'Cease your progress!'
A muffled voice came from over my shoulder as I shoved my dufflebag into the car. It was of an unusual pitch, that voice, and my curiosity turned me toward it before I could think twice.
'Cease it, I say!'
Two eyes stared at me through the bored holes of a cardboard box that had been hastily painted in flesh-tones. The box sat atop a bigger box that was even more sloppily-painted to resemble a lumberjack’s plaid, and cardboard tubes not unlike those used to hold wrapping-paper protruded from the sides at odd angles. A double-vision version of my aggressor stood off to the side, and one stacked on the other wouldn’t have been tall enough to look me in the eye... still, I ceased and my lack of movement seemed to produce an unexpected silence.
'You don’t know us,' said the voice again, straining now to make itself heard through the box. 'Though we are cleverly disguised as humans, you must try to grasp the reality of the situation as well as you can with your feeble earthling brain.'
Thankfully, he gave me time to do just that before continuing.
'We are martians!' he said, attempting to lift his cardboard-tube arms for emphasis but failing miserably. The one flanking him tried to do likewise, failed, and then averted his eyes. Silence hovered amongst the three of us as we looked at each other with the forced casualness of strangers meeting strangers in a quickly-darkening park.
'So,' I said, letting my voice trail off.
'You are fooling no-one with your nonchalance, earthling. You and your ignorant human eyes have been taken in by our ruse, and now you look upon us in horror as well as, perhaps, shame?'
I folded my arms and leaned against my car. Sleeping housecats had proven more threatening.
'Are you not suitably frightened?' he continued. 'Very well then, insolent human – you leave us no choice but to shock and confound you with our true forms!'
With that, they both simultaneously attempted again to lift their arms, again failing embarrassingly. The one doing the talking was clearly becoming frustrated, while the one in the back spent his time shifting around uncomfortably.
'Our cardboard arms seem to be quite heavy in your atmosphere,' said the chatty one.
'Yeah, and what’s with the sun over here?' the back one asked, cutting in. 'It’s, like, hot!'
'Yeah, it can get pretty warm,' I said.
'Well, it’s fucking ridiculous, I can tell you that,' he spat. More silence bloomed while he tapped his foot indignantly.
'You guys got names or what?' I asked, trying to change the subject.
'Our names would terrify you beyond your capacity for comprehension, doltish human,' the chatty one replied, regaining a little of his lost vigour. 'We will instead address each other by the resultant numbers mathematically formulated by our severely-impressive martian algebra, numbers that will seem devastatingly fantastic to an underdeveloped brain such as yours.'
He paused and looked at the hot one, who waved him on impatiently.
'Right,' he began again. 'So there’s three of us, yes? All right – I’ll be Three, this one will be Two, and you shall henceforth be known as One.'
'I dunno,' I said, stroking my beard. 'If I’m you and I’m all up on a foreign planet making demands, I’d probably try to hold on to that number one.'
'Yeah,' said Two to Three. 'What’s the matter with you?'
'I am Three because I am a full three times as significant as this one!' Three barked, flailing his stiff-straight arms at me in a huff.
'Wait,' said Two. 'So, according to you I’m only twice as significant as this guy? That’s bullshit!'
'You could just call me Ryan,' I said, suppressing a smile.
'No we can’t, imbecilic human,' Three said. 'That would throw off the rhythms of our extra-terrestrial equations!'
'The rhythms of our extra-terrestrial equations,' Two repeated derisively. 'You sound like an asshole, you know that?'
'If you continue to deride our superior categorizational abilities in front of the human, Three, we’ll have lost the battle before it’s begun.'
'You’re Three,' said Two.
'I’m... wait. You’re...'
'I’m Two, you’re Three, and he’s One.'
'What about Biscuits?' I asked.
'What about them, Two?'
'He’s One.'
'He’s... then I’m Two? How did you have it?'
'You could call me Biscuits, and Two there could be Gravy, and the two of us could be Biscuits and Gravy.'
Three sputtered incoherently before falling silent.
'I’m all right with that,' said Gravy, after a thoughtful pause.
'Fine! You’re Gravy, he’s Biscuits, and I’m Three! Is everyone happy now?'
'No,' Gravy said. 'It’s too goddamned hot to be happy about much of anything.'
'You guys want a drink or something?' I asked, rummaging around in my car for the cooler.
'Of course not, vile creature,' Three said, eyeing over my shoulder my stash of perspiring bottles. 'Why, what have you got?'
I held out two bottles of water, and both were snatched up eagerly.
'We will take your water,' Three said, unscrewing the cap with great difficulty, 'just as we will soon take your planet!'
'You’re welcome,' I said, grabbing a bottle for myself.
'You’re welcome to have the privilege of serving us!' he said, trying to splash water into his eyeholes.
'Gimmie that back.'
'Never!' Three shouted, stumbling backwards awkwardly. 'Your water has been invaded! We shall rule over this captured water of yours like dictators!'
We drank our water in silence, me sipping festively with well-bending arms, they splashing themselves ferociously and lapping up whatever ran down the inside of their box-heads.
'We will pillage you with our super-heavy arms,' Three continued, breathless from slurping.
'If you can lift them,' I deadpanned.
'If... when we lift them it will be to punch you in the face!'
'It’s going to totally suck, man,' Gravy said, though I wasn’t sure to which he was referring, my getting face-punched or him having to lift his arms.
'We will punch your species in your collective face, and we shall do so really, really hard.'
'Super hard,' agreed Gravy, somewhat sarcastically.
'Each one of our super hard punches will feel to you like you've been punched four-hundred times,' Three said. 'Every blow we administer shall hammer you with the pain of four-hundred thousand million...'
'You guys are dicks,' I said, finishing my water and pulling my keys from my pocket.
'Perhaps it is you earthlings that are the dicks,' Three said, 'what with your water and your exceptionally-flexible arms.'
'And that sun,' Gravy added. 'Seriously, what the fuck.'
'All right,' I said, walking to the driver’s side of the car. 'I’ll see you around?'
'You’ll see us hovering around your pathetic planet, foolish human.'
'Biscuits,' I corrected.
'Yes,' he said. 'Foolish Biscuits.'
'Great,' I said. 'Take it easy.'
'Wait!' Three said, shuffling towards the car. 'You’re not perchance going to Mars, are you?'
'Sorry, no. I’m heading home.'
'Home,' Three said, elongating the word to lengthen our conversation. '...to Mars?'
'Nope.'
'Great,' Gravy said to Three. 'That’s just great.'
'Don’t think your sarcasm doesn’t sting me, Gravy,' Three said. 'You throw these disparaging comments out all willy-nilly, but just because I don’t respond doesn’t mean I don’t hear them.'
'Well, you obviously didn’t hear me when I said this trip was a stupid idea.'
'I did indeed, but you have to admit that your first response to anything is pessimistic at best.'
'No, no, no,' Gravy said, his words heaving with disdain. 'I was actually feeling really, really optimistic about the chances of us hitchhiking to Mars from Earth, what with all the interstellar traveling these earthlings engage in.'
Three wilted under Gravy’s stare.
'Yeah,' Gravy continued. 'I guess I blew it again, huh.'
I was going to start the car, but something about Three’s expressionless box-face made me take my keys out of the ignition.
'I guess next time I’ll give it another fucking think before I berate you into joining me for some pointless fucking mission to the surface of the hottest fucking planet in the fucking universe, won’t I?' Gravy continued, padding a clumsy circle around Three. 'I guess next time I’ll figure out an escape-strategy before we’re stuck cooking in our own cardboard like a pair of assholes.'
Three was blubbering now, only his complete lack of mobility holding him upright.
'How did you guys get here?' I asked, getting out of the car.
'Oh, that’s another great fucking story,' Gravy said, exasperation sending his arms shooting into the air. 'Tell him about that brilliant idea, dummy.'
'All right,' I said to Gravy, gesturing him away from Three. 'Take it easy.'
'Rocket catapult,' Three said between pathetic sobs. 'I wanted to save money on gas, and it would only take an extra couple of weeks...'
'Hmm!' Gravy yelled, waving his arms out in front of him as though weighing the options. 'Let me see: floating through space for a couple of weeks like a couple of pinheads to save a couple of bucks on gas, or spending the money to fly here in a gigantic goddamned spaceship THAT COULD TAKE US THE FUCK HOME WHENEVER WE WANTED!'
Gravy’s anger echoed into the night, and we stood and pondered in three distinctly different emotional states.
'It seems to me,' I said, 'that you should be able to call someone to pick you up, shouldn’t you?'
'When was the last time you saw martians around here?' Three snapped. 'If we were to end up having to call for a ride we'd be laughingstocks, planet-wide.'
'And your dad would be so pissed,' added Gravy.
'Y’know,' Three said, turning to me. 'This is exactly what my dad said would happen. He’s just been riding me and riding me...'
'You’d have to call your parents?' I asked incredulously.
''All you ever do is futz around with your rocket catapult' he’d say,' Three said, affecting what I can only assume was a poor impression of his dad. ''Why can’t you be more like your brother?' Sure, my brother, the spaceship-engine mechanic, and his wife the architect... no room left for me and my dreams.'
'Dude,' Gravy said to me, as an aside. 'His brother’s wife? Super hot.'
'I just wanted to show him, y’know? Show my dad that me and my rocket catapult weren’t worthless, neither of us... maybe show him that I'm not a big, pitiful disappointment, just once.'
I was getting sleepy as Three became unbearably maudlin, so after letting him ramble on while Gravy and I messed around with a few incredibly cool handshakes I tried to coax him in a more proactive direction with the suggestion that they find themselves a nice overhang of trees to settle in under for the night. This was met with resistance, as they were unable to pull themselves vertical once flat on their backs. Finally, sense prevailed and Three recognized that calling for a ride remained their only option for returning home.
'Well,' Three said, 'good thing I always keep a quarter in my sock.'
'For what?' I asked.
'How else am I supposed to call my parents, you clod?' His abrupt, imperial attitude had returned with a vengeance. 'Stupid Biscuits – you think we don’t know how things work over here?'
'My apologies,' I said, slapping a particularly radical handshake down on Gravy. 'Go do your thing, man.'
'And do my thing we will,' Three said triumphantly, and Gravy gave me wink before they trundled off in the direction of the nearest gas station.
'Wait,' I called. 'You have a quarter?'
'Of course I do,' Three called back. 'I just told you that, numbskull.'
'Pay phones cost fifty cents.'
I heard an indecipherable mumbling before Three started meekly back.
'I have become aware that I was perhaps a little adventurous in my totally-friendly, not-at-all-disrespectful name-calling just then, Biscuits. I would hope that you wouldn’t hold such trivialities against a good friend when said friend were to humbly ask for a quarter?'
'What am I,' I said, starting my car, 'a fucking bank?'
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