock before retreating into the lumpy folds. She closed her eyes, shielding them futilely against the encroaching dawn and trying to get back into that rest-

Wait, dawn? It was mid-winter in northern Canada. It was nowhere near dawn. She turned to her window and let out a squeal of shock and delight.

Dancing outside of her window where four orbs of light, each as bright as a street-lamp. One was blue, one red, one green, and one yellow. They gave no heat that she could sense, no sound did they make, as the gamboled about each other in ghost-like movement. They seemed to be beckoning her to follow. Who was she to refuse?

*************************************************

Wandering through the cold woods in her pajamas, following a quadrate of levitating lights, another person might think it odd that only after she reached the mound did Bethany feel afraid. Up until now here only thought was the gushing hopes of leaving this pathetic planet for a more exotic and exciting sphere. Here in the eerie calm, where no leaves fell and grass and brush parted to make her way, the shadows of doubt began to creep in. What if she wasn’t going anywhere? What if she was just some failed experiment that was scheduled for termination? What if this was all some elaborate hoax? Shivering and now painfully aware of the cold, she did her best to take a deep and soothing breath. She’d come this far after all. This very well could be the fulfillment of her hearts desire. If she didn’t see her way through this, she’d never forgive herself; never stop wondering what might have been. Taking the deepest breath she could with such high nerves and low temperature, she got down to her hands and knees as she approached the barrow-tunnel and crawled in.

Bethany stumbled out of the hole like a sleepwalker. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been in/out there. Time seemed funny. Still numb with shock, she failed to observe that the dancing lights around her had condensed into a humanoid form and where now drifting off. She didn’t even feel the cold. She didn’t know how she’d feel when feeling came back. Happiness, anger, or just despairing? It was a bit like going on a trip to Hawaii and crash-landing in Russia. She was caught utterly unprepared; the shock of the no was almost as bad as the mind-numbing yes. Does this really change my hopes, my goals? I guess not. After all, it would all be the same if I hadn’t found this out. It’s just another bit to consider, another thing to add to my expanding understanding of the universe. It’s nothing I can’t handle with an open mind.

She sighed and idly stroked a flower, watching it bloom and unbloom at her touch. They all had it right, back then. It’s the other way around. I’m not a half alien.

I’m half-faerie.