Trinity

I said, "That's insane!! She loves me. Why would she want to go with you!!"

The dude just looked at me like he couldn't believe he was arguing with a creature so inferior. He finally said, "She is not authorized to be here. It might alert your authorities to our presence."

Then he made a sound of annoyance turned away and said, "I'm not here to debate this with you earthling. Come Stella, the portal will only stay open for a few more minutes."

Stella said angrily, "I told you. I'm not going back. I have a life here with a man I am committed to. Nothing that you say or do will make me leave him."

Mr. ET said scornfully , " You cannot be committed to a lower life form. That isn't legal. Either come with me or I will take you by force."

At that, he grabbed one of Stella's arms and began to drag her out the door. Evidently the guy had some kind of UFO parked in our back yard. Stella tried to yank her arm away.

I had to do something. There was no way I would win a physical contest with the guy. But that's not the way I do things. I said casually, "I know that you're an alien overmind and all buddy. But did you notice that everything you've done since you walked in here has been recorded."

I pointed to the tiny security camera in the corner of the ceiling and said, "If you're kidnapping Stella because your Invidian masters don't want her to reveal your race's presence. How do you think they're going to react when they find YOU proving that extraterrestrial life really exists via TMZ and Fox News?

I laughed, trying to sound more confident than I actually felt, and added, "We have this thing called the internet. It isn't in your league. But I can assure you that you will become a worldwide viral sensation if you don't get into your flying saucer and truck your way back to wherever you came from. "

Mr. ET stopped and looked at the camera. He seemed puzzled. Apparently overminds aren't that observant. Or maybe he'd underestimated us earthlings. I knew exactly what he was thinking. I said informatively, "You're screwed. There's nothing local to erase. You'll never find the recording. It's streaming to a cloud account. So, smile!!"

The alien dropped Stella's arm and turned toward me. He said, "You won't be ABLE to report it if you've been vaporized." At which point he pulled out what looked like a fountain pen. I didn't seriously think he was going to write me a check."

I wasn't frightened. I was uplifted. I thought to myself, "At least I'll die defending the woman I love." Then, I heard a resounding gong. The light went out of Mr. ET's eyes and he dropped like his strings had been cut.

Stella was standing behind him posed in her follow through like Serena Williams crushing a forehand at Center Court. She was holding an old fashioned cast-iron frying pan in both hands. THAT was a very effective low tech solution to a high tech problem.

The little beacon in my head flared intensely. It was Stella soaring with joy. She said, "I was always worried somebody would come after me. I think we're finally safe."

Of course, that presented us with a new problem. We had a body to dispose of. There are lots of ghost towns around Albuquerque. The nearest was a place called Golden. Golden was the gold mining center for the entire Albuquerque area in the 19th Century, hence the name. It featured a Catholic church, saloons, businesses, a school, and even a stock exchange.

But the gold ran out at the end of the Century and by the 1920s Golden was ghost-town. Their old cemetery is located next to the renovated church, which was built in 1830. Stella and I drove the thirty miles from our house with Kalel belted in the back ala Weekend at Bernie's.

The area was totally deserted, as we had expected it to be. I parked and left the lights on. We dragged the body through the brittle desert scrub and into the area where the old graves are. I was aware of the urban legends I was mixing by burying an extraterrestrial in a ghost town.

The ground was mainly sandy wash. So, the digging was easy. It wasn't like they'd have the dude's fingerprints on file. He would be a mysterious unknown. That is, if they ever discovered him. We dropped him in the hole and covered him up. Then we made our way back to the truck.

It was ten o'clock when we finished our ghoulish business. I flopped in my chair next to the fireplace. Stella was sitting serenely in her usual position on the couch. I said, "Do you want to talk about it?" After all, she'd just killed a man.

She looked at me calmly and said, "There's nothing to talk about. I could never leave you. So, I did what had to be done."

I dug farther. Why? Maybe it's because I'm an insecure weenie. But then again, Stella had just KILLED somebody. I said, "How does it make you feel?" Okay snowflake!! That's enough!!

She said simply, " You are the man I'm committed to and Kalel was about to turn you into a cloud of constituent particles. I couldn't let that happen. I promised to be your life's companion, to support you in every way. I meant it."

And that captured all that mattered in one simple statement. Married people look out for each other. That's a constant no matter what planet you're from. This beautiful woman might have stepped out of a wormhole from another arm of the galaxy. But she understood what love and loyalty meant.

*****

Time passed and we grew old. Stella was fascinated by aging. She told me that the causes of aging are well understood and if there was knowledge there was a way to manage the process.

We call it epigenetics here on earth. We've even started doing serious telomere and gene manipulation research. But the people in Stella's world had perfected the process eons ago.

It was like visiting a tanning salon. Every citizen went in for a lifecycle treatment. You lay in a special device. It scanned you and repaired any defects. Then you were good to go for another cycle. Since those cycles were similar to an earth lifespan the citizens in Stella's world lived a very long time, always in perfect physical health.

Now we were both experiencing the weight of the happy years we'd spent together. Stella's outrageous beauty kept her from the classic ravages of time. In fact, she was beautiful at any age. I just got old.

My commitment to fitness kept me relatively healthy. But there was no getting around the dire diagnosis. It was draining my life-force and Stella was distraught. As things started getting unbearable, my wife loaded me into our truck, and we headed south.

There was a spectacular, starlit desert sky as she parked next to the place where we'd first met. Then we began the painful journey through the Journada del Muerto to the obelisk. Four miles is a long walk for a nearly dead man, and it took hours. Stella supported me every step of the way, arm thrown over her shoulder, like a warrior wounded by life.

The twelve foot high monument was visible as a black presence against the star-washed sky. The desert was silent. The wind blew lightly from the west. I was sweating and panting with effort. Stella released my arm and leaned me lovingly against the black lava of the obelisk.

She was wearing the catsuit and arm device that she had on when I first encountered her. She walked several yards past the obelisk and did something with the device. The air began to shimmer and the stars in that part of the sky disappeared, to be replaced by a miniature galaxy.

She came back to me, put my arm back over her shoulder and helped me to that spot. She said, "We're going to make you well again my love."

EPILOG

It was the dead of night at the Trinity site. The surroundings were as dark and lonely as only a location deep in a desert can be. Then there was a shimmering that grew into an indistinct shape, like a galactic pinwheel. The shimmering parted like a curtain and two people stepped through. Then it disappeared.

The male was fit and youthful looking. The female was an absolutely gorgeous specimen of womanhood. They stood together for several long minutes staring contemplatively at the night sky. Then they turned and strolled hand in hand down the path toward the distant road.

She said in the dubious tone of a long married wife, "Are you sure the truck will start, Dear??" He said in the voice of an archetypally patient husband, "Of course it'll start my love. It's only been a day. Now let's get some breakfast. We have a whole lifetime in front of us."

Author's Note:

I know my stories don't fit any single category. It's not something I even think about when I'm writing. My only aim is to entertain. Still, I've always wondered what it would be like to write a fire-breathing formula Loving Wives piece like the Wizards of Angst post here. I gotta tell you, I really tried on this one. But I just can't do predictable. So, mea-culpa -- I wandered off the reservation one more time. But I DID have fun while I was doing it.