Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: fiction, flash fiction, sci fi, short story
things could be worse- my sister could have been abducted by aliens!
I never tried to be as pretty as her. I let her be the one the grown-ups loved, and later I let her be the one who fit in, and the one who got good grades. I was the weird one, the quiet kid, and I was okay with that. To be honest, I barely even though about it. I was off lost in worlds of my own, dreaming.
I never bothered trying to catch up with her, my smart, pretty, popular little sister. I did my own thing. I played a lot of video games. I read all the Isaac Asimov I could get my hands on. I had a subscription to a magazine of science fiction short stories and I waited for it every month and every month I was abducted over new horizons of weirdness. I dreamed of narrow escapes from black holes and alien overlords. I dreamed and dreamed and if I wasn’t pretty or successful or popular I barely even noticed it.
Then Chrissy was abducted by aliens. Now everyone asks if I’m okay, and all her friends have started inviting me places and asking me to parties, and even my grades have gotten better. But you know what? I think it sucks. The aliens were the only thing I ever chose, and even they just wanted me pretty, perfect, stupid, little sister.
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I hear you Vanessa … here Rainer Maria Rilke’s same sort of thoughts:
In the Drawing room
How they’re around us, these gentlemen
in chamberlain’s costume and jabots
like a night growing over darker
around its Order Star, relentlessly
and these ladies, slight, fragile, yet large
in their dresses, one hand in their laps
small as the collar for a Pekingese:
how they’re around us all: around the leader
around the peruser of these bibelots,
of which several are still their property.
Tactful, they let us live life undisturbed
Comment by valid-i March 31, 2008 @ 3:04 pmas we conceive it and as they fail
to understand it. They wanted to flower,
and flowering is being beautiful. But we want to ripen
and that means being dark and taking pains.
What do we expect from globs of green jello with blank eyes floating around inside. Those silly aliens. Who needs them.
Comment by Che March 31, 2008 @ 8:39 pmDon gets Analog magazine. He is an enthusiast of sci/fi. If you don’t receive them, do you want me to send you Don’s copies after he has read them?
Rainer Maria’s Rilke’s poems knock me out. I hadn’t read “in the drawing room”. Ripen, yes, ripen! Sometimes we need to get out of the heat though and sit in the shade in silence for awhile.
NChe