Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“No, no,” she said. “Ti.” She tried to wrestle the paper free, but the baby cinched its tentacle tight, crumpling the paper into a fan and holding it high out of her reach.

Trent got up to help her pry it out of the baby’s grasp, but the baby whipped its tentacle around and squealed in protest.

“Jeez, I hope that’s not somebody’s insurance form or something,” Donna said.

“I wonder if insurance would pay out here?” Trent got a grip on the baby’s shoulder, then worked his way up to the paper. Slime dripped off his fingers, but he didn’t let go until he’d rescued the paper. He wiped it dry as best he could against his shirt, then looked to see what it was, but the writing was in Chinese.

“I somehow expected things to be done in English out here,” he said. “The place was founded by an American, after all.”

Donna nodded. “You’d think. But the way the U.S. is clamping down on people leaving, I guess we’re just outnumbered.”

“So because they want everybody everywhere to think and act like Americans, they wind up with a colony that doesn’t even speak English as a first language. That’s really bright.”

Dixit kept squealing and reaching for the paper. Trent looked for a blank piece, finally pulling one out of the inkjet printer on the corner of the desk, but Dixit wasn’t interested in that paper. Only the original one would do.

“How about this one?” Trent asked, holding up a preprinted form that was at least empty of handwriting.

Dixit started to howl. Trent tried crumpling up the blank paper and tossing it from hand to hand in front of the baby’s face, and that distracted it for a moment, but not long.

Donna tried singing to it, but Trent could barely hear her over the baby’s squeals.

“Okay,” she said, standing up again. “Time to go back to Momma.”

Dixit quieted down as soon as she started moving, so they took their time walking back down the hallway. When they got to the exam room, Dr. Chen looked up and said, “Okay you come back now. Just take a minute to develop.” His assistant wheeled the x-ray machine back into its spot, then took the film plate into a back room.

Donna handed Dixit back to Katata. It was hard to tell who was the most relieved.

Everyone waited impatiently for the x-rays to be developed, Dr. Chen fussing with a tray full of equipment and with the light table while the rest of them just shifted from side to side and fidgeted. Trent’s eyes kept straying back to Donna, whose wet shirt was clinging to every curve. She might be a mess, but she looked so alive and so… so real , that he could have swept her off her feet and made love to her right there on one of the exam tables if he wasn’t afraid it would scare the aliens. She caught him looking at her and blushed, which only made him ache for her all the more.

At last the doctor’s assistant came back with a two-foot by foot-and-a-half negative and stuck it on the light table. There were four shots of Talana’s tentacle, presumably at different orientations, but they all looked pretty much the same to Trent. He had seen pictures of dinosaur skeletons with their long tails made up of short little segments of vertebrae or whatever; these x-rays looked a lot like that.

“So they do have bones,” he said softly.

“Oh yes,” Dr. Chen said. “And this one has fracture right here.” He pointed to one of the segments, maybe two inches long and half an inch wide, that had the faintest of shadows running diagonally across it. “See from side? Very clear.” Chen said, pointing to another image where Trent couldn’t spot anything unusual at all. “Not broken completely, but definitely fractured. We will need cast.”

It took some explaining to make Katata and Talana understand what he intended to do, but they must have had casts or something similar on their homeworld, because they didn’t protest when he got out the gauze and the plaster and started building one on Talana’s tentacle. He positioned it so the tentacle rested against Talana’s body more or less like an arm, and the injured bone plus two or three more on either side were immobilized. He worked fast, because the plaster set quickly. By the time he fashioned a sling and wrapped it around Talana’s neck, the cast was hard enough to give off a solid thunk when he rapped it.

“Very good,” Chen said. “Now we wait overnight and see how tentacle feels in morning. Make sure no complications before we send home. You have place to stay?”

“Yeah,” Trent said. “I mean, yeah, Donna and I do, but the camper would be pretty tight for all five of us.”

“No problem. Family can stay here tonight.”

They managed to get that across to Katata, pantomiming her and her children going into a patient room, then the sun going across the sky once, then Trent and Donna coming back in through the front doors.

“Bakbak,” Katata said when she figured out what they were talking about. Then she snaked out the tentacle that she wasn’t using to hold Dixit and grasped Trent’s hand with it, curling around his fingers and palm a couple of times and giving him a light squeeze. “Batakit,” she said.

She did the same to Donna, and Donna replied, “You’re welcome.”

“We’ll be back in the morning,” Trent said, and he and Donna let themselves out into the night while Dr. Chen showed his patients to their room.

Trent waited until he was outside to wipe his hands on his pants. Donna laughed and did the same, then they stood beside their pickup, smelling the wood smoke in the air and listening to the night sounds. Most of them were of human origin: music and laughter from the bars, and off in the distance a vehicle crunching along a street, but behind it all was the constant rush of the river and the whisper of air moving through the trees.

“Well, here we are,” Trent said.

“Not quite how we expected our first night to be, is it?” said Donna.

“Nope. But you know, it feels good. I haven’t felt this useful in ages.”

“Me neither.” Donna slid her arm around his waist and leaned her head against his chest. “Kind of puts things in perspective when you find someone in worse shape than you are, doesn’t it?”

“I guess.” Trent had never really understood why another person’s problems made your own seem less important, but they did.

“Now what?” Donna asked.

“Good question. You tired yet?”

“Not really. I’m still kind of wound up.”

“Me too. And it sounds like we’re not the only ones stayin’ up late. Want to check out the night life in Bigtown?”

“Sure. Let me get out of these messy clothes, and let’s go.”

Trent put his arms around her and gave her a long, slow kiss. “You want a hand with that?”

There was barely room for both of them in the camper, but Trent pulled the door closed behind them and made sure it latched. It was pitch dark for a second before he found the light switch and flipped it on. When he turned around, Donna was already wriggling out of her shirt. She had her arms in the air and her shirt over her head, so he reached out and cupped her breasts in his hands and said, “Guess who.”

She giggled. “Oh, Bob, how did you get in here?”

“Try again,” he said, giving her a squeeze.

“Jeff? Dennis? Gosh, there’s so many people it could be.”

“Is that so?” he said, surprised at how much some other man’s name could jolt him even when he knew she was just playing with him. He reached up and grabbed a handful of her shirt, intending to whisk it off her in a single tug, but he misjudged the angle when he pulled, and he heard it rip as it came over her head. “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry!” he said, but then he saw the look of wanton lust on her face and he whispered, “Whoa, maybe I’m not.”