Our Overrated Future

There was this alien family from the moon. They worked hard their entire lives to pay for a space vacation to Earth. By then when they had saved enough to fly to Earth, Earth is nothing but rubbles of smoke and dirt.

Alien Dad: ‘I can’t believe we've paid so much for this shit. This is exactly like home.’

Before I Axe This Draft

    Like the rest, Mother attempted to fail her intelligence test. They were jostled into a dark cell with swinging naked bulbs. Genders a building apart. They were squeezed into benches, sixty people filling the cell to the brim. The air was thick with gravity, sickness and hunger. Mother stared long and hard at the thinned windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of her husband in the next building. Questionnaires were thrust to the ladies; they were printed on the shreds of their flags. Flags of defeated nations were recycled mainly for toilet paper. Always shreds of them, never in a single whole piece. It was against new decree to keepsake a whole flag of the defeated nations.      

   She saw herself instead reflected by the hanging bulbs that hovered like stars upon the black windows. Mother must have lost half of herself; she could feel her ribs under her breasts and goose bumps on her thin scalp. She wanted so much to reach for the thinned window, to touch herself or to touch her husband in the next building, or to touch the real stars outside this tiny cell. Her warden barked for her attention and proceeded to instruct the ladies through an interpreter to fill the questionnaires. The nervous interpreter spoke clumsy English which incurred dozen of bewildered eyes in the shivering darkness to question his questions. After a while though the ladies have not gotten used to broken language, they scribbled their answers with ease and careful stupidity. Like the rest of the men in the next building, they attempted to fail their intelligence test.

   But deep down, the men and ladies knew that the tests applied to them for so many days now were inconsequential to their fates. Their captors have long gathered information of their previous employment status and genetic facts. They were men and women of intellects and this bit did not bide well at all for them in times of intellectual prosecutions. These little tests that could well went on for weeks were designed to break them. The submissive ones would be sent to the colonized mines and the rest, shot like dogs.

   Like the rest, Mother thought that the Germans would lose the war. Though it was unlikely as the Germans had to fight two fronts, it was the Soviet sabotage of the Manhattan Project allowed the Germans to first develop their atomic bombs and tip the balance of war in their favor. Calculating that their nuclear arsenal were still infantile and expensive to produce, the Nazis had focused their atomic holocausts on USSR and pushed into heart of the Soviet to increase Germany’s size of Lebensraum.

   After the test, the ladies were lined back to their holding area. It was a makeshift bunker where they cramped to sleep sitting up. They had been holed up here for almost a month after the fall of their country. During the daytime, they could walk around the fortified camp where they could see their husbands and sons across the barbwire, but interaction was forbidden. Sometimes they would be brought in to the building for interviews and sometimes some will not return. Music, mostly Germanic folk tunes were allowed but books and board games were banned. At nighttime when they were not made to do tests, they had to endure hours of propaganda films and radio.

   Through the radio it was apparent that the prosecution of the intellectuals had topped Chancellor Göring’s priority for domestic security of the defeated nations. The radio urged that harboring intellectuals could be a capital felony and reminded that it’s a national duty to blow whistle on suspected intellectuals and harborers alike.

   Moments after the radio and the lights went out in their bunker, a bony woman whispered to Mother in raspy voice, as if she was speaking in the rain. ‘How long is this going to last? There must be a point to all this.’

   ‘They will move us again.’ Mother replied with her tired eyes still closed. She listened to her own heartbeats and thought about her husband.

   The bony woman remained silent for a moment as if she was listening to her own heart too when the shadows of the barbwire thrown from the roving watchtower swam across their walls. ‘Death camps?’

   Mother did not answered to that. It would be unlikely, Mother thought. After all the tests on ripped flags they had done, there must be a point. Somewhere. ‘That, or the moon.’

   Mother could felt the head of the bony woman nodding softly. They kept quiet when shuffle of footsteps pounced outside their bunker.

   ‘There’s nothing there on the moon.’ The bony woman moved her cracked lips.

   Then there was a gunshot from the male bunker across the fortified fence. Immediately, the ladies rose and tried to rush outside to see. The armed guards by the exit pushed them back in and they attached themselves by the grilled windows and saw that more gunfire exploded, illuminating the night each time. The women began to cry and one tried to scream her sons’ names, the others covered her mouth and held her down. Two bodies were dragged out from male bunker and could not be recognized in the moonlight.

   After a while, the women slide back into their sitting positions and were all insomniac, Mother closed her eyes tightly and replied to the bony woman, ‘There’s nothing here either.’