“Hey,” Jude said softly. He reached out to give Al a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder, but caught himself at the last moment, remembering the strange reaction he’d had when they’d shaken hands. Al must have seen him reach out, though, because he stopped staring at his ship and looked right at Jude. His frown was now substantially deeper, and his lower lip, though thin, was pushed out in a pitiable pout.
It was equal parts heartbreaking and adorable.
Jude was becoming more convinced by the second that he’d made first contact with an alien dork.
“I’m sorry about your spaceship,” Jude said sincerely. “But, I mean, it doesn’t really look like it’ll be flying you anywhere any time soon.” He hazarded a glance at the spaceship. It resembled a crushed Coke can that had been lit on fire. “We’ll figure something else out, though.”
What that something else was going to be was a mystery—it wasn’t like he could rummage up another spaceship for Al, or make his cell phone suddenly capable of making intergalactic calls—but there were other ways he could be useful. Al was all on his own on this planet, far away from everything and everyone he knew, and that kind of isolation would make his problems so much worse. Jude was no stranger to loneliness—his boyfriend’s infidelity was just one instance in a long list of relationship bummers that had left him seriously lacking in the companionship department—but this little weirdo of an alien was more alone than Jude had ever been in his entire life. The least he could do was give him a friend.
“Jude will help Al,” Al murmured. He said it in a way that sounded like he was trying to reassure himself it was true. He searched Jude’s face with a question in his eyes, and Jude found himself nodding without a second thought.
“Jude will help Al,” he agreed. “I promise.”
Al smiled, soft and sweet, and whispered, “Thank you very much please, Jude.”
Poorly suppressing a laugh, Jude said, “C’mon now, we really do need to get going. Do you want anything from your ship? My car’s not that big, but if you have something important…” He trailed off, waiting expectantly for Al to decide one way or another.
Al made a strange series of sharp clicking noises in the back of his throat. The clicks were decidedly alien, but the action was familiar—it was Al’s equivalent of clicking his tongue or drumming his fingers on a table while he thought. Coming to a conclusion, Al held up one finger on both of the hands on his right side.
“One increment of time,” he said.
“What?”
“One increment of time,” Al repeated. Then, more sternly, he said, “You say in English ‘one second,’ ‘one moment,’ ‘one minute,’ and all these have equal meaning. This is stupid. My way is better.”
Jude snorted. “I never thought of it that way. Okay, I’ll wait for an increment of time, but only a short one. Remember, we don’t want to loiter.”
“Understood.” Al nodded firmly and proceeded to make a beeline for his ship. Jude, meanwhile, climbed out of the crater and watched from its edge as Al returned to the place where he’d originally crawled out from. Feet dangling out of what Jude could only assume was the ship’s doorway, Al struggled to crawl back in.
While Al did his thing, Jude strained his ears to listen for the sound of approaching vehicles, but all he heard was the soothing sound of the desert night as the breeze rustled the brush and critters scurried through the sand. He looked up and scanned for helicopters, just in case, and was met with nothing but the endless New Mexican horizon filled with so many stars, it looked like someone had thrown a handful of glitter at the sky.
“Okay, we can getaway drive now!” Al announced, emerging from his ship an increment of time later. He hurried back to Jude, something dangling from one of his hands.
“What’d you grab?” Jude asked, tilting his head to try and get a look at it.
“My set of three-sided dice,” Al announced with a wide grin. He held them up proudly, and Jude’s brain broke. The dice were big and fuzzy, like the type of dice people hung on their rearview mirrors, except that Jude couldn’t perceive them properly. Every time he tried to make sense of them, he felt himself going cross-eyed. The harder he stared, the less his brain could comprehend them.
“What the fuck?” he asked, averting his eyes and scrubbing them, willing his budding headache to go away. “How can dice have three sides?”
“Oh.” Al lowered the dice. “Maybe humans do not enjoy interdimensional objects?”
“Can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure before now,” Jude replied. He had stopped rubbing his eyes, but was pointedlynotlooking at the dice. “What do you use them for? Is it some crazy alien technology that will help you figure out how to call your home planet?”
“Uh, no,” Al said slowly, scrunching his forehead like Jude had said something idiotic and he wasn’t sure if he was being serious or not. “When I had my spaceship for the first time, I went to the vendor and bought my three-sided dice to put inside it. How do you call it in English? A decoration, maybe? I think, if the humans do the bad things you say they will, my three-sided dice will be a nice memory for me of my spaceship.”
“A memento,” said Jude. It pulled on his heartstrings, right up until he accidentally glanced at the dice again and got distracted by reality breaking. Al, noticing his wince, opened a compartment in his spacesuit and slipped the dice inside.
“Maybe it is better if I keep them away from your eyes,” he suggested.
“Yes,” Jude agreed wholeheartedly. “Maybe it is.”
* * *
“This contraption is very stupid!” Al said brightly as he circled Jude’s car, touching the siding with a couple of his hands and laughing in disbelief. “Very primitive and dangerous! I enjoy this bad machine very much, Jude.”
“Uh, thanks,” Jude replied, deadpan. He refrained from pointing out thathisbad machine wasn’t the one that was a pile of smoldering scrap metal at the bottom of a crater.
“How fast does it travel?”
