The alien next door

 

I should have turned in Green the minute he moved into the neighborhood.

He was such an odd fish, he had to be some kind of alien species.

Their kind has spread throughout the planet ever since our kind made contact with races on other planets,

Town by town seemed to lose identity and turn into some kind of alien colony.

Even the landscape changed, new crop rise up and crowding out what we always had growing around us.

Strange flowers, weird trees, and food stuff bad enough to make any true human sick.

Conditions got so bad that I started wondering if I had landed on another world rather than the other way around; I felt like an alien on my own planet.

Fortunately, our town has a strong anti-alien committee, one that doesn’t always wait for the law to make a determination, and for this reason, we have managed to keep the intrusion to lower levels than most other towns.

While we can’t just ban them from our neighborhood, we can make it difficult for them to stay.

So finally when I point out to them my suspicions regarding Green, they put him on a list and start to watch him.

I even let them use my yard as a staging area so that they could take samples of his plants and monitory his transmissions, and even listen in on what he and his family say inside their house.

This, of course, gives me a great feeling of safety, since I know I have my own kind around me, looking out for our common interest: The human race.

Then when the reports come back saying that indeed, the plants growing around Green’s house are alien, I feel sick and dirty, wondering how much my family has become stained by contact with these.

This is a particularly egregious variety that is known to take over whole yards and fields, and I see a vision in my head of the whole world being swallowed because I failed to report Green earlier.

We understood that if the plants are alien, we can be assured Green is, too.

While we can kill the plants, what do were we do about Green.

The committee offered to burn down Green’s house and I agreed until I realize they meant “with Green and his family inside,” at which point I suggested we report Green to the government and let them handle things, since laws do exist about promoting alien plants that endanger earthly species.

I’m not an unkind man. I don’t want to see anyone hurt, even aliens. I just don’t want them ruining my neighborhood.

The committee seemed to agree, but insisted on burning the plants first.

I can’t tell you how great I felt watching those plants burn, as if we had struck a blow for our civilization.

I was proud of the role I played in fighting back.

Perhaps this wasn’t just a blow against alien cultures, but against the whole concept of greed that had infected our lives over the last few centuries, certain members of our society making their fortune off the depleted resources of our planet therefore forcing us to look out beyond our world for new resources. These greedy fools who allowed our world to use up its coal and oil were as responsible for our being invaded by aliens as they aliens who invaded us. We would not have encountered the aliens so soon had not greed pushed us into space too early, before we were fully prepared to fend off changes alien life forms brought with them.

The fire, however, only lighted another more furious fire in the eyes of the committee, who then decided to kill Green anyway, at which point I called the police.

Green wasn’t a bad person, I thought, he just wasn’t human.

I didn’t think he ought to die just for that, simply sent back to where he came from, if that was possible.

When the police came to collect him, Green blamed me for everything, glaring at me with such hate, I was stunned.

The committee glared at me, too, for spoiling what they thought of as a perfect plan – calling me an alien-lover, and promised to burn my house down next.

The authorities were upset with us all because it seems that setting fire to the plants only made the alien plants grow faster, and within a few days, the plant took over our town like a plague.

I took refuge in my house and tried to clear all the plants I could from around it. In this, I hoped to serve as an example to my neighbors, and perhaps convince them that I did not love alien or alien things.

With Green gone, I felt as if the world had become balanced again.

As it turned out, I was deluding myself.

Where there is one alien we see, there are hundreds we don’t see.

The committee, being savvy to this, started killing first and asking questions later.

Every night I could see flames outside as the committee burned house after house, hoping to get rid of the aliens we could not see.

It scared me to think the more we killed and burned, the worse the problem got – because I started to see more aliens, not less, as if they, too, sprung up as a result of our violence.

So overcrowded has earth become that I decided to immigrate to one of the ice planet.

I saw no aliens name Green – nor any of the weeds that needed fire to spread.

People here don’t care who or what you are as long as you do your share of the work that keeps everybody alive.

I feel better.

I’m no longer worried about alien as much as I am worried about dying.