Page 11 of Homebound
Arlo assigned himself to light duty on the account of his injured hand. It wasn’t clear why the cut in his palm prevented him from going up and down the elevator, but it fell on Gemma and Ruby to haul up the bucket of gruel. Ruby gave out bowls. Arlo, operating with one hand, went up the corridor with a ladle to pour the mush into the bowls inmates dutifully held at the ready.
Gemma trundled along holding the bucket.
“Now, you so much as blink funny, this lunch is passing you by,” Arlo warned Little Green Man.
The alien bared his stumpy blackened teeth at the helpers but did nothing more than hold his bowl up. Today he dispensed with his top and paraded around the cell with bare torso, showing pale skin reminiscent of a frog’s belly and covered by coarse sparse hairs. In Gemma’s revised opinion, he took the prize for the most repelling creature on the cell block, both in appearance and personality.
The two Birdies held up their dinnerware daintily. They averted their round eyes and turned away their bizarre flattened heads almost shyly. They were clearly hungry, and the only way to get food was this forced interaction with their jailers. The two were skittish to the extreme.
“Yo, big boy. What’s doing today?” Arlo smiled at the next prisoner as he ladled the gray mush into his bowl.
A groaning, vibrating grunt answered him from the cell. Gemma jumped and took an involuntary step back, sloshing the contents of the bucket. The shape inside filled the cell’s cubic footage almost to capacity. A mountain of a beast, though he stood on two legs, looked at her out of soulful, gentle brown eyes with long lashes.
“Good God,” she muttered, making Arlo laugh.
“You haven't noticed this one? He’s hard to miss.”
“What is he?”
“An Obu alien.” Arlo added another ladle to the inmate's bowl. “The Obu can’t speak any of the complex languages, only their own, which is as much of a language as the sounds of a flushing toilet. Gurgles and oinks like a pig, nothing else.”
“Can he understand us?”
“Not sure, but not likely,” Arlo clearly reached the end of his knowledge of the Obu. “I know they conduct business and trade with other people.”
“I can’t imagine how they do it without a language.”
“Suppose it’s like a game of charades with them.”
As they moved along, the Obu emitted several low-frequency, high-amplitude sounds, his eyes glued to Gemma.
“What does he want?”
“Attention. He’s pretty tame, like a big puppy. Ruby rubs his back sometimes. Me - I’m not into rubbing no alien body parts.”
Gemma glanced at the Obu again, and his doleful eyes looked right back. The creature was clearly uncomfortable cramped into his cell.
“Aww, poor soul.”
Arlo stopped and looked her in the eye.
“They’re prisoners, Gemma. Criminals and assholes, all of them. They are not cute. Remember that.” He sounded exasperated.
Gemma shifted the bucket with gruel. “I remember.”
“Good.”
They reached cell number 34. Perali alien, Arc, who Ruby talked to sometimes, casually loitered by the bars, his bowl at the ready.
“Hello, beautiful Gemma,” he said to her and smiled. His speech held a fair amount of accent, a choppy staccato typical of the Perali. But he spoke fluently and obviously understood humans just as well.
“Hey, I come and feed you every day, and you never tell me I’m beautiful,” Arlo complained as he poured.
“My nut sack is more beautiful than you,” came a smooth reply. “Truth hurts, doesn’t it.”
“The truth is, you’re an asshole.”
“You’ve told me that before.”
