The House One Llisst

A story by Thelma Mary Caroline

(A N from the real T M C:  Based on a joke I read.  That's all.)

I remember the day the aliens came.  I knew they were aliens, even though they looked human.  Big and bulky, dressed inapporapietly for the time of the year.  They just had to be alien.  There was nothing else they could possibly be.  No one else would be so stupid to walk around in shorts and t shirts in the fall.  Unless we lived in Florida or something, but this was Whatcom County, for crying out loud!

I stood by the tree, smoking and watching them.

"What does you be doing?" one asked me.

Weird speech.  Definitly alien.

"I'm meditating," I answered.  "Becoming one with the earth."

"Ah," he said.  "You be here every day?"

"I try."

Really, it was my lunch break.  "Except tomorrow.  It's going to rain all day, really hard."

"Ah.  How does you know this?"

"Mother Earth tells me."

"Ah."

The next day it did, in fact, rain.  All day.  Very hard.

The "man" came into the office, looking for me.  "What does the weather be like tomorrow? I does be needing to know for our work."

"Oh, um ..." I looked around at my office mates.  Each one had a terrified look on their face.  They probably just thought he was a homeless vagrent.

"Has you meditated with mother earth today?"

"Sure," I answered, as calmly as I could manage.  "It'll be partly sunny, but no rain.  Except maybe a few showers in the morning."

"Ah," he said.  Then he put a ten dollar bill on the corner of my desk.  "Here is for you.  Compensation.  I shall see you tomorrow?"

"Oh yeah.  Same time, same place."

For days it continued, he asked me if Mother Earth had communicated the weather to me.  And every day he gave me a ten dollar bill as "compensation."

Every one made fun of me, but I didn't care.  I thought it was funny, that was all.

But one day another one of them approached me, the biggest one of them all.  I assumed he was the boss.  "Show me how you does this.  How you learns the weather," he said, and held out several hundred dollar bills.

I led him into the office, and pulled up weather dot com.  "Here, it tells you.  Tomorrow will be mostly cloudy with a chance of rain showers.  And if you click this link here, it tells you which hours it might rain.  Between elven and twelve, it says."

Suddenly, smiles broke out around me.  I had fooled a homeless man into thinking I knew what they weather would be.

And surely an alien knew about the internet, I mean really.  He had made himself look like an idiot.

The moral of the story is, even if you're an alien, exercize common sense.