100ThemesChallenge #2: “Love”
“[Love]! Why did it have to be [Love]?”
Indiana Jones, sort of
“I hate it when people misquote movies,” the old lizard repeated to himself, licking his lidless eyes thoughtfully.
Genoquan had been on this planet for less than a local decade, and it’d grown tedious by the end of the first week. He had a job to do, though, and he was very good at it, or, at least, lucky. Luck didn’t come easily to his species – every casino they’d ever built on the planet Qual-Zang-Veng-Bug-do, or Joe’s Star 7 as the Earthlings designated it, had managed to economically ravage the surrounding communities. These people might have been massive aquatic reptiles with a serious genetic advantage in the areas of biochemical research, but they were terrible poker players, even worse at craps, and totally unrepentant suckers when it came to slot machines. Sadly, the result of this was that, despite having cured all forms of cancer in terrestrial lifeforms, they came away from century’s worth of goodwill up to their four armpits in debt to the Intergalactic Native American Consortium. INAC might have been infamous for their revenue recovery tactics – they were still finding fragments of the last planet to default on a loan – but they were quite generous to their employees, which was what eventually landed Geno in their genetics lab in Oakhurst, California.
“Another sparkling white wine, please,” Geno asked a bartender over the intercom. A slender, perfectly formed barmaid (probably a clone) appeared suddenly, setting down a crystal champagne flute on the table next to him. He could hear the increased heart rate of his lab partner, Velma, as the barmaid turned to her.
“And for you, honey?” she asked. Velma gulped – Geno could smell the adrenaline increase in her. The middle-aged woman sputtered a bit, but couldn’t quite form any words. Finally, she shook her head, and looked down at her fries.
“Uh, well,” the barmaid smiled nervously, sharing some of the same symptoms as the older woman, “if you need anything, just holler, ‘kay?” She paused a moment, as if waiting for something, turned, and walked over to take orders from another table.
For the most part, Geno didn’t like humans. He tried to. He really wanted to, but they were complicated, and his life didn’t need any more complications. He’d worked with Velma for just under a year, and found her to be one of the few hominids he could stand to talk to in his off-hours. By the popular standards of the species, she was fairly unattractive — short, just over two meters tall, with almond shaped eyes that were too close together and a nose which was totally unlike the sharp, pointy muzzles you saw on the fashion pages or in Congress. If she’d been born a few centuries ago she might have undergone a bit of plastic surgery to make herself more desirable. However, the latest incarnation of Krishna had forbidden this.
“Jesus Batman Christ, Velma,” Geno exclaimed with one mouth while drinking from the other, “why don’t you just ask her out? You’ve been playing this game for months and its getting really old.” He really wanted her to get a girlfriend – it would’ve made their conversations a lot more interesting than the daily whining sessions she engaged in after a few martinis. She swallowed a mouth full of potato and added a big glob of ketchup to her plate.
“You know I can’t,” she replied meekly. “We’ve been through all this before. It just…” The rest of the sentence was stuck in her throat, leaving her mouth empty. She filled the void with more fries.
“’It just’ what?” he responded in a mocking tone. His scales rippled like a wave across his half-naked back as he struggled to choke back a stream of unfair insults, but he found himself unable to completely hold them down, finally settling on: “Damn, you’re pathetic!”
“Oh, what do you know?” she spat back, angrily. Velma had endured Geno’s abuse for months now and she was about at her wit’s end, but she wasn’t a particularly aggressive woman. Still, a response like that could not go unpunished. “You’ve been divorced five times!”
“And you’ve never even had a girlfriend,” he muttered, smiling. Raising his voice a bit, he continued, a heaping tablespoon of sarcasm mixed in with his tone: “Those zero-gravity orgies you used to attend back at the Convent don’t count!” His left tongue whipped out like a bolt of lightening, returned with a bundle of french fries.
“Knock that shit off, ‘Jar-Jar’,” she spat, “its fucking disgusting.”
“Look,” he explained calmly, “her blood flow increases 20% when she’s talking to you. There’s a 34% increase in her salivary production. Her hormone production goes through the frickin’ roof when you’re around, and she hasn’t even been exposed to your sebaceous secretions yet! This chick’s already in love you with you. I bet she goes to sleep at every night dreaming about having your thighs wrapped around her…”
“That’s enough!” she interjected, suddenly flushed.
“And I told you about that ‘Jar-Jar’ crap!” he snarled. He took a tiny sip of his sparkling wine, swishing it around in his left mouth and transferring some of it, via osmosis, into his right. He relaxed a bit, a smile breaking across both mouths. “I just worry about you, is all. You’re missing out on something that could be really good for you. Life isn’t just gene-splicing and karaoke, girl.”
“I know,” she murmured, trying not to let it bother her so much. “I just… I mean, yeah, I think she digs me. I think she’d go out with me… might even be my girlfriend. But what then? What if we get all intertwined and she moves in with me and then one night I wake up and she’s packed her bags and all I see is a note that says ‘sorry, but you fart in your sleep’.”
“Trust me,” he laughed, “it ain’t just in your sleep. Maybe the other monkeys can’t hear it, but I’m with you every day in that meat-locker they call a genetics lab. You need to lay off frozen burritos.”
“Its not funny – my doctor says he’s going to have to inject me with butt-worms if my test comes back positive.”
“Hey,” he replied, a hint of bitterness in his voice, “you need to appreciate those things. They’re the reason my dad didn’t come to any of my recitals.” He sipped a bit more wine, pausing to try to frame his next statement better. “Love’s an awful risk, Velma. My second wife left me because I kept leaving the gazelle de-boner out. The gazelle de-boner, for Krishna’s sake!” His gaze lowered, the bitterness increasing. “I made good money. I could have bought her one of those automatic thingies – I even had my lawyer send her a letter promising her one, and stock in the company that made it, if she’d just come back and finish incubating our eggs.”
“Shit,” Velma groaned, breaking into a smile, for once, “she sounds like a total bitch.” She paused for a moment, staring at the barmaid as she bent over a table to collect dirty glasses. Her eyes lingered over the curve of the woman’s hips before she asked: “What if this girl’s a total bitch, too?”
“You never even got her name, did you?” he asked, pity in three of his eyes. “Its Amiko.”
He drained the remainder of his glass, and the ridges on his forehead smoothed, a sign that any Quanesian knew from the earliest days of childhood, signifying that he was about to share something he considered a hard fact of life.
“You’re probably not going to marry this woman. You’re probably going to date her for awhile, maybe have some good sex — go to a few fun parties — get a drunk a time or two. You’ll take her to the zoo, make out on the Ferris Wheel at the boardwalk, and she’ll win you a stuffed animal playing skee-ball. You could get tired of her and break up. You could catch her winning some other chick a cupie doll. She could lull you into a false sense of security and then rob you blind, selling all your furniture to buy crack. Maybe she’s got anger issues and she might rough you up once or twice, and maybe you’ll be stupid enough to let her. And all of that crap could happen after you’ve gotten married or even had some kids together.”
Geno extended a clawed hand towards Velma’s plate and gingerly selected a french fry, popping it into his mouth.
“Or,” he grinned, “she could be the one you’re destined to be with, and you could live” — he snorted — “happily ever after.”
“Yeah,” she responded through a mouth full of half-chewed potato, “that’s what I’m worried about.”
“The other option, of course, is to just sit there and eat fries like a moron, and go back to an empty apartment, again,” he stated flatly, no hint of emotion on either set of lips. “Its up to you.”
Geno’s left tongue lashed out again, scooping up the last of the fries and depositing them into his right mouth. He chewed quickly, swallowed, and left loose a belch so loud it shook the table. Velma gave him a disgusted look but remained silent. This time, both mouths were smiling.
“Now,” he slid his glass to the edge of the table, “I want more booze. Shall I call for the barmaid?”
Daniel Latta
