Play Aliens

A world away from the mundanity of everyday life. A world where no dull colors existed. No dreary, drizzly skies choked with smog. No empty-eyed roadkill at the side of the roads. No random wafts of sewage that smelled like Dad getting home from the factory. No creepy strangers who stared a bit longer than a five-year-old’s mind could explain.

A world not ruled by predictable humans, but by a playful alien species, the leader of which smiled proudly on the lid of a pizza box. One of these boxes lay discarded in the midst of this incredible place. The grease-stained cardboard had long since been deprived of its contents, unless you count the furry gray animal that sniffed around inside it. The rat’s pinkish tail trailed out on the rubber-padded ground as it hunted for a crumb of the tastiest pizza in the universe.

Unbeknownst to this little creature, it was being watched from the colorful canopies. Two giant black eyes gazed down at it. A tiny body, barely three feet in length, clung tightly to a spider web of ropes. The web barely swayed as this being climbed down. The practiced ease of its movements would have been clear to any observer. Indeed, it looked like a native to this planet. The colors of its pelt were finely attuned to its environment, slashed with streaks of every color you could find in a six pack of crayons.

With impeccable subtlety, the hunter released its grip on the rope-web, rolled down tilted platforms like a barrel in a video game, and dropped into a pit of plastic balls. It army-crawled out of the pit toward the box. The rat’s pink tail was now barely visible. The rodent continued its search for food, blissfully unaware of the presence looming closer and closer. Then, with deadly precision, this predator made its move. It picked up the cardboard and scooped out the helpless little scavenger.

With its target in hand, the mysterious hunter stood to full height, revealing a bipedal, upright posture. It raised one hand to its enormous black eyes, then lifted the mask from its head, exposing a mane of scraggly blond hair, a small button nose, and gleaming dark eyes, far smaller and livelier than those of the mask. Though dusted with dirt, the girl’s face glowed from a week’s worth of fun. She stroked the rat's fur. It eagerly sniffed at her fingers, hoping for some sort of treat.

“Sorry, Stella, all gone,” murmured the little girl. “I double triple checked. But I know where there’s more!”

Gently cradling Stella, honorably named after the alien captain of Play Aliens—three-star restaurant and party destination with a play place designed for all ages—the young girl traversed the bizarre terrain. Her skills were far too advanced to use the simple set of cube-shaped steps to the exit. With a running head start, she ran straight up the slide, only slipping a little bit before curling one hand into the lip of its summit. She pulled herself and Stella out of the play place, trotted past the dining area, and pushed through the double swing doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, along with a smiling depiction of Stella Mozzarella.

In the kitchen, she set Stella down, who scampered at her heels. The loyal creature was only occasionally sidetracked, sniffing at objects that littered the floor. Utensils, pans, shattered remnants of plates, empty plastic containers that used to hold cheeses and toppings, the works. In one corner of the room, a commercial pan rack lay tipped on its side on the red-tiled floor. Whether the place had been raided or chaotically abandoned was unclear. The little girl herself didn't seem very troubled by this mystery. 

She hummed and jumped over pieces of carnage like a game of hopscotch. A particular piece of plate caught her eye. She crouched down to closely examine it, touching it carefully. The girl could have been an astronomer, searching for signs of intelligent life on a desolate alien planet. Then, unpredictable as any new world, she abruptly sprung up and performed a little jig, singing, “Stella, Stella, Stella! Stella Mozzarella! She came from outer space… mmm hmm… Mozzarella!” She pulled a plastic noise-maker from her pocket, letting loose a few dissonant chords. The rat jerked away at this sound, then slowly crept back to the girl, who stood there looking lost for a second.

“Oh yeah,” she whispered to herself, then made a silly, stomping run to the walk-in freezer. White-knuckling the handle with both of her hands, she threw the freezer door open to an extra-cheese-estrial’s paradise: a thawed expanse of plastic-wrapped pizzas, entire gallons of sauces, one gallon of sauce she had spilled, cried over, then left, and an assortment of boxed foods, whole fruits and vegetables that had only just started to rot. The rat named Stella immediately went for the smelly spilled catsup while the little girl focused her attention on a pizza. 

The pizza was soggy and the plastic wrap was wet. At this point, she knew better than to try and open it with her fingers. She grabbed a corner in her teeth and tore it open with only a little difficulty. Like eating a bag of chips, she reached into the plastic bag, grabbed a gloopy glop of cheesy dough with pepperoni that leaned more toward green than red, and stuffed it in her face. She stuck her hand in again, grabbed another fistful of dough, and crouched in front of her rodent friend. She held out her hand. 

“Stella,” she said. The rat diligently ignored her, licking up the catsup. “Stella,” the girl repeated, scooting forward, until her already-catsup-stained shoes pushed through the dried crust into the sauce that hadn’t dried. Still, the rat ignored her. “Eat,” the girl demanded. She wanted to share, but the rat wouldn’t listen. “Eat it, Stella.” Her face began to twist. “EAT!!!” she screamed, shoving her fist toward the rat, and it darted under the shelves, where it stayed.

“Stella,” the girl called. “Stella.”

It didn’t respond. With a noise of frustration, the girl ate the glop of pizza herself. 

She closed the freezer door behind her when she left, leaving Stella behind. She kicked her way through the mess on the kitchen floor, shoved through the swinging doors, and walked to the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED podium by the vestibule. Two shelves were hidden in the back of this podium. One had menus, the other had a stack of coloring pages with crayons. She grabbed a coloring page and a pack of crayons, then headed to her special booth in the far back corner of the dining room. The table, as well as the surrounding floor, were littered with scribbled coloring pages, broken crayons, and boogery napkins.

Squatting down on the wrinkled, torn cushion of the booth, the girl shook the crayons onto the table, slapped on the coloring page, and got to work. Judging by the intense concentration in her eyes, the furrow of her brow, and the set of her jaw, this certainly wasn’t play. While coloring the image of the large-eyed, scrawny-limbed alien with pretty eyelashes and a captain’s hat, she stayed perfectly within the lines. Each color had its purpose. She colored the alien green, the captain hat red—just like the real captain hat she’d managed to grab from the display shelf three days ago—the spaceship blue, and the speech bubble yellow. “Have a blast at my party from outer space!” it read. 

The girl’s dark eyes seemed to take on a vengeful glint as she scribbled with her crayon. “They went to the party without me,” she muttered. Then the crayon split in half, the two wax ends held together by the thin paper wrapping. The little girl tossed it aside. She appeared to be done coloring, anyway. She wiped the excess debris from the paper and held it up for inspection. All of a sudden a look of urgency crossed her face. She slammed the page down and bolted away. She ran down a hallway and shoved through a door with the decal of a dress-wearing alien. 

By the time the girl emerged, the grayish world outside had descended into darkness, as totally black as the countryside at night where the girl used to visit her uncle. Not even streetlights or headlights softened the night, nor did the giant smiling man holding the gas pump, the one who guarded the gas station down the road. He provided the girl with some comfort the first few nights, as the bright blue Earth provided comfort for the astronauts. 

As she walked toward the windows at the front of the restaurant, her complexion now sallow and her mouth smeared with puke, she seemed like a completely different girl than the one from an hour ago. She no longer seemed like an explorer of alien lands. Instead, she seemed lost. Perhaps even abandoned. Especially when she collapsed on her butt, wailing, “Mommy!!! Daddy!!!” over and over again. 

Everyone knows that time works different on alien planets. Time worked different in Play Aliens, too, where several hours passed in the course of only one. Within this hour, the girl cried for her mother and father—seemed to accept that they had gone to the outer space party with the rest of the world and were never coming back—regained her enthusiasm and turned on every light that would still turn on in the building—then dipped into another depressive episode in which she sat in the vestibule in front of the entrance doors, cradling Stella’s captain hat while she gazed into the night. 

She gently stroked the plastic visor. Her demeanor, now, was perfectly calm, as if her mind was suspended in nothingness. Her eyes betrayed no emotion, simply observing the world beyond, if the world beyond existed at all. Perhaps the tint of the windowed doors hid the nature of things. But it seemed that Play Aliens was truly adrift in space. The girl’s reasons for staying in this place seemed clearer at this moment. Surely if she opened those doors, she’d be sucked into a featureless vacuum, to be frozen or asphyxiated. But the world beyond these doors was not lifeless, after all. 

A touch of red light pricked the center of her pupils, growing in tandem with her widening eyes. The girl jumped to her feet, laughing and spinning in ecstasy as the lights in the sky got bigger, and bigger, and bigger, heading closer to the restaurant, the only place in the entire city that was still consuming energy.

“Stella, Stella, Stella!” sang the girl. “Stella Mozzarella!” 

With a start, the girl looked down at her clothes, which were stained with puke. “I’m going to the party,” she whispered, then ran for the play place. She slid down the slide, hopped up the platforms, climbed the spider web, crossed the bridge of braided ropes, and crawled into the bright green tube where she’d made her nest of bundled-up t-shirts, each with the same design as her puke-stained shirt. Her parents must have taught her good party decorum, for she changed her dirty shirt for a clean, albeit wrinkled one. Then she made her way out of the play place again. 

By the time she fell into the ball pit, the whole restaurant was bathed in an eerie red glow, aside from the long, skinny shadow from the silhouette at the door. Peering from the ball pit, she quietly gasped. “Stella Mozzarella…” she whispered with wonder.

The vestibule door opened. The figure walked in. Along with another. And another. They must have brought the party here from outer space. They had party supplies, too. Strange, long objects they held in both hands. 

The being at the very front held the hat she’d abandoned in the vestibule. Its attention was drawn to the booth in the corner strewn with coloring pages. The girl couldn’t see them very well through the mesh that divided the play place from the dining room. They didn’t seem to notice her, either. They spread through the room, creeping around slowly and carefully, like they were setting up for a surprise party. The girl watched one figure in particular, the one who held the captain hat as well as the drawing she’d left on the table. The question glimmered behind the girl’s eyes. Could it be…?

As a figure crept closer to the play place, she couldn’t contain her excitement any longer. She shimmied out of the ball pit, raced up the cubed steps on all fours, and burst through the play place’s curtain into the open. 

“Stella!” 

The creature lurched back with a terrible screech, revealing rows of pointed teeth beneath eyes like magic 8 balls, just as big and murky and black. The girl fell backwards with a scream to rival the alien’s, and she continued to scream as its colleagues pressed closer. Their tall scrawny bodies, their enormous swelling skulls, and their unblinking eyes that took up half of their face would have likened them to Play Alien’s mascot. But their thin lips did not smile with out of this world hospitality. The objects in their hands looked more like Dad’s hunting rifle than a confetti-blaster or noise maker. And their skin was not a pleasant green like a Granny Smith apple, but gray and kind of wrinkled, like crumpled gray construction paper you couldn’t smoothen out. 

The girl no longer wanted to go to their party.

While she cowered on the floor, tears rushing down her face, the alien that had screamed raised its weapon to her. Its thin lips lifted into a snarl. Then somewhere behind it, another alien screeched. A far more purposeful screech than that made of fear. The creature immediately lowered its weapon, backing away from the girl, while the alien holding the captain hat moved closer. Its humongous eyes did not narrow or widen, and yet it held a different expression from that of its comrades. It seemed to study the girl with intense concentration as it moved in closer, and closer.

Like a dying star, the girl’s fearful face collapsed in on itself. She screwed her eyes shut and released a piercing wail, then stood up and sprinted through the double swinging doors, through the kitchen, and into the freezer. She yanked the door shut behind her and huddled in the back. Stella the rat emerged from her hiding place to sniff at her. It made a small squeak when her hand lunged out to grab it. She cradled the rodent as though it was her stuffie that was still outside in the parking lot, locked in her parents’ car. “It was supposed to be Stella,” she whispered.

The silver handle to the freezer door cranked downward with a questioning whine. The girl curled in on herself, hugging the rat even tighter to her chest, which bobbed up and down as she fought for a breath as though the room was void of oxygen. “I want Stella!” she screamed, and then the door creaked open, revealing an empty kitchen. 

Her erratic breathing continued as she stared into the kitchen. Then, slowly, a slender hand curled around the wall beneath the latch plate. Following this hand, a large, veiny head peeked past the threshold. It was wearing a hat. A captain hat. And who wore this hat but Stella Mozzarella herself, her lips curled back into a sharp-toothed grin, enough to resemble the image on the coloring page she held in one four-fingered hand.

The little girl gasped. She let go of the rat, which retreated back under the shelves. 

“Stella!” she cried, and with a giggle of glee, she ran into the arms of the captain herself of Play Aliens. Everyone else in the world had already gone to her party in outer space. She’d seen it herself a week ago, when she woke up in the play place to find that everyone was gone, and saw those pizza-shaped saucers shooting back into the sky. Now, after a whole week of waiting, it was finally her turn to go.

The girl closed her eyes and buried her head into Stella Mozzarella’s chest. Stella stared at her with those unblinking eyes, then stood up holding the girl in her arms. A few of her colleagues moved closer to get a better look. A few seconds passed while they exchanged wordless glances. Then, upon some unspoken agreement, Stella Mozzarella and her fellow party hosts made their way out of the kitchen, the little girl in tow. Maybe they were going to a shindig on Venus, a bash on Neptune, or a blowout on Mars.

As they headed for their unknown destination, one of the aliens lingered behind. It ventured into the freezer, then crouched down and held out its hand. Like an obedient pet, the rat scurried into its palm. The alien stood, examining it closely. Then it stuffed the rat into its mouth, swallowing it in one gulp.

Wherever they were going, there would hopefully be pizza.