Siblings

There were two men, brothers, that ordered before me. They drove an Astrovan. They ate on a budget of white bread and french fries. They critiqued restaurants on a sliding scale of dollars, cents and calories. Taste is skew.

These two watched me carefully, an alien in hiking boots with hairy legs and an odd elvis-presley-esque hair cut. I have yet to perfect looking human. My voice betrayed my sex or lack of sex and my accent betrayed my time on other planets. Interstellar diseases are difficult to anticipate and one should always be on his or her or its guard, these homeworld-tethered humans understood this innately.

They moved across the restaurant vestibule and talked, not loudly, but of a certain decibel that let others know: We are entitled to this conversation.

A heterosexual human female had called one of the brothers at a moment 5:00 am as it occurred at or near the longitudinal coordinates 42.1393, -75.8798, that is to say Binghamton, New York, United States, Planet Earth, Our Solar System, The Known Universe on his cellular phone to tell him something.

When he picked up the phone she realized from the sound of his voice that he had been sleeping as heterosexual human males tend to do at this time at these coordinates, being prone to a phenomenon known as circadian rhythms and thusly being strongly programmed to rest during the hours this side of the planet they inhabit has turned its back on the local star.

The heterosexual female apologized for waking him to which he said, “I am awake now." Well put, human.

He followed up with, "Tell me what you wanted to say.”

I couldn’t hear what it is she had to tell him. He finished the story too bored or lazy to inject any emotional value into the timber of his voice by saying, “Can you believe that broad calling me at 5:00 in the morning? I was tempted to get in the van and drive over to her house and give it to her right then at 5:00 in the morning.”

I deducted from body language that the 'it' he spoke of was his male sex organ.

I, resident alien, longed suddenly, urgently to be a human heterosexual man. I felt the desire drive an Astrovan and to be satiated simply because I felt like being satiated while the rest of my side of the earth was still sleeping. I longed for the hormone-bewildered female to get into an ancient animalistic pose and clean my erect genitals with her mouth before permitting me to copulate with her.

There was a time when I could have forgotten I was an alien. When I could have stayed on this planet and my family could have raised me as a human. My faux human sister and I could have dwelt away our entire existences in this small-sized, economically faltering, human military-industrial post.

It is like sadness to have seen other worlds. Elated sadness. To know one thing is to forget another. To know a lot of things is to not know any one thing well. I have forgotten how to be human, something I was once unquestionably. My sister is much better at passing in the human world than I am. The two of us could have been habitating here, driving around a motorized vehicle, copulating with humans, reproducing human-esque babies, dwelling out our life expectancies. It would not have been any different from intergalactic knowledge seeking.

To be a human's arm length from my sister may have been worth all the unhappiness in this tilting planet.