The Other Half - Final Friday Fiction.

fff-rulez - linking to "My Take; doses of Wild YAM" - Final Friday Fiction

(You had to read part one last month.  These stories, and in fact this blog originally, were written for some very young friends.  We had a game where we pulled pictures out of a series of boxes and made up stories about them. This one involved a 'spoon' and an 'alien' and 'a problem to solve'.  My young friend had a 'treasure chest' of broken jewellery, old coins, keys no one could find the locks for, and assorted things shiny that had been magpied away.)

One day a small boy was sitting on the balcony of his family’s apartment playing with this treasure chest when he became aware of an alien on an air ski hovering nearby and watching him.  It was not unusual to be watched, their apartment was close to a river and the alien visitors seemed to like to follow rivers on their tours of earth.  On this day however he was being studied very closely and the boy decided to gather up his treasures, coins, special beads and crystals, and some coloured stones, and put them safely back in the box.  As he was doing so the alien hovered in for a closer view and was so focussed on the little boy and his treasure chest that it failed to notice a tree near the balcony.  It hit the ends of some branches and went crashing down to the carpark below.  Surprised, the little boy peered over the edge of the balcony – the air ski was upside down and the alien lay very still sprawled on the concrete.  Its SCUBA breathing gear had come off and it was lying beside the air ski.

Our little boy dashed down the stairs, out the back door and around the building to where the alien was lying very still.  He could see where the SCUBA set had become disconnected in the crash.  It looked more pulled apart than actually broken and without giving it another thought he pushed it back together and fixed the connection to the alien’s special suit.

Inside his suit, the alien’s colour started to restore; it went from a very pale shade of green through aquamarine into blue and finally a glowing shade of purple.  It gathered itself up, struggling with earth’s gravity, and focussed its sensors on the small boy.  It could see the boy was about the same size as the alien, and it could sense the vibrations made by sounds that seemed to be coming out of the boy’s mouth.

The visiting aliens had been warned about this – that the earthlings communicated with sound, but the alien could not interpret or understand the sound vibrations.  These particular aliens communicated genetically, they shared enough genes that everyone in their community understood what everyone else in the community felt and thought.  When they needed to, they could communicate with gestures, movements, and body language signs, but they never used sounds and they had no way to make sounds.  The alien looked around and wondered how it could make a ‘thank you’ that this earthling would understand.

Meanwhile the boy had put the air ski the right way up and was flicking the controls; it seemed to be broken.  He did not realize that the air ski and the alien’s space suit were programmed to work together so that if the alien fell off the air ski could not drive away by itself.  He pushed it back toward the alien and made that universal gesture that says ‘now what?’ – that shrug, hands spread out, with raised eyebrows and downturned mouth look that always seems to say “I don’t know!”  And suddenly the alien did know; it knew it had to use sign language.  The alien fumbled about in its space suit pocket and tipped out something that tinkled onto the concrete and sparkled there brighter than the brightest thing in the little boy’s treasure chest.  It glowed with a faintly pulsating glow.  Fascinated the little boy stared at the small glowing chip with sparkling flashes, but he made no move to touch it.  The alien pointed – first at the chip and then at the boy.  The boy stepped back, and after the alien’s second attempt, he slowly pointed at the chip and then himself – and mimed a gesture of picking up the small glowing stone and putting it in his pocket; a sort of questions expressed on his face.

“Yes, yes,” thought the alien “oh bother, no thought messages, how do they communicate ‘yes’?” It waved its pointer up and down in the air in its frustration but the little boy interpreted that as a nodding yes, and scooped up the space diamond without another thought.  It didn’t burn him, or explode, or harm him at all.  Instead, in the warmth of his hand it glowed even stronger and started to make a slight humming noise.  He put it down.  It faded. The alien waved again and, encouraged this time, the boy picked it up and wrapped his hand right around it.  He could almost feel it glow and suddenly became aware somewhere deep inside himself that the alien was saying “thank you, thank you for saving my life.”

As the alien slid back onto its space ski and did a couple of small practice hovers to check the programs, the small boy started a small smile, then a bigger smile, and then a really big broad grin, and the alien drew big grinning swoops in the air with his ski.  ‘Friends forever,’ though the boy but didn’t know if the thought was his own or came from the same place the ‘thank you’ had come from.  He put the space diamond on the ground.  The friend feelings stopped.  He picked it up and they started again and THEN HE KNEW FOR CERTAIN.  The alien had given him not just a pretty gem for his treasure chest, but had given him the most important gift ever – the ability to understand everyone, and he danced and waved as, dancing and waving on its ski, the bright purple alien flew away.

It got smaller and smaller as it flew into the distance, but the alien’s message never got weaker.  And ever after that, whenever he wrapped his hand around the space diamond, the little boy (who became a grown man) could ‘talk’ to the alien he had rescued that day.  He kept it with him always and when he was very, very old he told his granddaughter about the alien and the space diamond and he passed it onto her.  She wore it on a necklace.

We don’t know how long the alien can live so we don’t know whether his granddaughter could talk to the alien too.  What do you think?