Misdirection
Earth is a fancy food court for aliens. Only my brother and I know. We understand no one else will believe it—they’d think it was just a crazy story from a couple of crazy kids, so we don’t tell anyone what we saw. What we still see. We pretend. People would probably believe us if we were older, like twelve or something. I’m only ten, and Josh, my brother, is seven. Our parents say we’re the smartest kids in our school. I’m pretty sure the principal said “prodigies” one time, but I could be wrong. His office door is pretty hard to hear through. All I know for sure is that we understand things other kids our ages don’t. We get good grades, and we make our parents proud. But apparently that’s not enough to get them to believe us about the monsters in the closet, never mind convincing them that they, like everyone else in the world, are living under an illusion.
It was probably Josh’s magic card tricks that helped us see through the “mirage”, as we call it. Something the aliens use to make themselves look like humans. We don’t know how it works or where they hide it, but it lets the aliens walk around town without anyone looking at them twice. An alien could walk into a restaurant and sit at the table next to you, and you would think it was another person, never once suspecting that it might be a sucker-covered blob of pulsing flesh wearing a disguise. Because that’s what they look like. I remember the first time I saw one.
Josh and I were in the after school care, waiting for our mom to pick us up. He was showing me some card tricks, how to shuffle, how to flip the cards with a single twitch of the hand. He was very good. I think Dad called it “talent”. Mom called it “a waste of time”. Anyway, Josh was showing me how easy it was to make people look the wrong way at the right moment, to make the trick work. Sleight of hand, he said proudly. Misdirection. Make the audience glance at the wrong place for even a second, because that was all the time it took to switch a card and fool a crowd. Magic was deception. I beamed at my brother to let him know I understood, pausing to glance behind me to see if our mom had come yet. Then I saw it. Through the window that looked into the cafeteria, across the hall from the daycare room. An alien. It was as tall as my dad, who says he’s six feet, but really he’s five feet and four inches. I read it on his driver’s license. The alien had to be at least that tall. It was standing in the cafeteria line, and I couldn’t understand why no one else seemed to notice the slimy-looking, vomit-green colored thing that was standing next to them. Not even the cafeteria lady, who always seemed to notice when someone grabbed an extra cookie. The creature walked right up to her and held out a lunch tray. The cafeteria lady dropped a scoop of mystery meat on the tray, oblivious to the oozing tentacles that held it. She dropped a chunk of hard bread on the tray, blind to the dark, glaring eyes of the creature as she piled on more and more food until the tray was nearly overflowing. I watched as the creature shuffled its way to an empty table and slithered into a sitting position on the bench. It began stuffing food into a toothless mouth, not stopping to swallow, not pausing to breathe. I watched in bewildered silence. Josh seemed to notice.
“You see it, too,” he said as he calmly shuffled his deck.
“What is that…that thing?” I said, whispering because my throat was suddenly dry.
“I don’t know,” he admitted quietly, still shuffling. Kids shouted over a game of Connect Four on the other side of the room, but all my senses were focused on what my brother had to say.
“I think they’re aliens,” he finally said, shifting the cards to his other hand.
“What makes you so sure they’re aliens?” I said dubiously. “Why not monsters?”
“Monsters eat people,” he replied. He tilted his head toward the cafeteria. “They only eat food.”
“They?” I echoed, feeling color drain from my face. “You mean there’s more of them?”
“Yep.” Josh tapped his cards against the edge of a table to make them even. I was surprised at how calm he was. I was three years older than him. A fifth grader. But I felt like crying.
“I see them all the time,” he told me. “Pretty much for as long as I can remember. I used to think everyone could see them. I thought it was normal. But I’ve been watching them, how they behave with humans. They act like they’re disguised.” He shrugged. “I think they looked like regular people to you, and Mom, and Dad. Actually, you thought that alien in the cafeteria was Mr. Fledger, your substitute teacher.”
I felt my gut tighten. I hadn’t liked Mr. Fledger. He was a mean teacher who made us do nothing but math homework in a section our regular teacher hadn’t even taught us yet. He was also kind of scary. He was a fat man with beady black eyes, a big nose, and a stinky breath. The whole time we were in class, he glared at us from behind the teacher’s desk while he ate a seemingly endless supply of candy bars from a black bag. The classroom trash can was full of wrappers by the end of the day. I wondered how he didn’t explode. If Josh was right, and that alien was Mr. Fledger, I guess it made sense, then.
“Aren’t you scared of the, um, aliens?” I asked Josh. He shook his head as he slipped his cards back into their box. “If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you. They’re just here for the food.”
Since then, Josh and I have seen many of the aliens. As far as we know, we’re the only ones who can see them. If anyone else can, they must be pretending that they can’t, like Josh and I do. The aliens leave us alone, so we watch them. Eating at restaurants. Eating at the movies. Eating at cafeterias and all-you-can-eat buffets. Sometimes we even see them eating out of dumpsters. They’re always eating. Josh thinks that’s why they’re here, that Earth has the best food in the solar system. But I often wonder, what if it’s the only food in the solar system? Because sometimes when our dad watches the news, and the people on there show videos about the wars going on somewhere else, I catch a glimpse of a sucker-covered blob in the background that no one else pays any attention to.
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