Alien Invasion

My father would have disapproved of their attendance.

After I first met them up close I realized the ugly and brutish creatures softened their features to resemble ours.  

“They assume a form like ours to help us feel more comfortable around them,” my mom explained.

They will never be beautiful though. When they joined our society they brought a wealth of new technologies. Without hesitation we adopted their tools and welcomed the Aliens into our world. Over the course of decades our civilizations merged until eventually two of them ended up at our family game night.

They had shown up as a pair, a father and daughter, even going so far as to wear matching ugly sweaters. In addition to the upbeat and cheerful attitude their presence seemed to give my mom. As a gift they brought some canned cider.

The smile I was trying to fake made me nauseous. So I excused myself from the table and went to the bathroom. The bathroom was plain as always. I waited sitting on the lip of the toilet, but nothing came up. If I was going to vomit it would have been by now. Convinced I was taking too long I decided to leave despite the fact that my stomach continued to turn.

I sat across from them, my mom already sitting in between them. They were explaining how in their culture gender is a construct. The Aliens were wet with fat yellow teeth and pitch black eyes. I held my stomach as they laughed and continued to chat.

“Julia, do you remember that summer camp?” Mom asked.

“Of course mom, how could I forget it?”

“Didn’t you say you made that foreign friend?”

My mom was politically correct and not wrong so I nodded.

“Here try this cider,” she insisted holding it in front of me, “It’s delicious.”

Since she was being so pushy I had to give in, but only took a small sip.

The nausea wasn’t disappearing as my mother laid out the board game.

“Don’t think you can pull that same move as last time buddy.” She said as she divvied up the green, blue, and red pieces. Looking smug, my brother turned away from her without a word.

Everyone else had to be on a team besides me. That was how I enjoyed playing the game where the goal was to capture as much territory as possible. We drew cards, which provided an element of luck and played them as our pieces began to cover the board.

“Oh,” our guests would remark whenever they picked up some new aspect of the game.

They were laughing and drinking as I waited and watched. The can of cider at my mother’s lips looked dangerous.

The more I stared at them the more their happiness looked disingenuous to me. My thoughts were turning more wicked the more I thought. As I began to spin out of control, my nausea overwhelming me, I started to suspect my mother as well.

Then the daughter asked where the bathroom was.

I wondered why an alien would need to use the bathroom. That’s when I realized that she was probably excusing herself because she needed to activate some ingredient in the cider and It was only a matter of time before we all keeled over on the floor.

After a few minutes she returned and no one had died.

“This isn’t fair!” My little brother finally shouted as I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Isn’t it obvious,” he accused, “they’re cheating.”

With a genial laugh she urged him to draw a card and looked at the father “I’m sorry about that.”

He motioned for her to forget about it.

When I looked in my brother’s face I felt like I could understand what he was thinking. Isn’t it obvious they pose a threat? If we don’t stop them they are going to hurt mom. My feeling resolved itself as we continued to dance the pieces around the board and exchange pleasantries.

“What’s wrong with you two?” My mother asked.

We shook are heads simultaneously. Despite my conviction, coming out with the words seemed impossible. The idea that I was wrong never crossed my mind.

When the game was over they continued to hang out asking a number of annoying questions, and then the moment of truth came.

“Well before you go let me show you the house,” my mother offered.

They agreed and my mother started her tour through the home. I listened from down the hall as they wandered from room to room until finally they were in the master bedroom, my mother’s bedroom. Their conversation stopped and I heard the door close. I barfed into the kitchen disposal. As long as they were here I wouldn’t be able to rest.

I waited for a while, who knows how long, and grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen. There was no noise coming from her room. With hesitation I creeped down the hall way until I was standing in front of my mother’s bedroom door.

When I opened the door I could see one of them, it looked like the father, sitting on her bed. Someone was on the floor. His hands clasped around her neck. My instincts kicked in, and I was flying forward. Without a single thought I shoved the knife into his side, the blade ripping into his clothes. He didn’t make a sound as he stood up, looked at me, and fell to the floor. Screams erupted at once as red blood slowly spilled onto the floor.

“What have you done!”

I asked myself the same thing as I looked down. A shiny butchers knife was sticking out of my stomach. It looked so familiar.

“What have you done.”

I would ask myself this question over and over again.

All the stories my dad told, where he is the hero defending against the villainous foreigner. I didn’t feel like a hero in that moment though, bleeding out on the floor, hearing my mother scream. After all, the villain was supposed to lose.