MAGNIFIED 500X
MARGARET RICHARDSON KNEW everything that was happening on her block before it happened. Always watching from behind her fence, near a birdfeeder, she kept tabs on all her neighbors’ dirty habits. Handsome Mr. Ushoom down the street was plagued by a dangerous obsession with high-stakes gambling. He always wore yellow bellbottoms when he picked up his lottery tickets. Lucky and Bucky were two alien teenagers here to infiltrate the planet. They went around with their huge black eyes disguised as unassuming high school twins, with slicked back jet black hair and slack jaws, disguising their true evil motives. Reverend Gennity who ran the general store was some kind of religious lunatic posing as a friendly former postal worker and rearranging his opinions of whatever he was talking about to agree with whoever he was talking to just to make a friendly public face. Well, he’s not fooling me, thought Margaret Richardson. She’ d been hanged as a witch or raped and drowned as a gypsy seer and other forms of the same misfortune throughout her last sixteen or seventeen lifetimes and nothing much got past her anymore. The wind was fleets of banshees raking the air that day. It won’t be much longer, she thought, lifting the powerful pair of binoculars to her eyes again. Lucky and Bucky were walking down the street toward the grocers’ and Margaret increased the magnification for a closer look. The two were almost identical, with slim, curvaceous forms and heads shaped like streamlined footballs, with straight rows of tiny sharp teeth at the bottom. Were they twins or strange alien clones? Somehow no one else seemed to notice the unmistakably extraterrestrial characteristics they shared. Well, who knows. Customers look weird in this world. She was willing to consider it. Did they have parents? What did the parents look like? Well, let’s see how Gennity handles this incursion, thought Margaret. The two teenagers swayed up to the counter with their extraterrestrial way of moving across space and time. Reverend Gennity sat behind the counter with his sleeves rolled up, wearing his apron, with hair on the top of his head like white straw. Margaret flicked a switch and the audio amplification component kicked in. “Are you really a reverend?” asked one of the twins. It was getting harder to tell them apart now they both had pierced ears, if that’s what those things really were. Some kind of listening devices. “HEE hee hee!” exclaimed Gennity. “ME? A REVEREND? Now THERE’s a hoot,” the pudgy lump of pudding dissembled, as Margaret Richardson trembled with wrath just a few blocks away. She knew without a doubt that Gennity was most likely an ordained reverend in some kind of unearthly arcane temple, or he might be a Mason or something like that. She turned up the volume as he spoke again. “NAW, that’s just something the boys useta call me because I liked drinkin’ and playin’ cards so much. Boy, those were the days!” He was lying and Margaret Richardson knew it. She had to do something about it. “Back to order,” she lamented sadly, trying to summon a semblance of rigidity, then she said it more vigorously, “Back to order!” She put down the super-strength high-tech binoculars and smoothed out her skirt, made a half-turn in the direction of the door, then turned back and raised them to her eyes again. Someone else had come into the room wearing yellow bellbottoms. It was Mr. Ushoom! His sudden appearance presented a bit of a moral dilemma for Margaret, as it was he who had designed the special binoculars for her. They’d met at Neighborhood Watch and Mr. Ushoom had told her he was in the habit of inventing things for his friends to suit their personalities as customers. Then he’d given her these as a present, with apparent excitement at the prospect of being watched. “So you like to watch, huh?” he’d asked, with an insinuating grin, which she’d found titillating. Margaret watched him walk up to the counter and ask for three lottery tickets. “Coming right up,” she heard Gennity say, wiping his hands on the apron before queuing up three tickets on the little machine that spat them out. When it did, he handed the tickets to Mr. Ushoom and told him, “That’ll be $3.99.” “Thanks,” said Ushoom, reaching into his canary yellow bellbottoms and pulling out a banana shaped wallet, which he unzipped and rooted around in, pulling out four dollar bills and handing them over. “Keep the change.” “Can’t do it, mister,” said Gennity. “Lottery regulations. But you can put it in the tip jar. Hee HEE!” Lucky and Bucky started laughing when he made that high-pitched sound just like actual teenage customers might be expected to do, then they all had a nice gut buster over how it was not allowed to break the rules but they were all smart enough to figure out how. “We can do whatever we want,” said one of the alien twins. “That’s what you motherfuckers don’t understand!” and started laughing about it. Gennity looked at the aliens. “There’s something funny about you customers, but I like it.” Margaret Richardson put the binoculars down. More and more lately, it seemed she was the only one who DID understand. Mr. Ushoom had been so good to her. He was the only one who really seemed to understand her devotion to order. Now here he was, saying, “Keep the change,” and throwing away a whole penny. Was he working with the aliens or something? Worrying about Mr. Ushoom’s gambling habit and all the demons he was driven by consumed most of Margaret Richardson’s waking moments. That and thinking about the fierce passion he exhibited with his whole devil may care lifestyle. Margaret was the religious type. She had middle class values. Maybe Mr. Ushoom WOULD win the lottery someday, if faith was demonstrated by works. He went down there every Tuesday spending AT LEAST ten bucks every time. Well, I hope something comes out of it anyway, she thought, all the money he’s been spending on that flimsy soap bubble of a dream all these years. Margaret didn’t believe in wasting money. Mr. Ushoom had explained it as being more like an investment and lately she’d started thinking of it as continual purchasing of all those worthless tickets as his mustard seed. She fell asleep on her fainting couch, thinking about him, lost in beautiful dreams of going down a long yellow river on a banana shaped boat, dreams of Mr. Ushoom’s luxurious mustache sweeping over the planks of the boat, sweeping over Margaret Richardson’s vulnerable, pink, plump body, sprinkling her with mustard seeds. She was lost in these dreams for an uncertain length of time when the phone rang. “Maggie? It’s Barry Ushoom! Up for a visit?” “Oh! Mr. Ushoom . . . well, sure. About how long?” “I’m right outside your door. Brought a couple friends.” “Well, sure. Hold on a second.” Margaret Richardson hung up her phone and looked out the little peephole in her door to see Mr. Ushoom standing there with Lucky and Bucky. Their slitted, red eyes and tilted heads and strange rows of small, razor sharp teeth. Was he some kind of alien, too? Not Mr. Ushoom! With trepidation, she slid back the bolt and opened her door to let them all in. “I’ll put on some coffee if you like.” “Sounds great!” enthused Mr. Ushoom, who walked in first and gave her a big hug, smiling at her, with his whole huge mustache seeming also to smile. “We’d prefer tea,” said one of the twins, both of whose bodies were going through some kind of accordion-like expansion and contraction after coming in from outside. “Sure thing,” said Margaret, flustered from her encounter with the swashbuckling Ushoom. “I’ll be right back.” She went into the kitchen to put on the coffee and tea, followed closely by Mr. Ushoom, who told her, sotto voce, gently slipping one arm around her waist, “I hope you don’t mind me bringing the twins. We were at the store together.” “Oh, I suppose not.” Hopefully she could get those creatures out of here and she and Mr. Ushoom could have a nice conversation about moderating his gambling habit or something else might happen. She and Mr. Ushoom reentered the living room, where the twins sat clicking their jaws in one corner, curling and uncurling their bodies unfathomably. “Listen,” said one of them. “We know you think we’re aliens.” “Yeah, we’re NOT aliens!” said the other, its forehead retracting to reveal some inner mechanism, then reconfiguring again seamlessly. “Oh—” said Margaret. “Listen, customers,” said Mr. Ushoom. “I’m sure she doesn’t think anything of the sort.” “Yes she does!” “Does too!” “Just ‘cause we’re the only teenagers on this block doesn’t make us sub-customers!” “Don’t call us aliens no more! OKAY?” “Doesn’t mean we’re not real customers!” These two were aliens, all right, but Mr. Ushoom didn’t seem to know it, and Margaret didn’t want to spoil her chances of getting to know him better. Ushoom seemed like a good sort, with his yellow bellbottoms, his lottery tickets, his swashbuckling devil may care life of gambling and fortune and danger and chance. That ten bucks weekly added up, she thought. Mr. Ushoom had surely spent hundreds of thousands by now! Someday it was sure to pay off. Mr. Ushoom was making an investment in a beautiful future for both of them. The tea was ready. Margaret stepped into the kitchen, poured everyone’s cups, and came back out. “Of course I don’t think anything of the sort,” she said, handing a cup of tea to one of the two identical aliens, which retracted its outer jaws to reveal a third inner mouth in response. “I was a teenager once, too.” Then she handed a cup of tea to the other one, which rotated its eyeballs in both directions at super-speed to demonstrate gratitude, and handed a cup of coffee to Mr. Ushoom, who smiled broadly, holding it up to his giant mustache and saying, “This smells like some GOOD JAVA, Maggie!”
Zack Kopp holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and blows a blue harmonica. You can find his frequently-updated blog at www.campelasticity.com and all his books at Amazon. His latest work of fiction, Main Character Syndrome, was published in Feb of 2024, and a collection of interviews, essays, and commentary called Rare But Serious was just published. Kopp lives currently in Denver, Colorado.
