Dedication
Dedicated to friends
past and present,
near and far,
and to those I have yet to meet.
Beginnings
“What are you doing?” London yelled, almost dropping her keys as she stumbled out of her car and marched over the lawn towards Ailleianne, her very interesting non-gendered tenant. Ze was also an alien.
Said tenant was perched on a ladder and currently painting the autumn oak leaves of the tree in her front yard. Green splashes covered the robe covering zis tall, wispy form.
“Aillie! What the hell?” London whispered, looking around her lawn to see if her neighbors had noticed anything.
“I have been watching the discoloration of these beings over the last few weeks.” Ailleianne spoke, a tremor in zis voice. Ze applied another swatch of green paint to a bright red leaf. “I waited for the mating cycles to start. But now these attachments have begun falling. Is this world dying?”
“What?” London looked up at Ailleianne, wondering for the umpteenth time why she’d bothered to allow zim to be her tenant. Remembering the few dollars in her bank account, and that fact that ze paid rent, London shook her head at Aillie, trying to mask her annoyance. “No. Why would you think that?”
“That man on the bus whose hair had discolored and falled from his head. You explained he was getting older; that he was going to die.” Aillie’s hand clutched the paintbrush.
London watched as specks flew from the brush, “I said he was getting older, not that he was on death’s door.”
Aillie’s hands flew in the air wildly, more specks flying through the air. “This is what is happening here! This being has attachments which are also changing color. It has lost its source of nutrients! This being is dying!”
“The tree is not dying,” London sighed. “It’s the change of the seasons.” London looked around. “Let’s go inside and I’ll tell you about it.”As Aillie grudgingly stepped off the ladder, London asked slowly, “How did you think that painting the leaves would help?”
“It would maintain the look of the leaves and then I would ask you how to save the planet.”
“You thought that the planet was dying. Really? That’s … Okay, we need to talk about this.” Aillie stepped toward the house. London stopped zim. “No, first we are going to clean this mess up.” She grabbed the paint can and quickly pounded the lid on. “Please tell me no one from the neighborhood saw you doing this.”
“No one from the neighborhood saw me doing this.” Aillie repeated obediently.
“You’re just saying that, aren’t you?” London lugged the can into the garage.
“You told me to.” Aillie followed behind, a note of confusion in zis voice.
This is what happened when you try and do a good deed, London thought, wrenching open the door to the garage while balancing the increasingly heavy paint can. She stumbled to the wall with it, dropping it with a dull clunk to the cement floor.
She stretched, feeling the burn of muscles as she moved. As she turned around, she realized that Aillie had followed her, zis hands hanging uselessly at zis sides.
“Couldn’t you have brought the ladder in here with you?”
“You didn’t tell me to.” Aillie continued to stand there.
“Argh.” She moved to push past zim and then stopped, very clearly enunciating. “Okay, please go get the ladder. Put it back together so that it lays flat and bring it in here.” Aillie turned on a heel and walked out. London followed zim, watched as ze did as asked, and then grabbed the jumble of used and clean paint brushes, buckets, and other accouterments. After getting everything cleaned and put away, she and Aillie headed out of the garage again.
“Okay, if you could…” London started, then reworded her request. “Please come with me to the car and help me bring in the groceries.”
Thankfully Aillie listened. While they moved her few bags inside and she had put it all away, London thought back to the events that had brought Ailleianne into her life, and subsequently changed it completely. It had all started when London had needed another source of income.
*** *** *** ***
It was the worst spring storm the city of Madison had seen. That was the straw that broke London’s back, or at least the event that sucked away her savings. A tree branch fell onto her house, puncturing the roof and taking down the power line. It had killed the electricity overnight, spoiled the food in the refrigerator, and blew a few of the fuses. All of that had taken money to repair. London had barely had enough to scrape together; she had just paid off the furnace, which had gone out over the winter.
A week before, after hearing her mother was in the hospital, she’d caught her live-in boyfriend cheating on her with her best friend.
Now that everything was fixed, she needed a new roommate to help her out with the bills. She hoped to find someone nice, quiet, and low maintenance. But she also needed to find someone quickly; she didn’t know how she was going to pay her next electric bill.
London spent most of a week making fliers and then drafting an advertisement for an online classified notice. Finally she posted it.
It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes after she clicked the ‘submit’ button on her Roommate Wanted ad when she heard a knock on her door. She grabbed the bank statement she’d been brooding over as she went to answer it.
“Hello?”
“I am here to inquire about the space for rent.” Emphasis enhanced the words, straight from the ad itself. London sighed.
Had it really come to this? On her steps stood the weirdest person she could imagine. London glanced up at the person at her door and realized ze was still one step from the top of the stairs. Ze already towered over her. The person must be over six and a half feet tall, maybe seven feet. Where other people would have a muscle mass to encompass their frame, ze seemed mostly skin and bones. The person was either tall for a man or really tall for a woman.
Actually, that wasn’t the first thing. She couldn’t actually tell if the person on her doorstep was a man or a woman. There were no breasts or pecs to speak of, no visible Adam’s apple. Nothing to clear London’s confusion. She wondered if she could ask zim or if it was against the landlord/tenant laws.
He? She? Ze was strange.
( The third gender pronoun would work for now until she knew for certain.) Whatever the deal was, London had other worries. “How did you know where I lived?”
“The ad contained the address in its details. It was not too difficult to find.”
The person blinked slowly, then repeated, “I am here to inquire about the space for rent for the next six months.” Ze paused, waiting for her to speak. When London did nothing but stare, ze blinked again, and then recited, “Space for rent dollar sign five hundred forward slash one hundred forty-four square feet period No lease housemate requested period internet comma
