Resistant

I: Asylum

Fifteen million aliens arrived instantaneously and simultaneously across the United States.

The only thing to distinguish them from Humans was that nobody could understand anything they were saying. They spoke a beautiful, musical language and were officially named Cetaceans because of how much it sounded like whale song.

But nobody called them that. It was difficult to pronounce, even harder to spell, and given the lack of any other aliens, there wasn’t an immediate need for proper nouns anyway.

The strongest aliens immediately encircled their children, elderly, and infirmed, protecting them from violent incuriosity. Their initial fates varied widely depending on the legality of gun ownership and the temperament of local law enforcement, but eventually, and without protest, they were quarantined into hastily converted schools, commandeered hotels, and, of course, prisons.

Millions of Humans with minor crimes were given immediate clemency to open up space for alien incarceration, but of course mistakes were made and more violent criminals with what turned out to be high rates of recidivism were freed as well.

Almost immediately the aliens began to tell their story. They formed small acting troupes in whatever confinement they found themselves and, as best they could, physically mimed their tale of why they had come to Earth.

Every performance began with a depiction of some powerful and cruel group of others, played by aliens with exaggeratedly evil and angry faces. They stomped mightily and comically around their jail cells, waving their arms aggressively in a holding tank 4th grade classroom.

Then other aliens entered the scene and were immediately grabbed by the first group who, with outstretched hands upon their necks, pretended to march them roughly around the hotel bar. The second group wailed in painful chorus, repeatedly pointing at their chests in fourth wall breaking pleas for understanding.

Their desperate faces and anguished songs begged their Human audience to believe they meant no harm. They sought just sanctuary.

These performances fell on many deaf ears- aliens were aliens no matter how bad they might have had it in their home world. Others, mostly those with enough life experience to know desperation when they see it, were moved to tears by the Humanity. These were decent and oppressed lives. They were certainly aliens, but they were also refugees.

II: Integration

Madison Loomer was a quarter Cetacean. The name for the aliens had ended up sticking because Humans needed something to call her grandparents, and their actual name was impossible for Humans to pronounce in any of their languages. And her name, straight down the middle Human-American, was the gift of all Cetacean parents to their children: the chance to not be noticed.

Early on an already sweltering September morning, she opened the door to her room and flicked on the lights. The tables and chairs were piled so high upon each other that it was remarkable they hadn’t fallen over during the last two months. Madison guessed that when she moved them back into place, there would be one section of the room left to clean. As she carefully picked out

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And that’s when Maria Vásquez closed the laptop and stopped writing.

She had it all laid out in her head and on a legal pad with scribbled out names and arrows everywhere. As the story went on, Madison (who had previously been Sophia, and before that, Brooke) was going to keep on preparing for her day, while telling more of the Cetacean story.

Madison was going to think about the loss of language. How it pained her grandparents that she only knew a few phrases and they all came out sounding nasally and Human.

Her bratty teenage years in which she was desperate to assimilate. How annoyed she would get at her parents outing her by speaking Cetacean in public.

When she got older and that shame turned to anger. How the Humans only stopped killing Cetaceans because they realized it’d be cooler to exploit their labor instead. The rank prejudice like they were disgusted to even share space. The bullshit laws that sounded fair but everyone knew which species they protected and which one they injured. The way the Humans twisted their religion to support their hate. That they had the gall to use variations of their own name to mean decent and generous.

Then she was going to reveal that this was actually the first week of school and Madison was preparing her integrated classroom for the thirty Cetacean and Human second graders that would be coming though that door in just a couple of days. Madison would have learned to put aside her hate and forgive the previous generations of Humans because the ones in front of her had done nothing wrong.

There was even a clumsy metaphor for peace in the classroom itself because what was once a prison for her grandparents was now where she taught kids of both species to embrace love and reject hate. The future was going to be what they made it.

And of course it was all an easily spotted metaphor for refugee rights, but, she hoped, in one of those allegorical ways where it was so clearly communicated from the beginning that it wasn’t like she was trying to surprise anyone at the end.

But she hated it. She had written and rewritten for hours. Hundreds of words had been shoved into random google docs on the chance they might have use later on, but she knew that was wishful thinking. Even more had been command-x’ed to frustrated oblivion as if they’d never existed at all. She’d even changed the description and name of the Cetaceans a dozen times. Like that was the problem.

Madison’s third generation stories were also Maria’s, as was her profession and her hopes for herself and her community. But no amount of anecdote could support the weight of this much insincerity. It was 2025 in Los Angeles, and she was a long, simmering way from being anything close to forgiving.