Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Among the Naked Aliens
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Dear Jiji,
You totally don’t understand why we had to get naked for the aliens. It’s a cultural thing, like how they like teenagers but they don’t like adults. Remember what happened to that fat researcher guy? That wasn’t an accident!
We found out our clothes were freaking them out, because only like three or four days after we got there (I get confused, you know their days are like nineteen hours or something long) their designated talker came up to me and “Virgin male, your clothes are freaking us out.” I don’t mean like freaking them out they were just nervous, I mean like freaking them out, after a while they start making that whiney buzz noise in their upper mouths, and in a few hours they get worked up into a frenzy and they come swarming around and tear you apart. So Angela and Betty and Gina and I all had to take off our clothes like, right away.
About the other thing, that’s not my fault! They have this thing where everyone’s either “virgin male” or “father” (they don’t care about the women, I guess), and the virgin males are always considered a liability, like they’re not supposed to feed them much and things so that they fight among themselves, and I don’t have those spines and things like they have! So when they stopped letting them deliver food from Earth and all we had left to eat was their food I was completely starving in like minutes or something. And Angela and Betty and Gina and I had been walking around naked for a while anyway, so …
Anyway, I’m just saying don’t change your VirtualBook relationship status right away just because I’m like, an interstellar diplomat and have to have sex with people to do my job. It’s completely not fair.
Lance
Stone Cold
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
I don’t know how it happened. A few minutes ago I was in my office, sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee and trying to reconcile the quarterly numbers in the new reporting system, shivering because they have the air conditioning on even though it’s cold and raining outside. Then I got distracted, or maybe I was just bored and tired of what I was doing, but I decided to check on my investment portfolio, because of all the volatility lately, and I got on the Web to research something and saw a picture of a small wooden sailboat cresting a brilliant blue swell on a gorgeous sea under a brilliant sun and I thought I want to be there.
Next thing I knew, I was.
It’s not that I’m in danger, that’s not what bothers me. The sea isn’t rough, and without understanding why I know my way around the boat, how to fix the rudder and when to reef the sail and everything, even though I’ve never done that before. There’s dried beef and fishing tackle and raisins and casks of water and rum and dried fruit in the small cabin. The wind strokes my skin, and the sun is making my body warm down to parts that haven’t been warm since August.
What bothers me is that I didn’t finish those quarterly numbers. I didn’t finish my coffee. I was supposed to have my little girls this weekend, and we were going to drive four hours to go to the zoo. I’d just joined a classmates thing on the Web, and I already had an e-mail from Jessica Brown, who I had a crush on in 10th grade before she moved to Alaska. She didn’t say anything that made it sound like she was married. Things weren’t so bad. It was just an idle wish, wanting to be here. A momentary thing.
A pod of dolphins starts to play around the boat, swimming under it and leaping into the air, shining. In the distance I can begin to make out the green smudge of shore.
Somewhere, my coffee’s getting stone cold.