A Brief and Surprisingly Dull Encounter with an Extraterrestrial Life Form

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

“So what you’re saying is,” Brithpth said slowly and distinctly, “is that you eat with the same orifice you breathe with?”

“Yup,” I replied.

My guest did that thing again. He paused, in the way that a glacier might be said to pause. For a slow ten-count, he was perfectly still.

“How do you keep from clogging the tube?” he asked for the third time in an hour.

Let me go back.

When I got home from work tonight, there was an extraterrestrial life form waiting for me on my balcony. I didn’t notice him at first; it was dark by the time I made it home. But just as I was kicking off my shoes, I saw him there, peering in through the glass with those hollowed-out depressions that he uses for eyes.

I opened the sliding door. “Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

“Exceedingly,” he said. His voice was all clicks and pops, like a speaker with one frayed wire. “May I come in?”

“Sure,” I said, and I stepped back to give him room. Then I stepped back further. Then I opened the door wider, wider, all the way. He was still barely able to squeeze inside.

“Brithpth,” he said, the sound coming from pores all around his barrel-shaped mid-section.

“Introductions?” I asked. “I’m Jeff.”

He cocked his cranial protuberance at me. “I wasn’t telling you my name,” he said. “I was clearing the secretions from my dorsal spiracles. All that time in the cold left me stuffy. My name is” — and then he did this little dance. I couldn’t reproduce it if I wanted to. I don’t have the right number of torsos, and only one penis.

“It gets chilly here at night,” I said, just passing the time. “Why didn’t you” bring a sweater, I almost asked, but then I tried to imagine such a thing. It would have been like knitting a tea cozy for a Klein bottle. “Anyway,” I said, “what brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“Questions,” he said, all clacky-clacky. It came out sounding like klezhthinssshth. Hold the tip of your tongue between your front teeth and try to say the word. He sounded nothing at all like that, but it’ll at least get you in the right ballpark. “Studying you from afar has taught me much, but there are limits. I need answers to the most basic questions about you.”

“Studying from afar? You mean you’ve been” –

“Listening in on your radio and television broadcasts, yes. Funny story. I got the idea from an old tee vee show.” He made a weird twisty-shivery motion in his third foremost mid-thorax. I tentatively identified it as a grin and plowed ahead.

“Okay, so you know all about Captain Kirk and you want to know where our formidable space navy is?” I dropped a couple of ice cubes in a highball and started rooting around in the cupboard for the bottle of expensive bourbon I thought I stashed away six months ago.

“You can’t fool me,” he said. “I know those are just models. Though I liked the one with the tribbles. But my questions are more basic.”

“Such as?” Found it, on the top shelf behind the extra jar of spicy mustard. Always keep a spare jar of spicy mustard. You never know when you’re going to need it.

“Issues of biology and anatomy. Your species is sexually dimorphic, yes?”

Very, very slowly, I put the good stuff away and took down a bottle of rotgut. I could feel the headache settling in behind my eyes already. No need to waste the good stuff tonight. “Males and females,” I said, “right.” Two fingers of the murky brown stuff over ice.

“And reproduction involves an exchange of genetic material?”

Make that three fingers. “Less of an exchange and more of a donation,” I said, “but you’ve got the gist of it.” I headed back into the living room and looked with dismay. There was no way I was going to be able to make it around him to sit on the couch. I sat on the floor, legs crossed.

“Ah!” he said, and it sounded like a steam locomotive exploding a very long way away. “This is exactly the sort of information I need.”

“I was afraid of that,” I muttered as the ice melted in my glass.

“Your television programs are curiously vague on this subject. You seem to talk about reproduction constantly, but no one ever seems to do it. Can you provide me with details?”

I drained my glass, crunched on a shard of ice. “Sure,” I said. “What the hell.”

Then I got up to get my laptop.

It took him a while to understand what I was showing him. After my second drink I got an attack of the giggles that didn’t go away until I had a third, and got really good and started on a fourth. We kept coming back to the same old stumbling block.

“That is an organ of elimination.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “And no. See, it … uh. Does two things.”

“No,” he said, shaking his monstrous fore-cranium. “I have been studying your planet for longer than you have been alive, and that is an organ of elimination.”

“I know that!” I yelled, slamming my drink down on the coffee table. “I’m trying to tell you that we use it for reproduction too.”

Brithpth extruded a sort of finger-thing and pointed. “But that is also an organ of elimination.”

I had to give him that one. “Okay, yeah, but see, sometimes” –

He didn’t let me finish. He swung his northernmost hemi-demisphere toward me and just stared. I don’t know if he was bouncing radar waves off me or what, but my fillings started to throb.

“Are you mocking me?” he asked, the air rumbling out of his spiracles like distant thunder.

I took a breath, brought my glass to my mouth, bit down hard on the last ice cube. “Okay,” I said, “let’s go all the way back to the beginning.”

It took another solid hour, and by the end of it I was very drunk. We went over it and over it. Sometimes I launched into lengthy speeches of exposition, complete with visual aids, to try to explain it. Ingestion, elimination, fornication, insemination, parturition … it’s a big, twisty, complicated mess, and he just wasn’t getting it.

Finally, after the hundredth time around the loop, I got up and stomped off to the kitchen. I came back with a bag of pretzels. I popped one into my mouth, and he gasped.

“Suicide!” he bellowed. He sprang to his feet — you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a four thousand pound extraterrestrial life form spring to its feet — and came at me like a really pissed off 747. He bounced me off some of the furniture and onto the floor, then put a tiny fraction of his weight onto my chest. I blasted pretzel fragments all over his carapace.

When I could breathe again, I really let him have it. “What the hell was that for?” I shouted.

“I couldn’t be complicit in a suicide,” he said. He was sitting in his corner again, the picture of humble contrition. If he’d had a tongue, it would have been wagging, I swear.

“It was just a damn pretzel!” I said, still pretty mad.

“You attempted to obstruct your airway,” he said.

“I was eating!”

And that’s when he did it. He froze, solid. It was as if time stopped. I blinked hard, twice, and I was just about to go poke him in the metadental sinus pore when he spoke.

“You were what?” he said.

He’s still in there. I retreated to the bedroom about twenty minutes ago, ostensibly to go to sleep. I know damn well I won’t be able to sleep a wink. I can hear him in there, tap-tapping on my laptop with his digit-thing, munching wetly on the only thing I had in the house that seemed to interest him. What the hell kind of creature eats old newspapers, anyway? And all the while, his pseudolung fills with air drawn in through his wheezing spiracles. Tap tap, munch munch, wheeze wheeze. All at once.

And if he decides he needs to take a leak, I’m sure he’ll have a separate opening for that, too.

If anybody out there is reading this, I live on the eighth floor, apartment number ten. Please send booze.

The Glacier with Her Name Carved in It
and Other Stories
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