Aliens

            Hey everyone! I wrote this a few weeks ago for a class exercise. I think it's OK, personally, and it received good feedback from everyone who read it for the class. The brief was to write about 'a strange person at work', inspired by our reading of Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener'. We also had to try and include a 350 word sentence, which is far more difficult than it at first sounds. (seriously, give it a go) Anyway, have a read, see what you think :)

                ‘Look, you only have to look at her; she just looks mental; but basically, a few months ago, she came in after lunch without anyone’s food, (she was on the lunch run that day, we take it in turns, see?) obviously, we were pretty annoyed because we didn’t have any lunch now; anyway, she comes back in, soaking wet – which is weird right, because it wasn’t raining at all, we think she ran through a car wash or something; so yeah, she comes back in soaking wet and wailing about an alien abduction; obviously we thought that was so weird, because, I mean, apart from it being really crazy and either a figment of her imagination, or completely made up, or, just, whatever – but apart from that, even if it was true; like, aliens wouldn’t just come down in the middle of the day, and grab a woman who mutters to herself, with a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp – I mean, surely, they’d want someone who looks more representative of the rest of the actual human race, not her; unless, she is exactly what they’d be after; I mean, they’d get a lot of psychological information from her which they wouldn’t necessarily get from the rest of us; anyway, I digress; so she comes in, saying she got abducted by aliens for the half an hour she was out, and that they put some microchip in her arm to monitor her behaviour and whatever; but now she just gives everyone odd looks and mutters to herself ever more than she used to – plus, I mean, there’s loads of other stuff, but that’s obviously the main reason she’s the weird one here; before that, it was Geoff, but he was only considered weird because he’d sniff everyone really obviously as you walked past him, and sometimes while he was actually facing you and talking to you, he’d grab your hair and really huff it, which is still weird – don’t get me wrong, it’s not alien abduction, and he’s been spoken to about that. So yeah, that’s pretty much our office. Do you have any questions before I show you to your desk?’

                Weeks passed and everything seemed normal. I say seemed, because how normal is someone sniffing your hair, albeit surreptitiously, across the room from someone who mutters to her alien friends?

                Like I said, weeks passed. I think it was a Wednesday, it was sunny out and Louise had gone to get everyone’s lunch. She’d been a while, but, she was one of those people who walked slowly, and would stop to stare at a bag with sequins. What I’m getting at; is that we didn’t think it in any way strange that she hadn’t returned after forty-five minutes.

                When she eventually did return, she was soaking wet. She had no food with her, and appeared to have lost some of her clothing. There was a small, red mark on her arm and she looked completely disengaged.

                ‘Aliens.’ She mumbled, wide-eyed, and passed out on the office rug. 

      

             So that's that, hope you liked it, even if you didn't, thank for reading it :)

                            

                                      Laura

                                               xoxoxoxox