Ghosts and Aliens

John A. Frochio

The aliens lived among us. We got along with them well enough. Except for the ghosts who roamed the cities and towns. They shunned the aliens.

Their spaceship stood among the broken slides and monkey bars of an abandoned children's playground outside our town. It looked like a tall monument to Pablo Picasso, all lines and sharp angles and almost recognizable shapes. The alien overlords lived there. They never came out.

I worked with two of the embedded aliens. Today I invited one of them, Chrixval, a female, to join me for a "working lunch." We ate on a picnic bench outside the old mill where we worked in the analytical lab. I was the lab supervisor and she was a senior technician.

"None of us," she said, indicating others of her race who were walking past us, "were involved in the invasion, Alistair. It was the overlords." She nodded toward their spaceship.

I didn't look where she was indicating. I didn't need to look. Instead I looked down and then back up at her.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "At least they're letting us live our lives."

I wanted to get to know Chrixval better. I was a single father in my early forties, still decent looking and in good shape. She was comparable to an Earth woman in her twenties, darkly exotic, sensual. Her eyes were a deeply piercing violet color.

I looked into those eyes. They were hypnotic. I didn't know much about the aliens' personal lives, but I was willing to learn. She said, "How did your wife die?"

I sighed. I knew I couldn't keep the truth from her. "She died during the invasion. She was a soldier."

"Ah." She hesitated. "She's one of the ghosts that walk this town."

I nodded.

"You know the overlords constructed the ghosts? They made them from the deconstructed energies captured from your people's dead brain cells."

"I know."

She leaned close to me. "But did you know they made the ghosts to be their spies? They didn't trust us, their own people."

I watched my wife's ghostly figure stare at me from the entrance to our building. I felt a chill.

I didn't know, but I suspected it all along.

© John A. Frochio 2012 All Rights Reserved