Everyone said Abdual was “a dreadful fibber.”
But the truth of the matter was simply that he saw the world in exaggerated ways– it was big, and bright, and new, and everything was an adventure! The neighbor’s noisy dog was a dragon. The bushes in the backyard were an enchanted forest. Butterflies were fairies, flowers had magical powers, and even his own little bed was sometimes a pirate ship, sometimes a desert island, and sometimes a flying carpet.
He came home from school and told his parents that he nearly drowned in the lake on the playground. The teacher explained that he’d slipped and fallen into a large puddle.
He talked about the giant who lived at his friend Jessie’s house. Jessie’s older brother was six and a half feet tall and played football.
And he insisted that his parents were trying to poison him every time they served peas with dinner. “They’re green!” he would cry. “Green means poison, everyone knows that!”
So when Abdual began complaining that there was a monster in his belly making him tired and bloated and achy, no one thought much of it. That is, until he caught a fever that wouldn’t go away.
The next thing he knew, he was put in a white hospital room with white walls and white sheets on a white bed. Nurses and doctors would poke at him and talk about him as if he weren’t even there. Then they would stick him with needles, and he’d have to sit still while medicine traveled from heavy hanging bags down through long tubes and into his arm.
Abdual decided that he’d been abducted by aliens who looked like humans– especially Doctor Dingham, a tall man with dark eyes who never smiled. Aliens, yes. That would explain why they were doing all these tests on him.
The medicine wore him out, too. Probably to keep me from escaping, he thought. Even though his room was cold and the sheets were stiff, he curled up with his arms around his knees and fell asleep.
“Pssst!!”
Abdual opened one groggy eye, and then the other. Everything was dark and quiet.
“Pssst!” There it was again. He sat up and looked around.
Crouched beside his bed was a little girl in a fuzzy pink robe. She seemed about his own age, with long dark pigtails and bright dark eyes. And she was definitely trying to get his attention.
“What’s your name?” she whispered.
“I’m Abdual,” said Abdual. “Who are you?”
“I’m Yara. What are you in for?”
“In for?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, why are you here?”
“Aliens are doing tests on me. Why are you here?”
Yara thought about his answer for a moment, then flipped her pigtails and skipped over to sit in a chair in the corner. “I’m just visiting. Aliens are fascinating. I’m a journalist and I’m writing an article about their culture for a famous magazine.”
Alright, she had his attention. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “What have you observed so far?”
“Well, Doctor Dingham is their leader, and it seems like he thinks of humans like humans think of rats. And not like pet rats. Like lab rats.” She wrinkled her nose. “He’s so serious. And he doesn’t like to listen– he just talks at you and then walks away.”
Abdual logged that information away in his mind for safekeeping as Yara continued.
“The nurses are second in command, and they’re a little better. But they’re still aliens.” She paused. “But maybe not Nurse Nasira. She’s awfully nice and might actually be human.”
“It’s good to have other humans here,” Abdual commented.
Yara nodded in agreement. “And then there’s the aides who have to do whatever the nurses and doctors tell them. They also bring the food, which isn’t very good but you’ll get used to it. And then the cleaners who just…” She shrugged. “They just clean.”
That made sense to Abdual, but he had one more question: “So what are you doing in my room in the middle of the night?”
She rolled her eyes again. “Gathering intel, of course! Getting to know the local captives. Seeing which rooms are empty. Sneaking an extra Jello out of the nurses’ fridge when they’re not looking.”
Shifting in the chair, she pulled a tiny notebook and pencil out of her robe pocket and waved them at him. “Journalists write everything down, you know. It’s all important.”
Over the next hour Yara took Abdual on an undercover tour of the ward– slinking around corners, hiding behind doors, and crawling below the line-of-sight of the main desk. She took notes on which rooms were occupied and which were empty; which nurses were working that night; and even what food was in the fridge.
While they were at it, they also grabbed a cherry Jello for him and a lime one for her.
*** This story may or may not be continued here on BMaC... but the full and finished version will be included in my next book, Another 6 Stories by Haley, expected this winter.