Archive 501
Vivian Galván García
Sitting in a Tin Can III
By Mariana FolacheA tear rolled down my cheek, swift and cool.
Ziggy’s eyes traveled down following it.
“How human”
“What is?” I snarled at him, mad at his stupid alien comments.
“To give up one’s sustenance for the sake of an emotion, quite primitive”
“It’s uncontrolable”
“That’s a lie”
My eyes darted towards his again.
“Only some can lie that well”
“Can you?” It sounded accusative.
“I used to, but not anymore, not now”
“ why not now?”
“Because I don’t know who you are, what you are; and the fact that you chose David Bowie’s Major Tom costume I had as a child and not your true form terrifies me. Why won’t you show yourself to me? How do you really look like?”
“You wouldn’t like it”
“Why?”
“Because you wouldn’t understand it, as simple as that”
“Why?”
“I wear eyes so you can see me.
I wear a mouth so you can understand me.
I wear this body so you can feel me”
I approached warily. I couldn’t quite grasp if it was only and illusion or if his body had truly transformed into a human, some sort of metamorphosis.
I put my hand out; he mimicked me, both stepping forward approaching each other.
When my hand touched his arm I flinched.
What I saw was not what I felt. To my eyes my hand was tocuhi my Ziggy’s costume, the wrinkles in the fabric on his arm.
But my sense told me otherwise. What I felt was a scaly, spiky, jelly like length.
My arm snapped back, a substance remained on my hand. I couldn’t see it but I felt it and its texture on my skin.
It was all a fucking illusion.
I touched my own face with the clean hand, but I realized I was also covered in jelly.
My eyes felt closed as I palmed my face in panic. They were covered by a thick layer of jelly, i couldn’t even feel my eyelashes with the tips of my fingers.
My fingers trailed down, my nose blocked by the jelly. I felt my heart speeding up, slowly preparing itself like a motor for the race of its life. My hands continued down to my mouth.
It was open but full. A tube or worm covered it, filling the hole fully.
I gagged. I could feel whatever it was moving inside, exploring my intestines like highways with a destinantion.
I could feel the bile rising up and the thing inside was moving more.
“Stop. You need to calm down or you’ll get hurt. We’re trying to help you”
Even though I couldn’t see the worm my hands traveled to it by feeling and I started tugging at it violently, forcing it to get out.
The sensation made me spill my guts out, I couldn’t see it or smell it, but I had felt it.
“You were dying, just let us help”
“Why?”
“I think u call it pity or maybe it’s more like respect and pity.”
My eyebrows stuck together, my forehead folding my face the literal image of a question mark.
Ziggy smiled, his eyes still shielded by the screen, the pupils deforming and melting, alive.
“I love that”
“You love what? Can you even love?”
He laughed, the sound guttural, it resonated against my bones.
“I love how ur species work. You’re used to lying, yet you are so unaware of how much your body tells. Your expressions are so obvious, you are all taught communication without learning, it’s a given to a human body. Even your smell tells each other when you’re aroused, tired or just dehydrated. Didn’t you have beings that could detect issues in your body with smell too?”
My mind was twirling as his eyes searched mind as if he was inside me trying to find the right word, rumaging through the inner corners of my brain, my memories.
“Dogs” He said confidently as if he had opened the right archive inside my brain.
“And we can love, but ours is not something that might break us. Never so physical. We reproduce for the sake of our species and can appreciate one being more of the other but we don’t feel the same you do. We don’t feel…”
“Passion” I said quickly.
As soon as I’d done it I knew I’d fucked up.
His eyes shone, a mere reflection of his excitement, following the cues and directions my brain had told him a ‘normal’ human would do.
But I knew that word was laced to so much emotion, I knew he was feeling it, trying to figure it out, figure why we simply felt emotions.
“What is your name?”
His head turned like a dogs, questioning, trying to read into me, into my plan.
“If you won’t show me your true form I at least want to know what to call you, how to address you”
His face had changed into surprise, amazed with the fact that I also wanted to learn about him, if it even was a him, did they even have gender?
“Our language doesn’t work like yours. We don’t have names as such, we our called our rank our position, what we were created to do. Mine is Wooamb.”
Noise, I thought. That made him laugh.
“For your species and your ears it is.”
“What does it mean?”
“Guider, learner. In your culture you would recognize me as a wild old man”
“Are you their leader?”
“A leader, not the only one. But only up to your species understanding. I was not chosen but made, ‘born’ this way.”
“Where you born?”
“Yes and no.”
“How?”
“We are created out of the end of someone else. Think of it like a seed. When the one in our role dies a part of them grows into the next one, we flourish in some way.”
“So you are like mushrooms, you grow out of death”
He laughed again, that rich laugh, fake, another mask to make me feel at ease somehow.
“Not so blunt or cruel, just how we evolved, but I knew you wouldn’t like it”
His face got a tinge of sadness, but it was but a flash, instant and then gone.
“So you were always going to be a leader?”
“Yes”
“So is your personality part of your biology?”
“In some way. But we don’t think of it as a personality, as something unique, we just think of it as a trait.”
“Is that why you don’t love passionately?”
“Maybe, who knows. This concept is knew to me, to us. Love seems like a very pure emotion, very hard to control. Or that’s what I can tell from yours”
My eyes widened. He had seen my love, had stolen it to try to understand it. Stolen the feeling of it, my snensation, my memories.
“Love is also personal, only partly shared and only if one wants to”
“In my species we share everything, so I didn’t know, sorry”
“You didn’t ask” I said accusatevely
“We aren’t used to, we talk altogether. Our thoughts are not confined to their physical origin.”
His mouth closed.
“Just like this” His mouth still closed
“You don’t need mouths, at least not for communicating”
“We don’t have mouths.”
His soft smile seemed wicked to me. Just the act to soothe me, to control my reaction, just a game played to meddle in my brain and I had granted him full access.
“In your species you are also born with a purpose, aren’t you meant to carry the offspring”
This time I laughed, I don’t know if out of panic or the hysteria over the whole situation.
“We’re not cattle you know”
“Cattle?”
“Animals that are reproduced for human needs. Cows for example for meat and milk”
“I see, then what is your purpose”
“As we evolved we stopped reproducing for the sake of the species. The concept was romanticized in some way. Yes, my body was biologically built for reproduction, but it’s my choice if I want that. You see in my species when one carries an offspring and they’re born from them, there’s a moral obligation to care for this child. Specially in females, one cannot separate themselves from something created out of their own parts.”
“Would you have children?”
“I would. That was the plan in the future, but I guess I can’t anymore”
“What if you could? Would you say yes?”
“What do you mean? Everyone’s dead, right?”
“No, you weren’t the only one we salvaged.”
I wasn’t alone.
Hope again.