Guess Who Came to Breakfast?

Guess Who Came to Breakfast?

    “Crash!” The sound of all the plates and glasses on the breakfast table tumbling to the floor followed by a bloodcurdling scream as cousin, Carey Stupolski, also saw herself hurled off her chair in our dining room and saw herself covered with pancake syrup.

    The scream emanated more from the shock of our breakfast guest than from fear. Carey had been living and dining with us, the Fizurskis, because her mother Marcia, my mother's sister, needed her temporarily removed from a potentially dangerous domestic situation in her own home.

      “The craziest thing,” Carey said as she sat dazed on the floor after the breakfast incident, “I sat eating a plate of Uncle Stan’s delicious pancakes and reached for a glass of orange juice. All of a sudden I found myself tossed off my chair into mid-air with most of the dishes and other breakfast-ware falling on top of me and almost knocking me out as I landed on the floor.”

      Luckily, Carey experienced no physical injury and the Aunt Sophie's best plates and glassware escaped with few breakages.

     For Carey, however, the breakfast incident capped off a traumatic few weeks of sadness and concern, both for her welfare and that of her mother and sister Penelope. Their father, Jason Stupolski, had gone from a decent, hardworking father and husband to a destructive alcoholic with dangerous schizophrenic tendencies in less than a year.

    In a second incident, the Thursday prior to the breakfast table crash, while walking to school with me and her other two cousins, Carey narrowly escaped injury when her father attempted to abduct her and nearly ran her over with the junkyard reject car that provided his current mode of transportation.

     Jason also narrowly missed running over the traffic officer on duty. The officer pulled him over and told him to show his identification. He gave Jason a very stern 10-minute lecture and a warning.

“Good for you I am in a good mood,” the policeman said, “otherwise I would, at the very least, issue you a summons and possibly land your ass in jail. Get out of here and leave these people alone. If I or another officer catches you around here or around them there will be hell to pay."

    Not that he hadn’t come close to wearing a striped prison suit. The previous week, after Marcia had notified him that she would sue for divorce, Jason had broken into the family’s lower-income apartment from which she had evicted him three weeks prior and attempted to physically assault his wife.

     Luckily Uncle Stan, visiting with his family at the time, had quickly “escorted” Jason from the premises after pushing him against the wall and standing between him and Marcia.

      Back to the fateful morning of the falling plates:

      Turns out the bizarre incident had very little to do with Jason or the domestic storm clouding the Stupolski household.

      “Guess the dishes just slipped off the table,” Uncle Stan said as he helped Carey up from the floor. 

      “However, come to think of it, this is just one in a series of strange incidents that we’ve had here in the last month. My wife began making a turkey dinner for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago when the broiler door on our stove, underneath the oven in which Sophie had started cooking our turkey, popped open for no apparent reason. Last Friday our television screen turned purple before the TV stopped working and suddenly went back to normal within a few minutes.”

     Just when the family started to recover from the breakfast table shock the kitchen door flew open and in walked a very large man—about eight feet tall—with strange looking skin that had almost a bluish tint, He wore a very unusual metallic military-type uniform.

      “I can explain,” the creature said. “I am from the planet Numeron. We have had your earth under observation for about six of your earth months. Numeron received an unusual blast of energy from your sun because an explosion from a quake on our planet's surface, similar to one of your earthquakes, pushed our planet closer to the sun. We have determined that your earth can become our new home base to replace our planet once, as our scientists predict, it burns out of existence in few months. Rather than engaging in warfare with your civilization, our leaders decided to have some of us assume human form and create a number of incidents to frighten your people so they would desert earth and leave It to us.”     

     The Numeronian added that his people had observed the domestic dispute and saw that situation also helping to pave the way to obtaining their objectives without engaging with earth’s defensive forces. 

       However, just as suddenly as he had appeared the Numeronian vanished into thin air.

      Almost immediately, we heard someone else knocking on our kitchen door.

        “I am Col. Sandford Jones of Homeland Security. Our cyber communications unit has monitored the Numeronians for several months after the explosion on their planet. We know they have watched earth. We listened in on their meetings and waited for them to make their move. We then captured some members of the faction of the Numeronian Spaceforce bent on taking over earth. Fortunately, we have negotiated with a more moderate faction and our scientists are working on a new application that, the scientists believe, will save their planet without having them take over Earth.”

          After the incident the family court finalized Marcia’s divorce and the family counseling service had Jason committed to a mental health facility, where he died three years later.

Carey and her relatives breathed sighs of relief to have their family troubles resolved, and they never spoke again about the breakfast table incident. Jason had heard about the incident in one of his favorite bars. However, when he told those caring for his mental health about it, they dismissed it, figuring it as just a figment of his diseased mental state.