Imagine my surprise when I went out back to clip the elm tree I was performing bonsai on this winter – and I found this alien pod wedged in the tree beneath my bedroom window.
Next morning at nine, I hopped in my car to go to the dispensary – and there’s the alien pod – riding shotgun. Driving down the highway, I opened the window and threw it out. The alien pod came right back in the blink of an eye, riding shotgun again.
Waiting in the hour-long line at the dispensary can be tedious. So I whipped out my cell phone and started fiddling with it. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something moving on the lawn near the line of people. The alien pod was rocking back and forth. I thought I left it in the passenger seat. But no, this alien pod will not be left or ignored - or thrown out the window of a moving car.
Trying to keep cool in the line at the dispensary, I grabbed the alien pod from the lawn where it seemed to be performing for the crowd. I attempted to swaddle the alien pod in my pink hoodie. Some hippy saw me doing this and demanded to know what I was hiding. I admitted I had a new alien species on my hands. Suddenly, the alien popped onto the lawn and showed itself to those waiting at the dispensary. As a thick crowd of people gathered around to take in every feature of the alien pod, it disappeared again.
Nope. This alien pod won’t be studied – not even by a crowd of bored out of their mind’s stoners. At first it reveled in the attention. Then it got busy pulling that vanishing act.
Maybe this is the last I’ve seen of it. I tried to wish the alien pod away while I made my purchase inside. When I climbed back in my car, the alien pod was sitting shotgun. It telepathically demanded a hit from the vaporizer. So I complied. I blew a hit down the long air tube to the alien's overlarge head.
When I finally got home, I was exhausted. So I just parked the car and left the alien pod in the passenger seat.
That was a mistake.
After waking from a nap later that morning, I saw from my bedroom window the alien pod had hopped over the neighbor’s back fence and was creating havoc with the two dogs. I rushed downstairs and outside to the fence where I leaned over onto the neighbor’s property and nonchalantly plucked the alien pod from their yard and brought it back into my universe.
I felt a pang of motherly love for this alien pod. It was more than a curiosity to me. It was like I gave birth to it in my dreams, then found it the next day in my garden. The alien pod was mine!
The alien pod got wind of my possessiveness and disappeared – again. It wasn’t something you could hold onto. It only popped through when it wanted to. This alien was aligned with my frequency – oh yea. But I was soon to find out that it was a selfish alien pod, whose needs always came first.
It’s easy to see the alien pod has original thoughts on things, like crowds at dispensaries for instance. The alien pod knows exactly how to make a seamless and invisible exit and entrance. Isn’t that convenient?
I’ll tell you how it is ... For now, the travel methods of this alien pod are beyond human comprehension. So I have to live with it.
What does the alien pod eat? It’s has a strange way of eating. It’s more like absorption. At night, I place the alien pod in a shallow metal bowl and fill it with a combination of 100% anti-freeze and the grease of New York Strip Steaks. I just let it soak in the liquid all night. The next morning, all of the liquid is gone and the alien pod is burping and farting. Thank God I only need to feed it every three days. Or else, I thought, I would take it right back to that pile of half melted snow across the street from the Observatory, in Black Hawk, Colorado where it was found. It hitchhiked a ride back to New Jersey with me. Unbeknownst to me, it was stashed in one of my boxes of belongings. Michael Scott found it on a high mountain road, at about 10,000 feet, in a late winter snow melt. Micheal is now deceased and unable to tell his own story about the discovery of the alien pod. But I’m sure it wreaked havoc in his life. I wonder why he kept it in that room, which was his glass blowing studio?
The alien pod may even have a lengthy history of road tripping back and forth across the United States. But we don’t have time to get into that right now.
Think of my story as a galactic guidebook on what to do if you find an alien pod in your garden one morning. And, what not to do with the alien pod.
On the subject of what NOT to do, I was undressing one night and the alien pod took a keen interest in my breasts. The alien's interest in my breasts was so irrational, he knocked the pod on its side, trying to get next to them.
I had to scramble to straighten the pod, then run into the bathroom to finish dressing.
When I returned, the pod was horizontal on my bed, somehow lighting up the vape pen beside the bed and taking extra-long hits on the highest setting.
“Oh no!” I said, “this is not gonna happen. You’re gonna pay for your own weed habit. And get out of my bed, you freeloader.”
The alien pod quickly disappeared. It obviously detested conflict and was not interested on being challenged on its rude, dysfunctional behavior.
My cat hopped back on the bed. She had a natural distrust of the alien pod. The problem was, she couldn’t figure out how to penetrate that seamless glass barrier. Or she would have ripped that little alien to shreds when it first entered the house. While I was busy thinking about feeding the alien to the four cats next door, I saw it’s big, protruding eyes peeping around the corner at me from the hallway.
My heart melted and quite suddenly I didn’t want to bring harm to this creature. I wanted it to slowly assimilate into human life, kind of like a pet. I knew pet ducks could learn to love a grass filled backyard with a tub full of water. Assimilation for the alien pod, I found out later, was impossible. There was no changing this arrogant little alien. I suspected the alien pulled this on a few thousand humans by now, testing our boundaries and wearing each one of us into sheer exhaustion.
The alien never slept.
I thought maybe it was the anti-freeze it absorbed every three days. Wasn’t anti-freeze a main ingredient in methamphetamine? Besides anti-freeze and the drizzle of New York Strip Steaks, it only vaped Platinum Kush carts, no other.
Sometimes the alien pod got cold so I had to put the hoodie on it. The hoodie covered its only air hole keeping the cold air from blowing through the pod. The alien loved the hoodie and started wearing it around the house. I was aggravated it never changed clothes.
The alien stalker had a strange but obvious dominion over all electronic devices, It knew I was addicted to these electronic wireless devices. When the alien got tired of chasing me around, from device to device to device – like an ADHD child – It just started to screw up my phone or my Macbook. The device would snap off for no known reason. Or, I would receive text messages generated by what seemed to be a person in my contact list, but didn’t make any sense at all. I would read something like, “Come to the fore room and provide juice for the smoking device, then pass out calmly.” My friend Connie wasn’t even in the state, let alone the house with me. When I started to get strange demands like this, it was obvious the alien was behind these communications.
The alien stalker didn’t work at all. It spent all of its time stalking me. One day I brought it with me to the bank and I was getting money out of the ATM machine. When I was finished, the machine lit up like fireworks and thousands of dollars ejected from the cash dispenser. I had stepped away from the machine already. That was lucky for me. I didn’t need the bank on my ass! It was obviously pretty simple for the alient stalker to plow into an ATM machine. So suddenly - it was always flush with plenty of cash for whatever evil habit it had, or trick it was going to pull behind my back.
There were days when I became so frustrated, I just ditched the alien pod, leaving it in my bedroom, and abandoned all of my electronic devices - including my cell phone - and took a long walk through several of the neighboring towns. I would saunter through alleyways behind apartment complexes, walk on the main street, take walking trails through local parks or just walk the railroad tracks and pretend I was wandering far faraway. At these times the alien pod would leave me alone. It was contented with stalking me in the house on most days.
Then I would return home and the whole draining cycle would begin anew.
I sought counsel in a friend named Starseed. He met the alien pod one afternoon on a visit where we smoked some pot and caught up. “How do you ever get a break from this alien stalker?” asked Straseed.
I thought for a second, and said, “Well, I can’t stand to look at the alien pod at night, so I had to get pretty ingenious here.” At this point Starseed cast a worried look at me.
“No,” I said, “I already tried to kill the alien pod by smashing the glass ‘vehicle’ surrounding it: it doesn’t work.”
“So? How do you quell that maddening alien pod?” demanded Starseed.
“I call it a pleasant time out for both of us,” I said. “You know that big Yeti Microphone I just got? Well, I took almost all the Styrofoam out and the box has a little air hole that’s perfect for the alien stalker’s long airtube. That specially made box is like tomb for a vampire. When I place it in it, the pod has to sit upright – no lying down.”
“How exactly does it work?” asked Starseed. “I mean it seems so unwilling to take directions most of the time. It does what it wants to!”
I pondered this a moment and shared my method of putting the alien stalker to sleep. “On nights when it’s not in absorption mode, we have a vape party and watch two episodes of Schitt’s Creek. Inevitably, the alien goes overboard on the vaping and it gets tired. When it’s exhausted, the alien pod is more pliable. It’s more willing to take direction from me. So, I just take it and put it in the special box and shove it up in this closet and shut the door. I can have a relaxing night of sleep, and I know exactly where the alien pod is all night long. I don’t have to wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and worry about where the hell it is, and how I might retrieve it.”
“Yea, no doubt,” said my friend Starseed. “Seems to me like the vaping helps tremendously,” he added. We both laughed until we cried. It really was a tremendous relief to have somebody sensible to talk to about this.
“Yea. I was thinking about adding this 9% microbrew to absorption mode one night and see how that works out for the alien pod,” I observed aloud.
“Seems like these habits the pod has are mighty expensive,” said Starseed.
“Yea,” I acknowledged, “thank God this MOFO knows how to plow into an ATM machine and make a maximum hit. Or I would be broke.”
“How does the alien pod do that?” queried Starseed.
“It’s beyond human comprehension,” I shot back, “or we’d all be doing it.”
Starseed nodded and took another long inhale from his vape.
It’s nice to have a sounding board. But nobody, and I mean nobody but me knows what a drag it is to have this alien stalker trailing my ass just about everywhere. I tried to coexist with it for 11 months. By the dead of winter, I finally had enough.
I packed my suitcase with the alien pod nicely wedged in there between warm socks and underwear. I took a direct flight to Denver and booked an SUV at the airport. I drove the hour and a half all the way up the mountain to Black Hawk, Colorado. The alien pod was asleep from too much microbrew in Denver and multiple vape carts on the way up the mountain. I made it all seem like a great adventure.
Little did the alien stalker know it would be our last adventure. Before I deposited him on the other side of the mountain in Black Hawk, I recalled Michael Scott, said to me, while he was still alive. He let me know that if I ever got sick of living with this little fucker, all I needed to do was bring it back to this spot. There was federal observatory on top of the mountain with a small parking lot in the middle of the butt crack of nowhere. Michael said I needed to return here and throw it off the cliff across the street.
Nobody actually knew about this place this but Michael Scott. He confided in me there was a portal across the street and if I threw the alien pod right down off the cliff at a 90-degree angle, I would hit it, because it was quite wide. The best part was that the alien pod couldn’t just ‘return’ after a drop like that into a portal; it would end up in another time and dimension - and it would take it forever to get back. Michael theorized it might take hundreds of earth years or more for the pod to return.
Yes, this was to be my last adventure with the alien stalker. It was like exorcising a demon into a poltergeist of cold mountain air. So when we crested the mountain about sunset, I took the alien pod out of its case and put my only hoodie on it. Before it was fully conscious enough to know what was going on, I threw the alien stalker off that cliff. I made sure it was flung quite violently into the portal off the side of that 10,000 foot mountain.
I never saw or heard from the alien stalker again. Nor do I want to ever see those bug eyes on that too big head again. Humankind isn’t ready for such creatures, of that I was certain.
About the author
Elizabeth Kirwin is poet, fiction writer and performance artist. She has been published in The Oyster Boy Review. Kirwin is owner and editor of www.FairiesInAmerica.com. She has written for magazines on art and culture, travel and education. Kirwin lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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