SCIENCE  FICTION        FANTASY       HORROR    ~  FEATURED   FICTION      FLASH      COMING  SOON   MICRO-FLASH   

 

June/July 2008
Vol. V1 No. 6   ISSN: 1545-3650
Home Contact US Submissions
 

AlienSkin Magazine®
Published Bi-Monthly Online

The Wrong Room  
 
Up
Alnilam's Planet
Burn
Changing of the Seasons
Defense Mechanism
Dinner For Two
Golden Goddess
The Introduction of Phisto
Oversight
Rude Awakening
Words in White
The Wrong Room
 

 

Weird But True
Grasshoppers have white blood.
 

 

 

Did You Know ~
Napoleon Bonaparte was afraid of cats. He conducted his battle plans in a sandbox; and he had his servants wear his boots to break them in before he wore them.
 

 
 


Featured Fiction
The Wrong Room

by Joseph D. DiLella  ©2008

Dressed in a wrinkled gray trench coat, the detective with an alligator snout locked the door shut behind the accused that slobbered and drooled on the old speckled vinyl flooring as he slid inside the over-heated interrogation chamber.

The accused lumbered his five hundred pound plus carcass across the floor.  The creature eventually reached the tiny red cushioned chair behind the table.  Hoisting himself upon the undersized resting apparatuses, the alleged criminal cupped all eight of his hands, intertwined its arms, and rested all of them upon the cold, metal table top.  Not a stranger to Precinct 47, the nervous, but self confident fellow followed the inspector’s pacing like a child anticipating a severe spanking from one of his fathers.

The Inspector puffed on a menthol cigarette.  Smoke billowed out, into the air, like a smoke stack from an environmentally-safe, Cosmos Seven intergalactic train, the investigator croaked out the following accusation: "Five witnesses, Slatterynot one, two, three or fourbut five stinkin’ beings put you at the scene of the crime."

The bulbous headed one sneered back without a word.

"From what I hear on the street, you’ve had a grudge against their kind for centuries," the interrogator said as he put out his cigarette under his right front paw.

A bead of sweat, barely noticeable, fell down a circuitous route in large cracks and crevices of skin flaps etching the large one’s face until it fell into a tiny pocketone of hundreds on Slattery’s cheeks.  Sucking in the moisture like a dying sea-slug on a desert floor, the being closed his eyes and tried to meditate the entire discussion away from his conscious mind before saying, "I don’t hold grudges against any aliens, big or smalleven ones that smell like you, Detective Goddard."

Angered by the callous attitude, Goddard swung his tail around his body and slammed it upon the table.  He nearly knocked the Hermotite’s horn-rimmed glasses off his head.  "What would a pot-bellied, pig like you know about odor?"

The suspect regrouped himself in the chair, straightened his eyewear, and countered saying, "Sticks and stones; detective, sticks and stones . . ."

The officer of the court reached for his ray gun, but stopped short before pulling it from his waistband and disintegrating the nemesis on the spot. Recalling what his superior had said just last weekthat any more foul play would have him fired instantaneouslyGoddard instead reached into his bulging coat pocket and instead threw out five golf-sized, beautifully designed marbles like so many Yahtzee dice.

This caught Slattery’s attention.

The marbles bounced up.  Each ball orbited a small bright orb directly above the table.

"Notice anything unusual about this grouping, Slats?"  Goddard said loudly as he slid behind the creature and shoved his head towards the spherical entities.

"Yeahthere’s a blue one missing," he replied as he rubbed the ridges of his sore neck.  "You must have a hole in that moth-eaten jacket of yours."

The Hermotite laughed out loud, but to Detective Goddard, the noise sounded more a siren the precinct blew for lunch each day.

"You’re a funny guy, Sluggo," Goddard chuckled to himself as walked to the front of the circling orbs hovering three feet above the table.  "I bet you got a good laugh when you snuffed out those billions of life forms out like a swarm of Pervuvian locust caught in a bug zapper."  The long arms of the law reached out and clutched the accused by his mushy shoulder blades.

"You had the means, motive and opportunity to destroy that globe, Fatso; and if it takes me a million years to baby-sit you in this dungeon to extract the truth out of you, so be it."

Slattery shook off the detective’s grip as easily as a horse batting flies away with his tail.  "In fact, that’s exactly where I washome babysitting my thirteen squidlings, a billion par secs away from that solar system."

And that’s when Goddard laid down his final card.

"You forget, Slattery, I’m wise to you and your kind.  What’s it been, three, four months that the Hermotites developed a way to create mini-wormholes for teleportation?"

This time, not one but dozens of sweat beads rolled down the creature’s face.

"You could be in one place one moment, like your home, and more than a one hundred thousand light years away in an instant."  Goddard leaned into the suspect’s face before saying, "Do you want a lawyer now or after you confess?"

As Slattery wiped his face dry with the tip of his flexible pink nose, the inspector took that as an impending confession.  The detective crossed his arms and nodded his head in satisfaction.

Before he could call the public defender for the sobbing murderer, a harsh knock rattled the titanium door.

"Oh sorry, GoddardI thought the room was free," said the ex-partner as he stuck his head around the door.

"Wrong room, Dante," grumbled the disinterested cop who pointed next door and to the right with his thumb.

"Sure, I’ll take this one down there," the newbie replied as he dragged yet another red devil by its pointy tail to the inner ring of the police station for a similar crime against an innocent population living on a small rock circling a large sun.

by Joseph D. DiLella, New Mexico  ©2008

Writing is Joseph's passion and avocation, though, his day job is currently as a third year Assistant Professor of Bilingual Education at Eastern New Mexico University.  While in production, he pitched stories to the TV series Star Trek: Enterprise at Paramount Studios.  His tale, Cheating Destiny was an Alternate Selection for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Vol. 10.

 
 

Back
 

AlienSkin Magazine®  Copyright ⓒ since 2002 by Froggy Bottom Press and its Licensors.        All rights reserved.