Jerry Oltion - Anywhere but Here

“How do you get milk clear out here?” Donna asked.

“How else? We brought cows.” He waved an arm toward the table. “Sit! Relax. I will fix the lunch. Do you eat lapin?”

“I don’t know,” Trent said. “What’s lapin?”

“Rabbit. And before you get your hopes up, I have none, but the dandinant is very similar, and I do have that.”

“What’s a dandinant?” The name sounded suspiciously bug-like. Trent hadn’t heard that the French were into insects, but he knew they ate snails, which was just as bad.

André wrinkled his brow. “It’s… how to describe it? A little creature native to Mirabelle, like a skunk without the smell, but yellow and green to blend in with the grass. It’s round, and it walks like this.” He bent down and shuffled a few steps, waddling from side to side like a bear. “They are very common, and very tasty as well.”

Trent looked over at Donna to see what she thought. They had eaten some alien fish on their first trip off Earth and lived to tell about it, and André had apparently eaten these dandinants before, so it sounded safe enough. Donna nodded her agreement, and said, “Sure, it sounds great.”

“Excellent,” André said. “Sit!” he said again.

There were only two chairs at the table. Trent pulled one out for Donna, then went around to the other side of the table and sat in the other. The floor wasn’t perfectly flat—it looked like André had smoothed it with an adze or something—but Trent was able to wiggle his chair around until it rested on all four legs. André busied himself in the kitchen, taking a pan of shredded meat and several unknown vegetables from a small refrigerator and setting to work on the vegetables with a knife.

“So how come you speak English?” Trent asked.

André said over his shoulder, “When I was young, the United States was not the way it is now. Then, your country was the shining hope of the world, the strongest force for peace anywhere. You were admired. Most of my generation learned to speak English, for it seemed the entire world would soon become American.”

“That’s hard to imagine,” Trent said. “Seems like the whole worlds been pissed at us for as long as I can remember.”

André looked at Trent for a moment, giving him a onceover that had Trent wondering what the Frenchman was looking for until André said, “The change happened about the time you were born, I would guess.” He turned back to his vegetable cutting. “Terrorists attacked you on your own soil for the first time, and in response your country went insane. Instead of trying to stop the cause for terrorism, America instead began conquering other countries it considered threats to its own security. This of course worried other countries, who prepared to resist an American invasion, but that buildup of weapons made them threats in turn, and so it progressed until America went from the most admired nation to the most feared, and terrorism became the only way to fight back.”

That wasn’t quite the way Trent had learned it in school. He’d learned that terrorists were all religious fanatics, and that the United States had acted to stop them when the United Nations wouldn’t. But he didn’t want to get into an argument with André over it, so he just said, “There’s no justification for terrorism, no matter what the provocation.”

André nodded. “There, you see! All Americans are not the same.”

“I don’t think anybody supports terrorism,” Trent said.

“Someone must,” André said, “or we would not have such a nice big lake to the north of here.”

“Touché,” said Trent.

“Aha! You speak French.” André laughed.

“About two words of it.”

“What would be the other?”

“Garage.”

“Ah, of course. We have the joke in France, that when America renamed French fries ‘freedom fries,’ you also tried to rename the garage, but for some reason ‘car hole’ did not catch on.”

Trent was just about to take another sip of coffee, but his sudden laughter blew it into his eyebrows instead. Donna was already laughing at André’s joke, but she laughed even harder when she saw Trent dripping onto the table. André handed him a dishtowel and said, “My apologies! I did not mean to—”

“It’s all right,” Trent said. “You told me there was a joke comin’.” He wiped away the coffee and handed the towel back. “I’ll have to remember that one when we get back home.”

“So you are going back to America, then? I assumed that once you left, you would not go back.”

“We’re just sort of scouting around for possibilities at the moment,” Trent said. “We might move, and we might not, depending on what we find. But even if we decide to move, we’ve got to go back for our stuff.”

“Ah, yes, your stuff. ‘Etoffe,’ we say, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that our word ‘etouffer’ means to suffocate. I thought I might despair when I moved here, because I could not bear to give up all my ‘stuff,’ but in the end, I learned what was important to me and what was not. It was a valuable lesson. I sometimes think a person should move every year, and only take with them what they can carry.”

Donna said, “We met a couple on Onnescu who plan to find their own planet and play Adam and Eve, all with just one load of belongings.”

André whistled softly. “That is dedication. Maybe a bit extreme, but one must admire their ability to renounce worldly things.”

“We’ll see how long they stick to it,” Trent said. “I’d be surprised if they lasted a year before they moved back to civilization.”

André chuckled softly. “That is what my sister said to me when I moved to Mirabelle. I have eight months to go, and much can happen in that time, but I think I will prove her wrong.”

He set the chopping board full of vegetables aside and picked up the pan he had used to heat the milk. The light grew suddenly brighter in the house, and Trent assumed that the sun had just come out from behind a cloud, but it seemed awfully bright. André paused with the saucepan in his hand and looked out the kitchen window, then he whispered, “Merde.”

The light grew brighter.

“Baissez-vous!” André yelled, dropping to the floor. “Go down!”

Trent dived for the floor, his chair clattering over backwards, and threw his arm around Donna as she dropped down beside him. Coffee poured off the table onto their legs from their overturned mugs, but they didn’t have time to move. The ground heaved underneath them, throwing them and everything else in the house into the air for a second, then just as they landed again, there was a deafening explosion and they were thrown sideways into the kitchen cabinets.

Wood and rocks and dirt rained down over them. Trent pulled Donna close and covered her head with his arms, realizing in a moment of wry clarity that she was doing the same for him. A chunk of branch the size of his leg smashed down beside them and tumbled away. The table had overturned; Trent grabbed it by a leg and pulled it over the top of their bodies, and they felt the jolts as more debris bounced off it.

After what seemed like half an hour, but was probably only ten seconds or so, the patter of falling rubble stopped. Trent stuck his head out from under the table and looked up. The top half of the tree had vanished as if a giant’s fist had just swatted it away, and clouds roiled overhead like smoke over a wildfire.

“Are you okay?” he asked Donna.

“I… I think so.” Her voice sounded thin and distant through the ringing in his ears.

“André?” He turned to the Frenchman, who was sitting up and shaking the dirt out of his hair.

“Je vis,” he croaked. Blood ran down his left arm from a gash in his shoulder.