By Bartholomew Lamb
Prompted by the pestering ding-dong sound of the doorbell, Moira reluctantly left her opulent silk-upholstered red sofa, where for the past hour she had been indulging her intellect in the late-night cable news over a bottle of Chianti. Moira shuffled her bare feet across the red Persian carpet to the foyer and further down across the white marble floor to the massive oak front door. She silently put her eye to the peephole and blinked in disbelief—her eye read “Surrender!” written in thick black letters on a silverish background.
To calm down her heart that was about to enter a gallop, she soundlessly stepped back from the door and took a quick sip of wine, half-full glass still in her hand. No, she was not scared. Her seven decades in this world had taught her that sometimes reality could be stranger than imagination, and other times, it’s the other way around, so there was no harm in being cautious. She intently listened for a few tense seconds, but no auditory clues came from behind the front door; just the usual rustle of maple leaves dancing to the whistle of the October wind.
The doorbell sounded again, urging her to give the peephole another try. This time, her eye read: “We come to take,” written over two lines in thick red letters that stood out from a glittering green background. The sign shifted up to reveal the third line. “We come to take you away,” Moira’s lips silently moved as she completed the message.
Her heart skipped a beat and then accelerated as if making up for the loss. She now heard a slashing sound coming from the bottom of the door.
“Who is it?” Moira asked, making her voice sound powerful, if not aggressive, to conceal her growing anguish. “What do you want?”
“Trick or treat!” a child’s voice behind the door answered.
“Yeah, trick-or-treat, trick-or-treat!” another child’s voice enthusiastically confirmed.
Oh my, Moira scolded herself, how could I forget about Halloween! Her heartbeat returned to its normal pace in an instant, and she opened the door with confidence, not giving it a second thought.
In front of her, she now had two humanoid individuals from outer space and a honey bee in Robin Hood’s hat. Going by their sizes, she judged them to be no older than nine or eleven years old. The honey bee was a blond boy wearing a seemingly oversized, round wire eyeglasses, firmly sitting on his freckled nose. The two aliens had a stylishly greenish complexion—as all the known aliens have—and their noses were elongated into the shape of an extended elephant’s trunk that ended in chest pockets of their spacesuits, so that the intake ends of their noses were hidden from view.
These were not their noses that intrigued Moira, an eccentric artist by nature and a puppeteer by profession, but their two pairs of eyes that were elevated above their heads in sleeve-like chimneys similar to the eyes of a garden snail. The eyes were in a continual up-and-down motion, alternately unfolding and folding, so that when one of the pairs was active at any time, the other was momentarily hidden. Fast-dispersing small puffs of vapor were periodically released from a vent on the aliens’ backs, sending to the wind an aroma of vinegar mixed with orange, which completed the picture.
Their four-fingered alien hands held a bunch of strings, each tethering a colorful helium-filled balloon at its end. Other than the familiar sentiments of Surrender! and We come to take you away, already known to Moira, their other phrases included Boo!, Halloween, Be Afraid!, Love Maggots!, and similar ones. Moira laughed, disarmed by this unexpected picture.
“Boo,” she said, waving at them the empty wine glass in her hand. “I love your costumes, visitors. Where did you get them, may I ask?”
“Treat or trick,” said the honey-bee boy. He did not return her smile and ignored her question. The boy suggestively kept shaking a sack hanging across his chest while boldly looking into Moira’s eyes.
The rustle of plastic-wrapped candies tumbling in his bag made Moira realize that she had nothing sweet in her cupboard—absolutely nothing!—not even a stale sugar-powdered biscuit or a stone-hard and decades-old English toffee to give them. An apple might do, a thought crossed her mind.
“Let me see what I can find. Don’t go away,” Moira murmured to herself while turning around and shutting the door between her and the visitors.
Moira looked around the kitchen and the dining room. The only extra she found was a case of bottled Riesling, two bottles of Chianti, an open flask of Smirnoff, one Granny Smith apple, and two over-ripened bananas. On her way back, she stopped by the living room to refill her glass with the first drops of Chianti from a freshly opened bottle. Moira would have surely fallen asleep on the sofa had not an impatient doorbell nudge reminded her about the visitors still waiting ante portas.
She donned her gray cardigan and Alpaca slippers—the night became chilly, as they usually are past midnight in late October—and carried her offerings of one green apple and two brown-skin bananas to the front door. But now, when she opened the door, she saw four aliens instead of two as before, and more aliens were still coming from the space saucer parked by the curb in front of her house.
The honey-bee boy didn’t like her offerings. He didn’t say thank-you; he didn’t say anything. Instead, he angrily stuck out his tongue, long and meaty, in contempt of her. The aliens had expressionless faces—as all the known aliens usually have—and said nothing. They only hissed at Moira like a pack of extremely pissed-off cats, and the smell of their puffs, increasingly more acidic than citrusy, communicated to Moira their evil intentions. She sensed the danger and desperately tried to step back into the house, away from the green offensive. This is when things became ugly.
The following noon, Moira’s cleaning lady, Miss Sofia, found her lying at the threshold in the foyer amidst the shattered wine glass pieces scattered all over the floor. Later, while recuperating from the midnight experience in her bedroom upstairs, Moira clearly recalled being taken by the green people into their spaceship. What happened next, she couldn’t say with the same clarity. She remembered only in the disconnected flashes of memory that the aliens performed some really nasty vivisection on her, all without proper anesthetics. She recalled having her head opened and eyes removed.
“And they didn’t put it back together the right way it was before,” Moira lamented in her interview with a reporter who claimed to be from Weekly World News. “I have these nasty headaches now like you won’t believe. What other evidence do you need?!”
Her story appeared in print on the front page under the headline “Angry Aliens Don’t Eat Rotten Bananas.”
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Bartholomew Lamb is the pen name of a Polish-American/Canadian mathematician and emerging writer who lives in Texas. More about the author can be found at BartholomewLamb.com.