Today's Word: Gray

I never been one much for sci-fi. I mean it has its place and all, but I’ve always liked shoot-em-ups and the like when I go to the movies and I don’t read. So telling about this is like picking glass out of your foot, it don’t feel good, but it’s gotta happen.
The beginning was in my backyard; me barefoot, smelling wet grass and dog shit, courtesy of my neighbor who has a bumper sticker that reads: My other boyfriend is a pinscher.
But all that is boring, even to me . It’s just a bunch of lights I hardly remember and running and panting, side cramps and mud. Most of that first part is fuzzy in my head anyhow.
It’s easier to tell after the first part, when they had caught me, and the zookeeper had me hung out over a cliff face with just one hand, like he was freaking Hercules or something.
I should tell you about the zookeeper. That’s what I call him. He’s the one that dealt with me the whole time, though others were around, picking at me here and there, but he was my guide really.
He caught me easy. I had been running awhile, probably a mile and more, which is no small feat considering I don’t like to run unless somebody’s stole my watch or something. But he kept up with me all through the woods just loafing along there behind.
Then he had me, caught by the neck, and dangling over a cliff, those long gray fingers of his digging into my throat. I remember thinking how he wasn’t even breathing hard. I was panting like an old woman climbing stairs, and there was the little gray guy, just looking at me with those flat, black eyes. I couldn’t see my reflection in those eyes, nor the splatter of milky white stars above us. They seemed to suck all that up like tar.
I was having trouble breathing, but that didn’t seem to matter too much, with him holding me out over the edge like that, my bare feet dangling above a sixty foot drop with old tires, a rusted out car, and all kinds of trash at the bottom.
My feet were starting to tingle from and my head felt like it was going to explode. For an instant I imagined my brains all over that gray guy’s face, and I would have laughed if I could have breathed.
The gray guy was like you read about in the magazines. I’ve read a lot about them since it happened to me, but back then it was all new.
His head was big as a pumpkin, gray and hairless. His mouth was just a slit below two pin pricks for a nose and those flat, black eyes. My zookeeper, like all the rest I saw, wore orange pants with a white stripe down the right leg. They were shiny like satin, and though I never once touched them, I imagine they were soft. He didn’t wear a shirt, none that I could make out anyhow. His chest was gray as his face, and unblemished: no bellybutton, no nipples, and hairless.
The gray guy held me there a long time, dangling, before he spoke. He spoke to me, not at me; meaning his mouth didn’t move, and I didn’t hear words, but I knew exactly what he was saying.
He asked me a lot of questions, fast. I don’t remember all of those, mostly just where I was from, what my diet was like, how many females I had mated with at this point in my life. I held on to his tiny little wrist, sucking in as much air as I could, and tried to think back some answers, but there was no way with me hanging out there and him going so fast. So I gave up, and decided that if he tried to drop me, I’d pull him down with me. Wouldn’t that make a great headline: Local man found dead at base of cliff, alien body nearby.
My zookeeper got a flash of that newspaper. I could tell he didn’t like that one damn bit. He pulled me in, still just using the one scrawny arm, and lowered me till my bare feet touched the rocks.
He loosened his fingers, but I held on to his wrist. I squeezed it till I thought surely his hand would pop off. In fact, I thought all kinds of terrible things, like me choking him to death, or taking an axe to his bulbous head, and even me running him over with my car.
Didn’t seem to phase him much. He stared at me a minute and I could feel him working around in my skull. Then my hands just let go his wrist without meaning it. And I stood there, looking at him, looking at me. My hands fell to my sides. Then the lights came back into the sky, much closer, and that was it, I was on their ship.
That’s how things move when the gray guys come around. Time jumps. Sometimes a couple of minutes, sometimes worse.
I was on my back, looking up at blackness where I thought there should be ceiling. The zookeeper bent over me, peering into my eye. That’s all he looked at, my eyes. I never got a probe up the wahzoo like some I‘ve read about. I didn’t. Nobody did anything unnatural or sexual to me. Not ever. I swear. And I wouldn’t admit it if they did anyway. The zookeeper just poked at my eyes, and maybe my chest once or twice, with these little cold-light gadgets. It must not have hurt me. I still see 20/20.
Then he started asking questions again.
Who was your mother? Where was she born? Did she have heart troubles?
I answered, at first, but then it was tiresome. He asked a good many of them over and over. Pretty soon I was saying, go to hell, for every answer.
He didn’t like that.
I stood on a meteor. Now I’m no math whiz and I never liked science so much in high school, but I knew it was going fast and it was headed for a star. It wasn’t getting brighter or anything, we weren’t going that fast, but I could see it out in front of us every time the meteor spun around, like a big white fingerprint smudge on a blacked-out window. The meteor flipped so fast that night and day alternated about every minute or so. First the surface was black. I couldn’t see the zookeeper who stood right next to me. Then it would brighten by degrees, until the whole surface was brighter than daylight back on Earth, and the meteor was a riot of cracks, broken black rocks, and dust.
It wasn’t cold or hot on the meteor. I didn’t feel anything except a little queasy from the constant turning. My zookeeper took my hand in his and we looked off at the star for awhile. It looked like Haley’s Comet, all those years ago when it passed Earth, only no tail.
I felt the zookeeper reaching in and feeling around on the surface of my brain again. It’s like he was sifting out pebbles from sand inside my head. Funny thing was, while he sifted I could see inside his head too.
Hard to explain, that gray guy’s mind. It was like a centipede, I think, all squirming legs moving independent of each other, and then the body wiggling back and forth as well. And it was dirty. Dirty as sticking your hand down in a bowl of shit to fish out a twenty you dropped. In that big, dirty mind of his I was as small as a speck of lint on the Statue of Liberty.
He squeezed my hand when he realized I was in there, hard. Skinny the little gray men might be, but strong as grizzly bears.
Do you want to stay here? said the gray guy. Though he really didn’t say it, just thought it.
No.
You have a will to fight. Fight and stay here. Be good and go home.
Well, that didn’t take a lot of contemplation.
We were back on the ship in an instant. And now there were a lot of others in the room where I had been laying down. They were all gray like my zookeeper. There weren’t any greens, reptiles, humanoids, or any of the other kinds I’ve read about in all the magazines. All the gray guys were of a size, except one who was tall as me. They must not assign station according to height, because it seemed like the tall one was being ordered around by the normal-sized ones. Maybe he was some kind of freak on his planet, and they banished him to serve on the earth expedition ship to get rid of him. Who knows?
These other zookeepers led five humans into my room. They were all men, all naked. I looked down and realized I was naked, but it really didn’t matter I suppose.
I tried to speak to a couple of the men, but my zookeeper gave me a little flash of the spinning meteor and I gave it up. Those guys were like zombies in the horror movies anyway. They didn’t move unless their zookeepers told them too and their eyes were glazed over and funny looking.
All of my zookeeper’s friends wanted to look me over and ask me questions. Several did, and they were all the same.
Who was your first girlfriend? Have you any children? Do you masturbate often? Do you like French vanilla fudge ice cream?
I answered and answered. Pretty soon my mind was tired and my zookeeper told the others to leave, which I thought was nice considering how he had treated me thus far. Once they were all gone he said, You are a strange human being. You can read my thoughts. Do you know why that is?
Do you?, I thought back to him.
No. Your kind are not enough evolved to communicate this way, and yet here you are. Never have we found one like you in all our research. Why is that do you suppose?
No clue.
A shame.
And so then I was in Britain. I knew it was Britain, though I wasn’t sure if it was London or some other big city, because the cars were all on the wrong side of the street, along with all their drivers being on the wrong side of the car. And I was standing next to one of the big, red public phones like you see in movies. Some cop started yelling and shaking a black stick in my face for being barefoot and dressed only in pajamas. Thank God the zookeepers put those back on me.
The story made all the big rags over there. For about a week my picture was splashed right up beside Prince Charles and that lady he humped when he was still married to Diana, back before she got killed in that tunnel by ultra secret SS men. Had something to do with the change from the original German royal name to Windsor. But that’s a different story.


The End