On Second Thought
Welcome to earth
On one of the last cool afternoons of the season last week, my husband and I were working in the garage when our eight-year-old neighbor – I’ll call him John – stopped by for a visit.
He and my husband started talking about guy things and the safety beam of the garage door was brought into the conversation by John. I honestly don’t know what got into me, but I ended up telling the kid that’s how I got back and forth to my home planet, Jupiter.
John side-eyed me for a few seconds, then told me I was being sneaky, and my husband agreed, which I guess was a nice way of calling me a liar.
It only made things worse.
John is extremely intelligent for an eight-year-old, so he brought up all the arguments that he should have – how it’s too cold to survive on Jupiter and there would be no oxygen to breathe anyway. Then, there was the matter of gravity. His list of how I couldn’t possibly be from Jupiter was long, but so was my list of lies explanations.
I told him that my anti-gravity space suit allows me to survive there, of course. When he told me to produce the space suit, I explained it lived in the light that transported me home. It made sense, like a kind of secret space closet. He reiterated that I am indeed, sneaky.
His other questions were What language do we speak? I’m not allowed to talk about it and he wouldn’t understand it anyway; and How does teleportation in light work? Very efficiently.
He asked why our garage door beam is green and the one at his house is red. I thought everyone knew the red one would take you to Mars.
My husband was horrified at my brazen willingness to tell a perfectly fine little boy that I am a legal resident of Jupiter. I was impressed at my ability to riff off a fictional narrative of my life, off the cuff, and I don’t even read fiction.
But then again I was the mother who, with a straight face, told her children it was a state law that they get a college education and I’m sure if they would have asked me, I could have cited the lawmaker who wrote the bill and the year it was passed. I am sneaky, or so I hear. I told John it was time for my shower before returning to Jupiter, and went inside. Later that evening, as I saw John’s Dad returning home from work, it dawned on me.
John was, at that very minute, telling his Texas DPS trooper father that the neighbor lady is from Jupiter, or so she says. And I was like WHY DID I DO THAT?
John will probably never be allowed to even walk past our house again, and I really like the kid even if he is from Mars.
