Don't cry when I'm gone

Mother never wanted me to dance. She told me that I could do better, that dancing sluts never got anywhere in life. She should know. She danced on the streets for as long as I can remember, and she sang. She was a beautiful singer. Folk would come around to hear her wail a ballad, and pay her in copper and sometimes silver. Then we would eat for days, and even have meat that was only a day old. But we always had to leave, no matter how much coin we made, because Ma was afraid. She was afraid that her past would follow her to wherever we were.

Well, her past won’t follow her anymore. A week ago, ma died, and all my problems began.

Mother and I had just been in Anaia two weeks when she got sick. Real sick. She couldn’t sing, and for a few days we had nothing to eat. I was hungry, and she had no medicine, so I pleaded with her to let me dance. Only this once, I reasoned, and then I could pay for a doctor to make her better. How could it hurt? I begged her. She, always stubborn as a mule, refused to bend. But I, too, was stubborn, and one evening while she slept, I dressed myself in my old dancing skirt, a white blouse with no more than five holes, and no light cloth I had sewn into shoes. Then, with a prayer to the Mother above, I slipped out of the house to go dance.

Exhilaration swelled within my soul as I made my way to the corner of Town Square, ready to amaze the crowd. Upon reaching my destination, my nerve faltered a bit. Mother’s beautiful face was enough to attract the first of her listeners. Her hair was dark as a raven’s wing, with a gentle wave, while mine hangs straight to my hips, a dull shade neither brown nor blonde. Her lips, rosy and plump, would open into a beautiful smile, and her skin was a gentle copper. My mouth is plain, my skin pale and alabaster, like a northerner’s. Only our eyes are the same, large, mahogany, with thick eyelashes. But my eyes were closed as I stood, nervous, blocking out the outside world and seeking the music within me.

There it was! I listened, letting it flow through me, a gentle melody of hope and rebirth. Slowly, without my controlling it, I felt my body move. Long limbs stretched; my back arched gently. I raised my leg and spread my arms, twisting my body. Real music started somewhere, but I did not hear it; I was absorbed in my motions. I swayed, I spun, I leapt and crouched. Faster I went, letting my figure move, letting the music carry me, on and on until my muscles were sore and I could stand no longer. Then, finally, I came back to myself and my eyes sprang open.

People stood around me, watching. As the silence drew on for heartbeat after heartbeat, my fear rose within me. Just when I felt fit to burst with it, a little girl stepped forward. Her chin was stubborn, her hair as black as Ma’s, and her eyes shone a fierce blue. Part of me wanted to flee, but those eyes held me entranced, and all I could do was stand, frozen, as she walked up to me. Her gaze never left my face as, slowly and deliberately, she drew something out of her pocket, and placed it in my hand. Only when I looked down did I realize it was a little doll, crudely made but still beautiful, obviously the girl’s own creation. The thing was dressed in clothing similar to mine, but much nicer, and apparently modeled as dancing garb. Tears stung my eyes as I tore my gaze away from the gift and back to the girls face, but before I could tell her that such a precious thing was something I could never accept, she stopped me with her own words. “When I grow up,” declared that strong little voice, “I want to be a dancer like you. My father has girls who he pays to perform, but they are not like you. You are a real dancer”. I could not hold my emotion at these words, only clamp my eyes to hold in the stinging tears. When I opened them, the girl was gone.

My joy would turn to misery far too soon thereafter. After collecting a good assortment of coins, enough, I believed, to pay for a doctor, I ran home. The sight that met my eyes when I got there shall remain forever imprinted on my mind. A man, our landlord, stood at the door, holding my frail mother by her wrist. A bruise had already made its way across her face, and he had raised his arm to strike her again when I screamed. I ran to my Ma, dropping my earnings as I went, and cradled her gently in my lap as she had so often done to me. Then I looked up, fury in my eyes, at the beast of a man who was our landlord. He was calmly counting the coins, his ugly face calm, not a drop of sweat on his huge, hideous arms. Coldly, he turned to us and said, “It’ll do fer now, but ya owe me a sil’er more, an’ mark my words: if I get it not by the end of the week, ye’ll pay dearly.”

And so we did.

Things in Shadow

Second Subject’s responses to Investigators written questionnaire. EYES ONLY.

1. Mary Louise Elizabeth Smith.

2. Sixteen on May 19th.

3. Yes, both.

4. He works for one of those big computer companies doing something I’m not sure of. Whenever I ask him he just says, “dealing with assholes,” and Mom tells him not to talk like that around me like I’m some kind of toddler.

5. Pharmaceutical representative for GENTECH Inc.

6. One brother. I know this isn’t part of the question but I just want to point as that this whole thing is Chuck’s fault and it’s really not fair for me to get in trouble as well.

7. A writer or a Vet.

8. Once, but that’s none of your business.

9. If by “first signs of trouble” you mean that time he got suspended from school, then two months ago.

10. Changed every ones grades to perfect 100’s. I know everyone says he’s some kind of genius but that doesn’t seem very smart, I mean there’s no way he could have gotten away with it; everyone noticed.

11. They yelled at him for a while then grounded him from all electronics. He wasn’t even allowed to use the electric can opener, which seemed little ridiculous. So he started reading a lot more, I think that was the main problem.

12. Three or four a day, it was ridiculous. I can barley read all my chapters for English class and here he was going through book after book. They were big too, like the kind teachers keep on shelves behind them to look impressive. He pretty much just stayed in his room reading those massive books then took them back to the library and get more, even after his suspension ended. He wasn’t talking to Mom or Dad because he was still mad about not being able to watch T.V. or use his computer.

13. He told me he had got it from the subbasement in the library. I didn’t even know it had a normal basement. The book looked like one of those Oxford English Dictionaries except from the 18^th century. I can’t prove it or anything, and it hardly matters now, but I think he might have stolen it from the rare books room. It looked like it should have been in a museum.

14. A bunch of squiggly lines, I guess. Chuck said it was some kind of dead language that no one had been able to translate. I told him it was probably some kind of cookbook but he just rolled his eyes and went to his room.

15. Three days. I guess that might be impressive because he was still going to school but it probably wasn’t that hard to figure out. The people who wrote it probably just wrote everything backwards or something stupid.

16. Well he was acting all excited and antsy. He kept smiling and mumbling too himself like the homeless man on fifth street who smells like old fruit. Mom asked him if it was about a girl but he just sort of scowled at her and went back to his room. After he left, she asked Dad if he thought Chuck might be in love. Dad said he was certainly acting crazy enough.

17. When I found the pentagram in the attic.

18. Angry, because he had used all my sidewalk chalk.

19. A bunch of weird symbols and a lot of the squiggly line stuff from the old book.

20. Well normally I don’t really care what he does but this was kind of serial killer creepy. But he made me promise not to tell Mom and Dad, and I figured they’d find it the next time they went to the attic, anyway.

21. When our parents went out for their anniversary dinner. I hadn’t seen Chuck since they left but I had a paper to write so I wasn’t really paying much attention.

22. It was around 10 when I started to smell something. It was awful, like burning tar and garbage. The kind of smell that just gets inside your head.

23. He was in the attic with the pentagram, muttering stuff.

24. A flash of light and the sound of nails on a chalkboard. The smell got way worse like he’d set off 20 stink bombs.

25. A thing crawled out of the floor. Not from behind something, just straight from the middle of the pentagram, like it had been waiting beneath the floorboards.

26. He called it something but it didn’t even sound like words, really.

27. Like it didn’t have a shape. Amorphous, maybe. Except for the spider legs. It looked about the size of a large lizard, although it was really hard to tell. The thing was completely black like it was made out of shadow or something.

28. Okay, so I’m not proud of this but I screamed really loudly. Like those blonde haired bimbos in the first scene of a horror movie that get chopped to pieces. That kind of scream. So it stands to reason that it surprised Chuck a little. He didn’t know I was there.

29. Well I didn’t see it happen but Chuck told me later that I made him move outside the circle, which broke the spell that gave him control over it. Like it was all my fault that thing escaped.

30. Out the attic window and into a sewer grate.

31. Chuck was about to run after it but then our parents pulled up. He told me not to say anything or he’d tell them about the time I got drunk with Stacy and threw butter at the meter maid. Plus, whose going to believe that my brother summoned a demon from hell, right? They’d think I was crazy or something.

32. Nothing, we didn’t talk about it.

33. When the cats started disappearing.

34. Not at first, they were mostly neighborhood strays, but then a few missing posters started popping up from other houses down the block.

35. Dogs, mostly.

36. I didn’t really mind it when the little yappy one from across the street disappeared, but then Mr. Henderson’s dog went missing. Butch was such a sweetie and he always seemed so happy to see me.

37. When Chuck came through my window covered in blood.

38. He’d been going out to look for it at night. I guess he found it. He told me he caught it by surprise while it was eating and scared it off. Problem is, the commotion woke up the neighbors too. So they found Chuck with half a Doberman, covered in blood. He managed to run before they recognized him but after that everyone thought there was some sort of psychopath running around killing their pets. Which, if you think about it was actually less awful that the truth.

39. The media made this big deal about it and they started sending patrols around the neighborhood at night. Chuck said that it was like running an all night delivery service. He said it had gotten a lot bigger and dogs wouldn’t be enough anymore. I didn’t ask how big.

40. Chuck couldn’t look for it anymore, because of the patrols. He stayed up all night reading that book. He told me not to go out after dark.

41. They found the car down an ally off Jefferson Street. Someone called because the police lights were still on. I don’t think they ever found the cops.

42. He came running into my room saying he’d finally figured it out. He wouldn’t tell me what he’d figured out only that he was sure he could stop it. Chuck said he had to hurry before it got dark and that it had to been done tonight because there was a full moon.

43. He took the rest of my sidewalk chalk.

44. Like the pentagram in the attic but it stretched across the street. There was more too, strange symbols that made pictures if you looked at them right. At that odd writing from the book. It took him over an hour and by the end it was nighttime and I had to hold a flashlight for him.

45. He told me to go back inside and lock the doors. I told him nuts to that, I wasn’t going to hide inside while some stupid spider thing ate my brother. He told me that it probably wasn’t going to eat him and that he loved me. I told him to stop talking like that and he just smiled and said something that didn’t sound like words and my head started spinning and then I was walking back inside.

46. From my bedroom window. If he wasn’t going to let me outside I was at least going to watch.

47. He was reading from the book. More nonsense stuff. Then it got really dark, like all the light had out of the moon. Then, something started coming out over the sewer gates. It looked like thousands of black spiders, moving together like a flood. The started massing in one spot. They made this huge, dark, towering shape that loomed over Chuck. It didn’t look like spiders anymore. It didn’t look like anything really. Just a mass of black nothingness. The air was cold, I could feel it all the way from my room, and the thing started moving towards Chuck. He just stood there as the thing moved closer and closer. I started wildly looking around my room for something to throw at, maybe distract it so Chuck could get away. Then he screamed something and the whole pentagram caught fire with the dark mass in the center of it. The thing screamed, if you could call it that. The noise was like a thousand nails on a thousand chalkboards. Everything got really bright, and I could hear Chuck’s voice yelling over the screeching monster but the white light burned my eyes and I couldn’t see. Then suddenly, everything was quiet. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness again but when they did there was nothing. No dark shape, no burning pentagram, no Chuck.

48. Then you people showed up.

49. Look, forget your questions. I know you’re the ones who did something to everybody to make them forget. No one talks about the disappearances or what happened that night. My parents don’t even seem to acknowledge that Chuck is missing. I tried to get my mom to remember once, I showed her pictures and all that, and she just stared at me for a while then asked what I wanted for dinner. You know, if you’d just gotten here three weeks ago, none of this would have happened. Look, Chuck was annoying and a nerd, and he may have opened a portal to hell and all, but he was a good brother and I miss him.

50. Please find him.

Ideas!

Borrowed from http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/assign/e50xs2.htm I thought some of these might be fun, or helpful, or interesting for us to try.

English 50 – Intro to Creative Writing: Exercises for Story Writers

More Exercises:

Write the first 250 words of a short story, but write them in ONE SENTENCE. Make sure that the sentence is grammatically correct and punctuated correctly. This exercise is intended to increase your powers in sentence writing.
Write a dramatic scene between two people in which each has a secret and neither of them reveals the secret to the other OR TO THE READER.
Write a narrative descriptive passage in a vernacular other than your own. Listen to the way people speak in a bar, restaurant, barber shop, or some other public place where folks who speak differently ("He has an accent!") from you, and try to capture that linguistic flavor on the page.
Play with sentences and paragraph structure: Find a descriptive passage you admire, a paragraph or two or three, from published material, and revise all the sentences. Write the passage using all simple sentences (no coordination, no subordination); write the passage using all complex-compound sentences; write the passage using varying sentence structure. The more ways you can think to play with sentence structure, the more you will become aware of how sentence structure helps to create pacing, alter rhythm, offer delight.
Focus on verbs: Find a passage that you admire (about a page of prose) and examine all of the verbs in each sentence. Are the "active," "passive," "linking?" If they are active, are they transitive or intransitive? Are they metaphorical (Mary floated across the floor.)? What effects do verbs have on your reading of the passage?
Take a passage of your own writing and revise all of the verbs in it. Do this once making all the verbs active, once making all the verbs passive. Then try it by making as many verbs as possible metaphorical (embedded metaphors).

Characters: There are two types of characters: well rounded and flat.

Create character sketches. This is a good exercise to perform on a regular basis in your journal. Sometimes you can just create characters as they occur to you, at other times it is good to create characters of people you see or meet. Some of the best sketches are inspired by people you don't really know but get a brief view of, like someone sitting in a restaurant or standing by a car that has been in an accident. Ask yourself who they are, what they are about. The fact that you don't really know the person will free you up to make some calculated guesses that ultimately have more to say about your own vision of the world than they do about the real person who inspired the description. That's okay, you are NOT a reporter, and ultimately the story you intend to tell is YOUR story.
Write a character sketch strictly as narrative description, telling your reader who the character is without having the character do or say anything.
Revise the above to deliver the character to the reader strictly through the character's actions.
Revise the above to deliver the character strictly through the character's speech to another character.
Revise the above to deliver the character strictly through the words/actions of another character (the conversation at the water fountain about the boss).
Often when we call a character "flat" we mean that the author has failed in some way; however, many good stories require flat characters. Humor often relies on flat characters, but often minor characters in non-humorous pieces are also flat. These characters usually appear to help move the plot along in some way or to reveal something about the main character. A flat character is one who has only ONE characteristic. You can create whole lists of these and keep them in your journal so that you can call upon them when you need a character to fit into a scene.
Young writers are prone to write autobiographical pieces. Instead of writing about people like yourself, try writing about someone who is drastically different in some way from you. Writing about someone who is a good deal older or younger than you will often free up your imagination. It helps to make sure you are delivering enough information to your reader so that the reader can clearly see the character and understand the character's motives.
Write a scene of about five hundred words in which a character does something while alone in a setting that is extremely significant to that character. Have the character doing something (dishes, laundry, filing taxes, playing a computer game, building a bird house) and make sure that YOU are aware that the character has a problem or issue to work out, but do NOT tell your reader what that is.

A middle-age man is waiting at a bus stop. He has just learned that his son has died violently. Describe the setting from the man's point of view WITHOUT telling your reader what has happened. How will the street look to this man? What are the sounds? Odors? Colors? That this man will notice? What will his clothes feel like? Write a 250 word description.


Write away!

In Blue: Episode One

I hate everyone.

From the moment I was born, everyone said that I was oh so special. The special child, the magic creature, the brilliant blue bastard. Oh yea, blue. I'm blue. Blue as a baboon's ass. Or a fairy's, in this case.

It's all the fault of my great-grandmother, who decided, hey, normal guys? Not doin' it for me. I'm gonna get myself some of that fairy tail (do you see what I did there? With the stupid pun? Yes, it was a pun! Do you hate me yet? Cause I hate you.) Well somehow, that fairy managed to get granny dearest pregnant, despite being about a quarter of her size. Nobody knew. Cross-species mating... well, let's just say that people don't really like it around here. At all. Stupid people. I hate them. I hate all of them.

So anyway. After little boy blue put the whammy on granny, gramps was born. And... nada. Nothing. No blue, no short, no nothin'. Just an ordinary kid. I hate gramps. Most normal man in the world. And my dad, too! Just blah blah blah, with the straw colored hair and the brown eyes and the normal, boring, tan skin. Normal voices. Normal smiles. Even my mom agrees that her husband's a boring-ass piece of work. So what happened to me?

Oh, I was special. So very special.

So out popped my blue ass, followed by my blue feet, my blue chest, and finally, my blue little face. They thought I was strangling at first, but oh no, I was find. Sufferin' a little bit of blue balls (hah!) from the lack of warmth, but breathin' like any little kid. Then they turned me over and saw the wing buds.

I think that's when the nurse screamed and dropped me.

So yeah, story of my birth. Everyone in shock. Everyone disgusted. Everyone staring. Everyone except my mother, who leap up from the bed, butt naked and bloody, swooped me off the floor and after one look announced that “Tammy!” would be the cute blue baby's name.

Did I mention that my mom's insane? Oh yeah. I hate her.

Untitled, Part 1. The characters/cars in this story are fictitious. Any relationship with real-life people or cars is coincidental.

 It’s 2:03 a.m. and the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling are significantly less luminous than they were three hours ago. Oliver’s been turning over and over and over and he’s decided he’s going to do it. The hurt his mother will feel when she discovers he is nowhere to be found crosses his mind, but it can’t be helped. He’s got to do it.

 He remembers a conversation he had with his best friend, Lila, a day ago.

 “Sometimes, I just feel like packing some clothes and hopping on a boat to Chile.”

 “Wouldn’t you miss your family and your friends?” she had asked.

 “Yeah, I suppose,” he had replied. But right now he didn’t feel any remorse for wanting to leave. He hated it here, and he’d be damned if he was going to stay another night.

 Oliver swings the covers away and slides out of bed, careful not to make a sound. His foot sinks down and the floor creaks. He pulls his sweater out from under the bed and finds his pants. He grabs the keys to his 84’ Nissan Maxima and makes his way out of the house.

 Outside, Oliver makes his way across the driveway. He’s giddy with thrill of what he’s doing. He can’t be controlled. He’s his own man. He wiggles the key back and forth to open the car door.

 He’d bought the car for five-hundred dollars off an old benevolent couple who had no need for it, and didn’t need the money. It was worth at least one grand. The car ran, but it had its fair share of quirks. Click.

 Inside the car, Oliver turns the ignition. He backs up and looks both ways. Road’s clear, of course. No sane person would be so far out in the country at this hour.

 He pulls out of the driveway. The lights to the house flick on. “Shit!” Oliver says. He’s left his shoes in the house. He hits the gas and doesn’t look back. He won’t need shoes where he’s going. 

499 Words

Lester Johnson was a man with a dream.

Every night he would perform the same routine:

1) Feed the three dogs and one cat who slept on his porch. His daddy had taught him to take care of those in need, no matter their size or shape.

2) Straighten up the kitchen and living room. His mamma had raised him to be a tidy boy; he would do her memory proud.

3) Brush his teeth, wash his face, and scrub his nails. The girl he'd loved as a teenager had once called him a slob, and said that’s why she wouldn’t date him.

4) Crawl into bed and switch out the light. He didn't know who taught him that. But it musta been someone.


Lester Johnson was a creature of others' creation. He was a good man, walked the straight and narrow all the time. He tied his shoelaces and buttoned his shirts. He went to church every Sunday and held open the door for the matrons and young ladies alike. Lester Johnson woke up at 7:15 every morning. Every Tuesday he went to the grocery store. He worked nine hours a day at a local toothpaste factory, and wasn't ever late. Lester Johnson ate a good dinner, and sometimes had visitors, but usually he ate alone. Every Friday he went to the bar and drank two beers and listened to the other men discuss sports. He never said much, unless to repeat what someone had said to him.

There was nothing to dislike about Lester Johnson.

Nobody could stand him.

Nobody knew about Lester Johnson's dream.

Nobody but Lester Johnson.

Every night after he turned off the light, Lester Johnson wondered if he would have the dream again. Lester Johnson knew it was wrong, and he knew he shouldn't love it, and he knew he should tell a doctor or a priest about it. But somehow, whenever there was an appropriate time, Lester Johnson would forget. He'd go to confessional each Saturday and say good morning, Father, and I have sinned, Father; but when he listed his sins, he never mentioned the dream. It was a sinful dream. He wanted to be forgiven for it. He wanted to stop dreaming such a terrible dream.

He was addicted.

Every night, as soon as that deep breath of sleep took him, Lester Johnson would dream. The dream was always the same. In Lester Johnson’s dream, the town fire alarm would go off. There was no fire, but all the townspeople would come running outside, anyway. They were all naked, and they all looked the same – no hair, no scars, no private parts. Just carbon copy bodies with different heads. They would scream, each looking to the other because nobody knew what to do without being told, naked chickens all in a row. Only Lester Johnson wore clothes. Only Lester Johnson knew what to do:

He took out his rifle, and he shot them all.

In his sleep, Lester Johnson smiled.

Due to disastrous laziness, I also have not completed a story for this evening. Instead, feast your eye-like appendages on an unfinished story I wrote like two years ago.

Jim and the alien.

Jim was in bed when the alien came. The ship landed silently in his back yard, utterly destroying a years-work worth of credenzas. The alien woke Jim by telepathically sending him signals telling him not to fear the strange and wonderful alien creature that was about to appear, and then violently punching him in the stomach.

“Greetings, squishy.” Said the alien in an unmistakably British accent.

“Ackghh,” replied Jim, clutching at his bruised and admittedly squishy stomach.

After regaining his breath, Jim gazed up at his extraterrestrial attacker. The alien was covered entirely in a metal suit with glowing bits that just seemed to be there for decoration. This made Jim wonder if he was dealing with an alien or a robot.

“Even if I was a robot, I’d still be an alien,” replied the alien to Jim’s thought. Jim decided not to think too much anymore.

“Well, squishy,” began the alien. “What is it that you call yourself?”

“Jim”

“Hmmm… Jim-Jiiiimmm. Jim?” The alien tried the name aloud, producing syllables that Jim was sure were impossible.

“I don’t like it. I think I will call you r².”

“Well I rather prefer Jim.”

“I should think that as I am the one who is forced to produce the necessary sound waves, that I should be able to decide what they are,” replied the alien curtly.

“Oh… all right then,” Jim said dejectedly, as he was not one for nicknames.

“Now r², you may be wondering why it is I have come across the incalculably large vastness of space to your humble living box?”

“It honestly hadn’t crossed my mind.”

“Well let me tell you!” the alien said, ignoring Jim. “I have come across the vast recesses of space in order to make you a remarkable offer.”

“Of what?” Jim asked apprehensively.

“On this, of course!” replied the alien. “This magnificent property you have.”

Jim looked around his house. It was easy to do because it was all one room. His kitchen consisted of a microwave next to a toaster oven and his bed folded up into the wall. His bathroom was located next door, outside the truck stop. The walls were an ugly lime color, which Jim had later found out was not, in fact, paint, but a mostly harmless fungus. For tax reasons it was classified as a shed.

“I honestly hadn’t considered selling it,” said Jim, slowly.

“Oh but you must!” The alien cried. “It is such prime real-estate. Not too far from the interstellar turnpike yet scenic enough to enjoy a clear sky, free of starships.”

“I hadn’t really thought about it like that before.” Said Jim, for once feeling some attraction to the house that was slowly giving him cancer. “ I guess those are nice features.”

“And that’s not even to mention its 220,000 miles of coastline!”

“Umm, excuse me?” said Jim, sitting up in his bed.

“Oh, and the mountains,” gushed the alien. “ I’ve never seen such beautiful mountains. All the ones on my planet have been ground down into fuel, but not these. Oh, it’s so relaxing.”

“Wait, hold on. Do you mean to say that you want this whole planet?” said Jim quickly, trying to get a hold on the situation.

“Why of course, you silly squishy. What else could I have possibly meant? Certainly not something as insignificant as this flimsy structure? That’s ridiculous.” The alien laughed at his own whimsical musing. It reminded Jim of the noise that was made when his neighbor’s Pomeranian had bit into a power cord and was electrocuted. Any pride Jim had begun to feel for his dwelling was immediately dashed into innumerable pieces. He slumped back in bed as the alien went on and on about the wonders of his planet.

“Obviously,” the alien continued. “I’m willing to offer well above galactic asking price.”

“Look, Mr. Alien… Metal… Thing,” began Jim. “I would love to help you but the earth isn’t mine to sell.” The alien, behind the entirety of its metal suit, still managed to look dejected.

“Are you sure?” it asked, disappointment heavy in its voice. Jim had to think about it for a minute.

“Yes, yes I suppose it really wouldn’t do for me to sell it.”

“I was so sure that this was the owner’s location.” then, brightening up again, “well would you please direct me to where I might find him?”

“Well, that might also be a problem. I mean no one really owns the earth, we all just sort of share it.”

“Ah, so you’re Communists. Well if that’s the case, then you should have a leader of some sort.”

“Well, I suppose that would be the President but he doesn’t-“

“Splendid!” cried the alien. “Tell me where I may find him.”

“He’s in the White House,” Jim said confidently.

“Which one?” asked the alien.

“Uhh…” Jim thought for a moment. “The big one?”

“Talking is such a wasteful activity,” grumbled the alien. “I’m sure you know where it is somewhere in there. It’s nothing a little old fashioned telepathy won’t solve.” With that, the alien forcefully grabbed Jim by the face. The room began to spin as his mind was jostled about by none too gentle hands. He cringed with the pain of what felt like two electrodes shorting out right behind his eyes. For a second, everything tasted purple, and then Jim blacked out.

***************************************************