You ever get in a strange car, like a rental car, to drive it, and keep adjusting the seat because somehow, your body and that seat just aren’t having a meeting of minds?
Yeah, that can be a pain.
His Name
His grey-green master came to see him in the morning.
The sun was up, and it was eight thirty by his clocks, which seemed accurate. He’d just completed showering, shaving, and his other personal matters when he turned and saw her. His house was at a level where she could comfortably look in on him without bending much.
The intrusion infuriated him. Shouting profanities at her tempted his tongue, but he held back, instead smiling at her. Still smiling, he gave a mock smile and bowed. He wondered how she would take that, and then turned his back on her to go down and make breakfast.
“Tolleaf,” she said.
She’d said that before, he remembered. Stopping, he turned and looked up at her.
“Tolleaf,” she said.
This is probably his name, he realized. What she’d decided to call him. He shook his head. “No. No.” Pointing at himself, he said, “Thomas.”
“Tolleaf,” she said.
“Thomas,” he said. He hit his chest with his fist. “Thomas. Thomas.” He hit his chest again. “Thomas.”
Bending closer to his house, she opened her yellow eyes wide. He watched her irises and pupils change. The capillaries and arteries in her eyes looked like a garden hose.
“Thomas?” she said.
Thomas nodded. “Yes.” He nodded again and pointed at himself. “Thomas.”
“Thomas,” she said.
He felt sick that this made him feel happy.
His House
Comfortably furnished, he was starting to like his house.
He was less certain that he liked his host. (Hostess?) He didn’t know her and little understood her, or even if it was a female, or if they had sexes. In his words, she was grey-green with yellow eyes. Unlike the invasion’s early day descriptions, though, he saw that they weren’t all the same color. One of his host’s frequent visitors was very light grey while another was forest green. Grey, green, and in between, that’s what they seemed to be. They all had yellow, parietal eyes, and were hairless, of the parts of them he saw. They liked watching him. In the early days, he’d sat motionless, glaring back at them. Once in a while, he shouted at them. He quit shouting at them because he thought they enjoyed that. Now he treated them with indifference and went about his day as if his captors weren’t present.
His house had running water and electricity. Located in a cage that presented him with a large yard all around it, his house was built for a family of five. About twenty-one hundred square feet, the split level featured three bedrooms and two and a half baths, along with a two car garage. There wasn’t a car. A full complement of appliances, dishes, and cookery was made available to him. They liked it when he cooked and ate.
The house’s front had been removed and replaced by a fine screen. He guessed that was so they could see in and watch him all of the time. Food was delivered in a shopping cart once a week. It was funny to see these creatures, twenty times larger than him, push a shopping cart his size into the little secure delivery area. They only opened the outer door on it when the inner door to his area was closed. It was a prison.
Besides frozen pizzas and dry cereals, they gave him cartons of milk and juice, bottles of wine and cases of beer, and fresh meats, snack foods, and produce. He didn’t know where these goods came from.
He didn’t have a phone, but he had two televisions, and a laptop, and he was connected to an Internet. Streaming shows were available, but nothing new. At times, ruminating about his existence, he mourned that he would never know how “Game of Thrones” ended. He posted on a blog every day, and others commented, and he shared emails. None of that helped them understand. All were in cages like him.
From the scenes and events described by others, he was beginning to picture entire human cities in cages.
The Importance
She was stunning, gorgeous in all the manners desired in the commercialized, western intersections of fashion, sex, television and movies.
The tragedy was that she knew. She’d been told since her curves first emerged and noticed lingering, admiring gazes.
All she wanted was for others to watch her as she walked and moved. She looked around to reassure herself that others were looking. It came to be all that was important to her. Nothing else mattered except to know that others noticed her.
She needed to be noticed, and she thought, all she had was what they saw.
Michael Seidel, writer 