Teenage Alien Walkabout

We come in peace; we really do. Only, we’re just adolescents. At least, by our calculation we are. By yours, we’d be about three hundred years old. 

And we don’t just come in peace. We come loaded with raging hormones, too. In fact, we’re a lot like your Earthling teenagers in that we have a tendency to sleep in until noon every day and to be surly to any adult unwise enough to cross our path. Nasty little buggers, say our parents, who can’t wait to load us into the closest Morphsender and blast us off the surface of our beloved home planet, Grozzl V.

Why would they send us into the far reaches of space, once our Celebration of Procreational Readiness (CPR for short, oddly enough) has been held, with all the pomp and ceremony it entails? Simple: to keep us out of reach of those who wish to procreate with us, at least until we turn about four hundred and twenty Earth years old. At that point, we get zip-zapped home, without any notice at all, and forced to marry the Grozzling of our parents’ choice, as negotiated between them and the other family involved in the match.

So it has always been, is, and ever shall be, apparently. 

We hate to admit it, but our parents are crafty and have a great success rate in getting us chastely through the frisky teenaged years. They have developed an elaborate system of shuttling us from one habitable planet to another, so that nobody questions why we remain in the adolescent phase for as long as we do, and they keep us far away from other teenagers of our species. 

Or at least they try to do this.

The moment that my CPR was over (and a fine time it was, my parents having pulled out all the stops in their excellent choice of venue and offering only the very best Frizzlingpop, which flowed freely throughout the evening), I was tamped right into that Morphsender tube and, without any fanfare at all, converted to Ener-Goo, squeezed through a few dimensions, and pooped out in human form on the planet Earth.

 It’s always the luck of the draw as to what planets we’ll be sent to for our Teenage Walkabout. In my first placement, I was the loser Grozzling who ended up in Minneapolis in mid-January. And, although I was cunningly disguised as a typical Earthling girl, swaddled in many layers of horrible, synthetic fabric, hilariously referred to as “space age” by the natives, I was frigging freezing. After a few hundred years of being gently caressed by Grozzl V’s sultry, tropical breezes and warmed by our two radiant suns, I was not at all happy with the polar blasts and horizontally driving snow in this hellish place called Minnesota.

My assigned Earthling parents had been brand-spankingly brain-cleansed, falsely re-memoried, and moved across the continent to a location where they knew virtually nobody. My new dad spent a lot of time at the race track and casino, and my mom worked at an office and went to church regularly to pray for his soul. According to our convincingly forged papers, my Earthling parents were called Vince and Quince Fruit, and I was the equally unfortunately-named Pendula.  

That’s right. Pendula Fruit. Apparently, our Grozzl V Namer of the Year was a total idiot or, to be charitable, new to the assignment. In any case, my new parents were blissfully unaware of the oddity of their names, and I was too cold in god-forsaken Minnesota to give a Grozzlrat’s ass.

Quince Fruit was a lovely, middle-aged woman. She was short and round and had tightly curling black hair and almond-shaped, almost-black eyes. I believe she was originally from an island called Jamaica, and she talked with a captivating lilt that initially took a lot for my Grozzl V brain to comprehend. We shared our hatred of Minneapolis’s bitterly cold winter weather, but not much else. I know Quince was a good person but in my teenage mind she was repressive. She was religious and very, very strict.  I was dragged to church, urged to excel at school, and monitored closely.

Vince Fruit was a different kettle of Grozzlfish altogether. He was a sickly shade of eggshell white, and his grey-flecked brown hair shot out in all directions. When he walked, his extremely long legs wobbled and faltered, and sometimes kicked out randomly. I thought perhaps he had a medical condition, but Quince Fruit told me that no, he just had no coordination and that if he only came to church and prayed with us, perhaps he would be given the gift of grace. All I knew was that Vince was a really nice guy who left me alone, and for that reason, he was my preferred parent.

I went to high school in north Minneapolis, and immediately was a hit with the boys. Under all that polar fleece, I was quite an Earthling babe, apparently. Whoever had designed me had given me the beautifully dusky skin of my supposed mom, Quince, and the coltish long legs of Vince, minus his wobbling and kicking action. I had the body of a supermodel and the face of an angel. Look out, males of Minnesota, I had arrived.

I appreciated their admiration but, honestly, I wasn’t attracted to any of them. My ideal mate would have an enormous bald head with bulbous eyes, catfish whiskers, and lumpy, purple skin that would ooze phosphorescent slime to indicate his state of arousal in my presence. These mostly beige, small-headed, hairy people held no appeal for me at all. Besides, I was quite bewildered by my new Earthling sexual organs. Where was my twizzlerbeak? And, in my supermodel human body, how could I meld my zantorius with anyone’s plastudinous? Let’s face it; it just couldn’t be done.

And so, I made strict Quince and lax Vince proud by studying hard and excelling at school, while going to church regularly and shunning all offers of dates. I had no problem with the academic course load and came first in all my subjects, scoring perfect grades in mathematics and physics. Really, it was no big deal. We Grozzlings are an advanced species, after all, and I had to remember to dumb it down as much as possible.

Many of the Earthling females were jealous of me, not for my geeky command of mathematics, but for my innate ability to attract the boys. The girls called me names: Pendul-ass being one of their favorite barbs. It affected me not; nor did it repel the boys. If anything, I had a perky little human derriere, if you actually care for that kind of thing. The boys certainly seemed to.

A few years went by. I was getting close to the end of my senior year, and graduation was looming. Quince had coached me through applying to a variety of universities, and I had been offered full scholarships in mathematics at a few reputable ones. I was in the church choir, and I had taught Vince all kinds of logistical ways to improve his chances at the race track and casino, so both of my Earthling parents were ultra-proud of me.

And then it happened. By some fluke, the Grozzl V Morphsending Committee made a miscalculation, and a new boy named Dickens showed up one day at school. He was only a freshman, and he was wearing weird clothes and looked like he had been designed out of random human parts. But, the minute he walked toward me in the hallway, my Grozzl V hormones woke up and began to sing. And it wasn’t an Earthling hymn they were singing, either.

They had sent a male Grozzling to Minneapolis! Someone had made a very big mistake. No two Grozzlings were ever supposed to meet during their Walkabout. We are an intelligent species, but we are also super-horny. It’s a fact.

We became aware of each other at the same moment. Without conscious thought, our feet started moving in the traditional pattern that I will translate here as the Grozzling Gavotte, a mating ritual that dates back to primitive times. We took a languorous step towards each other, then a perky, come-hither skip, then a large, sexy leap. Reverse. Repeat. Again and again. Faster and faster.

Two things happened. The bell rang for the next period, which startled us, and made us falter. And, the Earthling kids in the hallway dragged Dickens away, laughing like crazy as they went. 

I couldn’t focus. For the first time ever that day, I only scored an A-minus on a quiz. I was consumed with the problem of how to find Dickens again and then figuring out together how to access our twizzlerbeaks.  In this human skin, how on earth were we supposed to do it?

Quince Fruit picked me up from school that day and took me directly to choir practice. I sang fervently, hoping that Quince’s big dude in the sky could actually cleanse my thoughts of impurity. But, the more I prayed, the deeper in lust I fell. 

This would not have ended well, had Dickens and I met again. We might have tried to rip off our human skins in an attempt to get to our twizzlerbeaks, which of course would not have been there since we had been converted into Ener-Goo before being put into the Morphsender. Hormones will be hormones, though.  Left to ourselves, we would have done our utmost to fulfill our Grozzling imperative.

At some point that night, while I was pining and panting alone in bed, I felt a puzzling new sensation. It is quite difficult to explain, but it seemed to involve a lot of fizzling and twittering and elongating. Then, pop! My time on Earth, apparently, was over and I was being sent on my next Walkabout. 

Another world, another adventure. A brand new set of repressive parents who of course would not understand me. And no Dickens!

I would spend the remaining years of my adolescence touring different worlds, away from my own species. During that period I would never again see a fellow Grozzling. I would be free of sexual temptation, just as the Morphsenders had intended. And, at long last as an adult, I would return to my home planet, ready to honor my parents’ wishes and absolutely agreeable to marrying the first male Grozzling they could scrounge up.

My mate and I would Gavotte, then caress each other’s twizzlerbeaks. We would meld my zantorius with his plastudinous. We would stay in our honeymoon suite for weeks and weeks and weeks.

I couldn’t wait.