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Story Time: You are an alien!
“You are an alien?” Orlando looked up from his seventh-grade maths book to find his five-year-old sister, Mary, sitting with her little cousins and asking their Aunt Julie in awe. “That’s right.” Aunt Julie spoke with a feigned mysterious look on her face. “I’m from Mars, I’ve come to earth for a special mission.”
“But... but you are our Aunt Julie,” three-year-old cousin Amy spoke with tension visible in her voice.
“Oh, your Aunt Julie is at Mars. We caught her, took her to Mars and locked her up there. Then we made a mask that looks exactly like her, had me wear it and sent me here. I’m living her life and completing my mission. No one will ever know who I really am.” She said, hiding amusement on her face.
“Oh yeah, so what is this mission of yours?” Mary’s twin Eric’s voice grew loud when he vainly tried to speak aggressively. But Aunt Julie just laughed and told him it was top secret. It was only when little Amy had tears in her eyes with worry, because she would not accept an alien as her aunt, that Aunt Julie ended the conversation. Saying it was all a joke and left cradling Amy in her arms.
Smiling, Orlando shook his head and went back to his reading.
Aunt Julie was a real treat for all the children. Young, bright, cheerful, funny; kids admired her. She was in college and came home only for holidays. She treated everyone according to their ages and adjusted remarkably well with almost everyone. But Orlando still thought, or at least liked to think, that with a gap of only four years the two of them were more comfortable with each other than the rest of the family, which was, of course, a large family living together. He simply loved that.
Orlando came back from school the other day to find his little cousins sitting together on the front stairs and discussing if Aunt Julie could be an alien. He smiled and entered the house. Aunt Julie was sprawled on the sofa in front of the TV. He threw himself on the sofa next to her. She turned to look. “Orlando, my bright nephew, how was your school test,” she called cheerfully.
“Your bright nephew is shining,” he smiled.
“Hundred per cent marks?” she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.
“I say 200 per cent: if they could give anyone that,” he laughed.
She was about to respond when something on TV caught her attention. It was some news about the recently spotted Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). Since when was she so interested in such fables? He tried to ask her that, but she was too absorbed in the news. He picked up the bag and went to his room.
On the weekend, he decided to stay up late in the night and study for the exams. It was past one in the morning when he felt he needed a cup of coffee. He climbed down the stairs and was about to enter the kitchen when he had to stop in his tracks. He could hear voices. He listened hard for a moment: someone was talking. He tiptoed across the kitchen to the door that opened outside in the backyard and peeped out. His mouth fell open. There was blinding bright light outside! At one in the morning! There was something fishy going on.
Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder and jumped. He wildly turned around to look and found Aunt Julie standing and staring down at him.
“What are you doing up so late, Orlando?” She asked, and then her eyes searched him carefully. “And why are you shaking like mad?”
He tried to get a grip on himself. “I just came to get some coffee, when I thought I saw some light in the backyard.” He pointed at the door.
“What light in the backyard?” She pushed the door and looked.
He took a closer look too. But ...but there was no light! It wasn’t possible! “I saw the light myself!”
“Maybe you’ve been working too hard with the books,” she closed the door and turned to him. “Why don’t you go? Get some sleep?” She smiled and kissed her nephew goodnight.
Orlando found it rather hard to go to sleep that night. It was not just that he’d seen the light there and then he saw it disappear so suddenly that made him upset. It was something else too. It was so downright absurd that even thinking about it made him feel stupid.
He had seen people walking in his backyard. The rest of what he’d seen didn’t make any sense at all. No one could be at two places at the same time. Perhaps he just imagined this. But everything was so clear in the backyard. Orlando thought he could bet on his life that he had seen Aunt Julie in the backyard talking to those people. A second before he found her standing behind himself..!
It was a difficult day. He spent all the time thinking about last night and trying to make sense out of it. He kept forgetting, dropping and bumping into things. Almost everyone in the house joked about him, everyone except Aunt Julie. She was one more person who stayed quiet and spent most the time shut up in her room.
Tired and frustrated, Orlando decided to watch a movie in his room at night. He had fallen asleep while watching the movie when he felt a sham needle pain in his arm.
“I don’t care what the mission is; I’m not going to let you take the boy away.”
“You speak as if he really is your nephew.”
“He is somebody’s nephew. Whatever, the boy stays here. He is under my protection.”
“You will fight us to protect the boy?”
“If I have to: yes. Why can’t you find someone else?”
“We were supposed to find someone, and we found him. He’s perfect for our experiments. He’s young, healthy, and he was easy to get.”
“NOT HIM!”
Orlando heard the voices around him, but his eyelids were too heavy to be lifted. Then the voices turned to screams and explosions. He forced his eyelids to open. And what he saw was unbelievable.
He was lying down on a table in a large room with all sorts of huge machines all around. A strange something, or somebody, was standing next to him. A green, big, round head, with eyes the size of a tennis-ball, a mouth that spread from ear to ear and a tiny ball in place of the nose.
Orlando was face-to-face with an alien! However, it wouldn’t be entirely right to say `face-to-face’ because the alien was looking away at someone he was arguing with. That someone was Aunt Julie! Orlando might have jumped in astonishment had he not felt so weak.
The alien standing next to Orlando turned towards him. But before its hands could reach him, it fell right on his face. Disgusted, Orlando pushed the green, slimy body away, and found Aunt Julie holding a hard heavy rod and smashing it on the alien’s head. He wasn’t even able to shut his mouth that had opened in shock. When Aunt Julie grabbed his hand and pulled him.
“Quick, out of here,” she hissed.
As he got on his feet Orlando found more of those green slimy aliens around them approaching menacingly. He ran blindly with Aunt Julie who still held his wrist tight in her hand. All of a sudden he fell with a yell: something slimy held his ankle. But Aunt Julie beat the slimy hand off his ankle with her rod. Now that he saw closely, Orlando found the rod illuminated; he was reminded of Star Wars.
And it looked exactly like a scene from the movies, when no less than eight aliens surrounded them with anger dripping from their faces with the green liquid, and Aunt Julie hushed him behind herself and took out her rod in a warriorstyle.
“Just hold on tight,” she whispered to him. Orlando held his breath and said a little prayer for this nightmare to come to an end.
Now, prayers are useful even when you are surrounded by a bunch of aliens. Well that’s what Orlando found out. Somehow, something happened, and there were alarms going off, and lights blinking in the spaceship. The aliens turned and shrieking ran to hold their positions shouting at each other. And what do you guess? Our hero and his Aunt made use of the opportunity and fled.
The rest of the events were not very clear to Orlando. How, when, where: there were loads of questions for him to ask when they were in their backyard in a blink. They fell face forward on the grass and lay there panting.
“Are you OK?” Aunt Julie held his face in her hands. He barely nodded and Aunt Julie hugged him tight. Suddenly he remembered something and pushed her away.
“You are an alien?” He stared at her.
Aunt Julie smiled and got up on her feet. “Let’s go inside, it’s too cold here.” She pulled him up. As he walked in front, with Aunt Julie behind, he didn’t see her taking out her rod and hitting his head with it. After all, she still had to do a little work on him to make him forget his spaceship escapade. She had to make him remember only that she was his Aunt Julie.
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