20 Weird Love Stories

The Cactus Critter-3

“Be right back,” said Lynn. She went back to the house on her own. The horse was getting closer. It had a tall rider on it. I walked toward it, hoping the rider would see me and see that I wasn’t afraid of him. Or her, as the case may be.

Don’t know if the rider saw me or not, but the horse increased its speed some, sending a jolt of fear through me. Lynn and I did not need this right now. Everything was falling apart around us. And it all happened so quickly.

As the horse got closer I saw that the rider was skinnier than was reasonable for any human. I also soon saw that the rider was green.

Just like the Harper’s Weekly article.

Lynn returned with two shotguns. She handed me one. I took it.

“Loaded?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, and raised her weapon high and held its aim on the approaching horse and rider, who did not break stride.

“The rider’s green,” said Lynn, wonder in her voice.

“Yup,” I said.

I stepped away from Lynn a few paces and raised my shotgun as well. Two distinct sources of firepower was way more intimidating than if we were clustered close together.

“What if shotguns don’t work on these alien critters?” asked Lynn.

“Then we might be slaughtered. Who knows what powers aliens have.”

Lynn nodded. “Got that,” she said.

“If things go bad,” I said, “I want you to know I wouldn’t have traded my time with you for anything.”

“Likewise,” said Lynn.

Then we turned our attention to the horse and rider. I felt the weight of the shotgun pulling my arms down, but reasserted myself and held the barrel fixed on the rider, who slowed down some and stopped a fair distance away.

It opened its mouth and sound came out.

Not exactly fair to call it a voice. More of a scratchy growl. Raspy. There were words there, though. English words.

“No harm,” said the green thing.

“Does it mean it won’t do us harm, or it doesn’t want us to do it harm?” asked Lynn.

“Don’t know,” I said. “Maybe both.”

The creature regarded us for a few seconds. We didn’t lower our weapons.

Then it dismounted and stood beside its horse.

“I’m looking for my pets,” it rasped. “Heard they were here. Crash site just over there.” It indicated the general direction in which we had rode to retrieve the ellies. “I found craft remains, but none of my pets.”

“How does that thing know English?” I said to Lynn in what I thought was real quiet, but not quiet enough to keep the green thing from hearing.

“Elementary language,” it said. “I learned it in a day.”

“There you go,” said Lynn. “It’s way superior to us.”

“Not good,” I said. “What kind of weapons you think it has.”

“Sheriff said something about a ray gun. Possibly.”

“What the hell is a ray gun?” I asked.

“Never mind,” said Lynn to me. Then she addressed the alien. “We don’t have your pets. We found them. But.”

“Careful, Lynn,” I said.

“But what?” asked the alien. It took a few steps toward us.

“Best to spill the whole story,” whispered Lynn to me.

“Says who?” I whispered back.

“I have a feeling about this—creature.”

“Fine,” I said, not feeling fine about it at all.

“We didn’t know they were your pets,” said Lynn to the alien. “We found out they tasted good. Real good. So we’ve been raising them for people to eat. Your pets are long gone, I’m afraid, but they have lots of descendants.”

The creature just stood there. For a long time. Staring at us. It had green eyes. Green skin. Green hair. Everything green. It was like a giant saguaro. All it needed was some thorns and it would fit the part perfectly.

“I don’t like that stare,” I said to Lynn.

“Easy, love of mine,” she said. “Give it some time.”

“I’m not lowering my shotgun.”

“Wouldn’t ask you to,” said Lynn.

“Where are the descendants?” asked the alien.

“Well,” said Lynn, “funny thing. They got taken away this morning. We’ve been robbed.”

The alien stared at us for a few more seconds. It was good at that. Loved to stare. I didn’t like it much. Made me nervous.

Finally it got back on its horse and went to turn away.

Lynn lowered her shotgun and started going after the alien.

“Lynn!” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Don’t want to let it get away,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Hey!” she said to the alien. “Hey! Cactus being! Wait up.”

The alien stopped its horse and turned in its saddle and looked back at Lynn, who was already almost caught up to it.

I ran after her. Couldn’t let her confront an interstellar visitor all on her own.

“Hey,” said Lynn. “Where you going? We’re sorry we—um—killed and ate your pets. Didn’t know they had sentimental value.”

We were now very close to the alien. It looked down at us. I swear I noticed some sadness in it. Not in the face. It didn’t have much expression there. But in the way it held its body. Like it was suddenly fragile or something.

“Going to go find them,” said the alien. That voice was still raspy and annoying.

“Take us with you,” said Lynn. “We can track them.”

The alien looked at the ground. “I can track, too,” it said.

I believed it. It didn’t take an expert to see where the tracks were headed. South. Towards Mexico.

“Okay,” said Lynn, “but you don’t know this country. We do. We want to find our herd. And the people that stole it.”

“And Lightning,” I said.

“And Lightning,” said Lynn.

“You seek atmospheric phenomenon?”

“My horse,” I said. “I miss my horse, Lightning.”

The alien did some more staring. Quiet. It fit into the west, that’s for sure. Not a lot of words from this one.

It stretched out a hand. A thin, kind of grotesque hand, I might add. It had a long green nail, and it was a little bit moist, and it was so skinny it felt like paper thin skin covering bone, but it had strength.

Lynn took the hand and the alien lifted her up onto the horse. Then me.

The three of us on that horse.

Good thing we were all small and the horse was big.

“Let’s go find Lightning,” said the alien.

“Yee. Haw,” I whispered into Lynn’s ear.

The alien could handle a horse. That put it high up in my book.

“Heard you visited president Grant,” said Lynn after we had gone a few miles. The ellie tracks went almost directly due south.

“I did,” said the alien.

“What’s he like?” asked Lynn.

“Big breakfasts. With lots of meat from my pets.”

That stopped the conversation for a while.

“So,” I said after a while, “did you want to—oh, I don’t know—destroy the human race for eating your pets?”

“Mary,” said Lynn, “we don’t want to give the aliens ideas.”

“No wish to destroy anything,” said the alien. “Only want some of my pets back. Will accept descendants. Without them I am—” here the alien struggled for a word. I figured whatever concept it was trying to unearth, there was no real English word for it.

“Lonely?” asked Lynn.

“Yup,” said the alien. “Lonely.”

“You don’t want to live in the west if you’re prone to loneliness,” I said.

“I understand,” the alien said.

“You travel a lot?” asked Lynn.

“Here and there,” rasped the alien. “I take my pets with me. Sometimes they try to escape to other planets.”

“Like ours,” I said.

“Yup,” said the alien. “Like yours. They get into the escape pods. It’s very inconvenient.”

“I like that you came after them,” I said. “I chased down one of the ellies just yesterday.”

“Ellies?” rasped the alien.

“That’s what we call them,” said Lynn.

“It’s fine,” said the alien.

“Don’t mean to offend,” I said.

No reply from the alien, so I couldn’t tell if it was offended or just didn’t care.

The alien stopped the horse.

“Ellies,” it said, “are just on the other side.”

We looked ahead to a fairly high hill. The tracks went up the hill, and, presumably, over the rise to the other side.

“We’re still a long way from Mexico,” I said.

“Mexico?” asked the alien.

“It’s another country,” said Lynn.

It nodded, then dismounted. Lynn and I did likewise and stood beside the alien.

“Should we make a deal, here?” I asked.

“Deal,” said the alien. There wasn’t the feel of a question in its voice. Just a repetition of my word.

“My partner here,” said Lynn, “wants to know how this will play out. The ellies were raised by us, so we feel we have some claim to them. On the other hand, the original ellies were yours, so, you certainly have a claim as well.”

“Your government says you can’t raise them anymore.”

“We heard that.”

“So they are worthless to you.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Maybe?” said the alien.

“Our hands might have had the right idea. Taking the herd to Mexico. Different laws there. We could still raise them.”

“But the market is gone,” said the alien. “You can’t sell the meat. It was a goodwill gesture. I got it straight from your president. I think he’s afraid of me.”

“Well,” said Lynn, “you are kind of scary looking. To easterners. Not so much to us. We’re used to weird things.”

“You think I’m a weird thing?”

“We all are,” I said hastily. “Everyone’s weird in their own way. Don’t you think?”

The alien turned a darker shade of green. Didn’t know what that meant.

“In any case,” said Lynn. “We can get around the laws. That’s what the west is all about. We make our own rules.”

The alien was silent, again, for a long time. Living in the west, I had gotten used to the strong silent types. They’re more common than weeds. But this cactus critter was a little unnerving the way it deployed it so casually.

“I’ll take five of them for me,” it said.

“Sounds more than fair,” said Lynn.

“The rest I will help move back for you.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

The alien looked me straight in the eye. Its green eyes did not blink. The sun beat down on them, illuminating them into strange jewel-like things that glowed and shimmered with a kind of trembling. The sight of them set the hairs on my arm standing straight up.

I wondered if it ate sunlight, like plants do. Like cactus. Was it here to drink up sunlight? Did it come looking for the ellies because it liked the desert?

“Ellies don’t last long on our world,” said the alien. “Here, they seem to live a long time.”

“That’s because we take care of them,” I said.

“Damn right,” said Lynn.

“I will tell your president Grant there is no reason to stop the trade in ellie meat.”

Well, you couldn’t have asked for a better outcome, I suppose. Our way of life was saved by an alien, by a creature from some other world. It felt fitting, in its way.

“So,” said Lynn, “we going to take back our herd?”

“Yup,” said the alien.

“Yup,” I said.

The three of us, bending low, went over the rise and surveyed the scene on the other side.

The ellies were all there, tied up to each other by lengths of rope so that they couldn’t get away without a miraculous feat of coordination, which they were absolutely not capable of. All of them, every single one, was rainbow colored.

I felt the alien’s dark mood beside me.

“Shouldn’t be colored,” it said.

“When we have them,” I said, “they’re not. Just plain old brown.”

Our ranch hands, all four of them, were on horses on the perimeter of the herd.

Mike was on Lightning. I didn’t like that.

“Think they stopped for a rest?” asked Lynn.

“Must be,” I said.

“Cactus critter,” said Lynn, “you want to go first?”

The alien stood and began walking down the hill.

The ellies, all of them, as though responding to a call, turned and looked at the alien.

Our ranch hands, Ned, Horace, Heather, and Mike, all froze. The alien kept walking. All the ellies surged toward it and surrounded it. The alien looked somehow straighter and more full of himself. Don’t how to describe it exactly, but the green it carried around, it seemed to fall into it, as though it was getting stained by the color, as though the color wanted to be a part of the alien.

The ellies, meanwhile, were losing their color. All of them were fading to brown.

Our good for nothing ranch hands stepped back from the herd and the alien.

Ned, who I could see was very agitated by the turn of events, reached to the side of his saddle and pulled out a rifle.

That’s when Lynn and I, together, began running toward the traitorous bunch. We had our shotguns held high in the air and we were whopping and hollering and raising such a fuss, that Ned, the coward, dropped his rifle and turned his horse around and galloped off.

He was soon followed by Horace and Heather. Their horses left clouds of dust as they thundered across the desert.

I hated seeing them go. Those were our horses, for one thing. I wanted to capture all of them and teach them a lesson. Rustling is the biggest crime anyone can do around these parts. Anyone. And my entire crew was guilty.

Mike’s face was a study in terror. I think he didn’t know if he should be afraid of the aliens, or Lynn and me. Or neither. Or both. He dug his heels into Lightning’s side.

Lynn and I kept running toward him.

Lighting saw me.

Now I’m not going to go all sentimental on you and say that Lightning knew me and didn’t want to leave me. I’m not going to do that. Because, first, Lightning’s a horse. And second, well, there is no second.

But I’ll tell the truth here and say that Lightning was not responding to Mike’s kicks.

Instead, she held her ground despite Mike starting to go a bit crazy and pulling on the reins and kicking for all he was worth.

Lynn and I just kept running.

Mike, finally seeing that Lightning was not going to do his bidding, climbed down off of her and began running away from us.

But we were too fast for him.

We caught up to him and tackled him. We went skidding to the ground, Mike rolling, me and Lynn tumbling after him. When we came to a stop, I was on top of Mike and he was cowering.

I slapped him a good hard one across the face.

He whimpered.

Worse than an ellie.

His face turned red.

I was ready to slap him again, and would have, if a bony green hand had not grabbed my wrist and held it fast.

Lynn, next to me, looked up at the sky behind me.

I fell back and looked at the green alien.

“No need for that,” it said.

I was breathing hard. Arizona dust scratching my throat.

“Sorry, cactus thing,” I said in a raspy voice to match his. “Won’t happen again.”

Mike confessed to the whole thing. How he and the other ranch hands aimed to take the herd to Mexico where they thought it would be easier to raise and sell ellie meat.

I asked him how he could do that to us.

He only shrugged, like it was no big deal he stole our herd out from under us.

“It’s the wild west,” he said.

“That’s no answer,” I said.

“It is for me.”

The sheriff took him and hauled him off to jail. Good riddance.

That left us without a crew.

But it didn’t matter.

Turns out the big green cactus thing liked living in the desert. Liked ranch life even more. And raising ellie’s, well that just tickled it so much, it decided to hire on with us.

You come out to visit the ranch, you’ll see it mending fences, feeding the ellies, and just plain fitting in.

It won’t talk much. Strong silent type.

Then, of an evening, you might find the three of us, alien, Lynn, and me, sitting on the porch, eyes turned to the skies enjoying the view.

You might even get the alien to point out its home, up there in the star spangled blackness.