Author Edward Bryant, selected "Willa And The Alien" by Dick Bellamy for First Place from 112 entries in the 2006 SFWoE SF/F Contest. Dick has given SFWoE permission to place his story on our web site for all to read. He wrote "Willa And The Alien" as an experiment to see if he could successfully tell a story backwards.
Keith Demanche has created a fitting piece of art for the story. Below is what he had to say about his artwork.
"For me, 'Willa And The Alien' is a story of dichotomy. Nothing happens, but everything changes. No one understands Willa, but we understand Willa. The Alien does not attack our world, but simply being here disrupts humanity. What I wanted to express in my art is the unseen bond between the two characters. They are connected outside the realm of the known. I tried to put all of that in there, in a palette based on those funky colors you get when a magnet sits on top of a TV-energy waves made visible."
Keith Demanche owns his own Marketing and Design firm Haunted Milk, and works for clients big and small with his wife Stacy and dog Fritz. In his spare 45 minutes or so a week he plays in the rock band Porter, creates art, and travels as far as he can.
First-contact stories--that critical moment when the human species first tries to establish communication with an intelligence alien--has long been a classic staple of science fiction. The often skeptical curiosity of sf and the generally accepted structure of drama being what they are, first-contact scenarios rarely go smoothly or well.
Those issues are in play for writer Dick Bellamy of British Columbia, Canada, who has admirably demonstrated the virtues of ability and perseverance in winning this year's first place award. In 2005 he placed two stories in the top ten, cresting at fourth place. Now, with "Willa And The Alien," he hits the jackpot.
Mr. Bellamy successfully plays it both ways. On the micro-level, the two characters of the title find a workable means of communication and discover they share a common bond. On the macro-level, humanity displays its often bungling bureaucratic approach to critical issues. Truth be told, the author's military and governmental representatives are uniformly parodic, played perhaps a little too broadly. You'd never want these clowns coping with real peril.
On the other hand, it's to the writer's real credit that he understands that such a civilization-shivering event as incontravertable proof that we're not alone in the universe would not wholly be treated as a solemn or even religious experience. Reality will be a lot more surreal. The government surveillance experts assigned to keep close eye on the crashed alien seem to spend half their time fantasizing about hitting on the sexy young female tech in their midst. The street-smart guy who owns the spiffy Camaro that gets smacked by the crashing alien is much more concerned about whether his wheels have been damaged than whether the extraterrestrial represents the end of the world as we know it. And so on.
Ultimately this is a wry, jaundiced tongue-in-cheek fable about the unlilkely friendship between an aging homeless woman and the near-term pregnant alien who plunges to earth in a nameless city in search of an unusual meal to satisfy pre-natal cravings. Both sudden intimates are maginal beings, each of whom has something valuable to offer the other. A quirky oddball humanity gives Mr. Bellamy's tale a distinct flavor that sets it ahead of its peers.
Now, enjoy reading Dick Bellamy's story below. After you have read the story, if you care to make a short comment about his story, you may do so by clicking on the "SUBMIT YOUR OPINION" link.
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"The alien really changed my life, not in the religious sense, although it could have, had I been the suggestible sort. But I am no longer the same person, since." Dr. Jim Butler read the phrase aloud to see if it made more sense when spoken.
It didn't. Frustrated, he tossed the hand-written document back on his desk and paced to his office window. He scowled out at the gentle, sunlit university scene, seeking inspiration; some hidden nugget of real information in her words. There were twenty pages of such blather and his report was due in half an hour.
"No longer the same person, indeed! Why not? Specify, quantify, explain, why can't you!" he growled.
However well-meaning, the writer didn't get to the heart of the problem. Jim let out a long hissing breath. If only it was possible to ask her.
"Yeah," he said to himself. One might as well try asking the alien.
Her name was Willa Puckett, and she was a bag lady. She wandered city streets pushing a supermarket trolley loaded with plastic bags filled with her possessions. What wasn't in the bags she wore. Two oversized sweaters and a draggy cardigan prevented a dun colored winter coat from being buttoned about her ample figure. Men's baggy jeans showed under three different coloured print skirts. On her feet were army boots, on her head a bright yellow sou'wester. Her hair hadn't seen a comb in more years than she could remember. In summer she hacked it back the way one might cut a hedge. In winter she let it grow. She smiled most of the time, and when particularly happy she hummed. But she never spoke. Along with everything else Willa had a PhD in Geology, plus a Masters degree in Archeology. And she had met the alien face to face.
Problem was, she was the only person who'd met the alien still lucid enough to communicate anything about it. And she couldn't talk.
"Anything?" asked Chairman General Guyes down the long table. A dozen pair of eyes swivelled to look at Jim Butler, Emeritus Professor of English.
"Nothing," he replied. "She uses words, but they don't describe anything useful. No hidden meanings, no disguised facts."
"To tell the truth, Dr. Butler, I confess I didn't expect her to be subtle." Bernard Guyes steepled his hands in a parody of praying on the polished board room table. "She is, after all, just a bag lady."
"With two university degrees," put in Dr. Patricia Lee.
"Obtained a long time ago when the lady wasn't two beers short of a sixpack," added Dr. Greg Halliburton.
"She is as sane as any of us!" exclaimed Pat Lee.
"Then why does she wander the streets?"
"Personal choice," Pat said.
"This isn't getting us anywhere, people," said the Chairman. "The President is waiting for our findings. And that Thing is still out there."
It lay in the alley outside the back entrance to Mario's Restaurant, where it had fallen on a passing car and awakened Willa Puckett two nights ago. An amorphous blob of something, vaguely colored - no two people seeing it could agree on either its shape or color - resting against Mario's dumpster like a discarded sack.
No human wearing less than full combat uniform and wired into Command Post Alpha was within a hundred yards of it now. The run-down shops and mean apartments for blocks about the alley had been emptied of their rightful inhabitants and were patrolled hourly by trigger happy soldiers with orders to kill.
The alley itself was blocked at both ends by Army tanks, their big guns pointing rather carelessly at each other. And the only other moving thing in the alley was a wheeled robot from the police bomb disposal unit which had drawn the job of monitoring the alien.
The Thing had made no move in thirty six hours, not even when a heavy rain shower had caused all human patrols to seek shelter. It behaved exactly like a discarded plastic sack. In fact, after regarding its color television image from the robot for most of two days and a night the Commander of the Invasion Containment Force was beginning to see it as such.
"Are you sure this is the Thing?" he asked for the hundredth time. "Is this really what those dummies saw?"
The Witnesses were all confined to the 25th floor of the local Sheraton Hotel. Guarded night and day by hard-eyed Special Service veterans with loaded and conspicuous machine pistols. Mario Campone, owner of the restaurant; his wife Silvia; Ned Snow, petty criminal and driver of the car; Paul Drake, petty criminal and car passenger; and Willa. Of the five, Willa was the most helpful. The others were...
"Loonie Toons!" declared Dr. Halliburton on examining them. He was the psychiatrist and delighted in his analysis mostly because it upset Dr. Patricia Lee, the psychologist.
"In shock," she insisted, scandalised by her colleague.
Neither analysis was hampered by the fact that the four witnesses who could talk merely babbled, and Willa, who wanted to help, was mute.
Willa was delighted by her new circumstances. Two lady doctors had examined her and pronounced her `amazingly fit and healthy.' A dentist had filled a cavity in one tooth and a pleasant hygienist had cleaned and polished her few remaining teeth. But best of all an ophthalmologist had provided her with new bifocal glasses, and she could see the world clearly once more. She knew it wouldn't last, nothing in her experience ever did. But she enjoyed the interval. It gave her time to sleep in a real bed. And bathe. And eat regularly. And write.
She'd forgotten what a joy writing was. Here she had an endless supply of ruled paper and more pens than she knew what to do with. So she wrote and wrote. Letting years of pent-up thought flow out in flowery phrases and dewy prose. The alien had told her that was what she did best, so she should do it. Who was she to disagree?
Willa had communicated with the alien, somehow. Despite the fact she'd vowed never to speak again. But she'd not really broken that self-made rule - she hadn't spoken aloud. When she contemplated the matter she knew she'd been in mental contact with the small thing, which was perfectly acceptable.
They'd had quite a conversation. And it had happened much faster than if she'd been talking out loud. It had been a nice chat, woman to woman. There was no doubt at all that the alien was female.
"That goddam thing bent my Camaro, man. Like it pushed the hood right down onna fanbelt. I'm pissed, I tell ya!" Ned Snow whined to his fellow drug runner, Paul Drake, on the Internal Hotel phone. But he was actually more concerned with something else about his car. "An' what's with the forensic analysis, man? They find that goddam stash, man, we toast!"
"But, man, that don' mean diddly. You hear what those Army creeps was sayin'?" replied Paul. "Man, we got hit by an alien, man. A freaking monster from outer space!"
"That sack a shit? You crazy? Some dork threw that off a roof. I find him, I'm gonna carve him a new mouth a liddle lower than the old one." Ned slashed with an imaginary long knife in the privacy of his hotel room.
"It's a real alien, I tell ya!"
"So what? He hurt my wheels, I change his face."
"You heard it, speakin' in your head, you lame prick!" spluttered Paul.
"That was nuthin' more than Mary Worth onna bloody radio!" insisted Ned.
"Who's Mary Worth?"
"The comic strip, asshole!"
"That weren't no bloody comic strip, man, that was real telephony!"
"Wassat?"
"Mind readin' you dumb prick!"
Had they listened to the calls these jokers made to each other, the Committee would have learned why the pair were playing babbling idiots. As it was, the team conducting the forensic analysis did find the heroin stash, a dozen pornographic magazines, and some very odd magnetic inconsistencies in the car's metalwork. They promptly sold the stash, and split the profits. Someone stole the magazines. The magnetic findings were classed under "anomolous readings" and buried in their report.
The Campones too had their own reasons for playing dumb. Their dumpster was illegally parked in the lane, and they'd recently received notice from the City telling them it would be impounded unless they moved it.
Alerted by the noise, when the alien hit the Camaro shortly after two in the morning, Mario and Silvia had been ideally situated to look out of their back bedroom window down into the alley and see what happened.
"That thing was glowing, Silvie. Lying there on the hood of that car, glowing." Mario whispered to his wife while the shower noisily ran in the empty bathroom. They both watched a lot of TV shows about aliens and government conspiracies.
"It was the moonlight, Mario," she whispered back.
"I don't think so."
"Well it didn't glow when it fell off the car, anyway," she insisted.
"But - you heard it when it was talking to that old bag lady."
"Could have been a radio in the car," she told him.
"Yeah, but it wasn't, was it? You saw it crawl and slither to the dumpster." The way he phrased it reminded her.
"It scares me to think about it," she admitted, shivering.
"I just don't want the City on my ass about the dumpster again, Silvie."
"Told you. We play dumb and act stupid. Pretty soon they leave us alone."
"This is a real nice place, Silvie. I could get used to this," he said.
"Then we better figure how to string these government jokers along," she replied.
Willa wrote and wrote. Eventually she would recapitulate her PhD thesis on Jurassic limestones and somehow manage to tangle it together with her later Masters paper concerning the monumental art of the early Hittites. But meanwhile she laid bare her life wandering the streets in several pages of tiny clear handwriting. She put down her accumulated wisdom on why humans hated each other in a rambling treatise full of exclamation points and triple underlinings. And, still smarting over her husband's infidelities of thirty years ago, she dealt with love and sex in a single blazing paragraph.
She also expounded at length on how detritus collects and eventually buries a city, and why the modern city would quickly succumb to its garbage should sanitary engineers suddenly cease to exist. It was as close as she could steer her woolly prose to anything about the alien.
For all his dedication and dogged determination to read all of her obscure outpouring, Dr. Jim Butler did not make the connection. But why should he? The only real link was in her admittedly tangled mind, and she had made a promise to the alien. And one thing Willa Puckett always kept was her promise.
"Hey! Didya see that?" shouted Observer Cummins, waking the Commander from his doze in the warm trailer.
"Wha'?" Commander Borovski jerked upright in his chair.
"The dumpster. It moved!" Cummins explained, jabbing his finger at the television screen.
"Shall I rewind the tape, sir?" asked Technician Sandra Spink efficiently, her slim finger ready on the button of the backup recorder.
"Moved? How?" asked Borovski, his mind still fuzzed with sleep.
"It shivered, sir. All around the Thing."
"Shall I rewind tape, sir?"
"Yes, Sandy. Anything to relieve the boredom." Borovski grinned indulgently at the buxom red haired technician, wishing fervently he could spend time alone with her.
The VCR wirred briefly, stopped, made loading tape noises, and a familiar picture appeared on the video monitor marked TAPE B.
"What are we looking for, Cummins?" asked Borovski.
"That, sir!" said the observer, pointing.
"Didn't see it. Pause and single frame it back, Sandy."
"Can't sir. It's a cheap machine. I'll have to rewind again."
Which she did, several times, until the Commander didn't blink or look away at the critical moment and actually saw Mario's dumpster shiver and dance an inch or so. Missed during this admittedly interesting exercise was what happened on the real time video monitor, the one marked LIVE.
It was late afternoon in the alley, and the dumpster had been soaking up spring sunshine for several hours. The smell attracted a grey feral cat which ignored the patient robot and leaped up onto the rim of the open metal box to explore the ripening contents. The robot's camera was focussed upon the sack-like alien and Observer Cummins was amusing himself by zooming the lens to give a tight shot of the alien's plastic-like surface. (He too had the hots for Technician Sandra Spink and she was behaving in such a prissy, holier-than-thou fashion he'd figured she was out of his league. Playing with the equipment prevented him from agonising over that assumption.)
The cat was dining on discarded steak when the dumpster shivered. The animal growled and crouched, prepared to defend its meal. When nothing further happened, it placidly continued eating. Being, as it were, in the middle of things, the cat was the only self-aware creature to actually see what happened next.
"Holy freakin' shee - it!" exclaimed Sandra Spink, blowing her ice goddess cover.
The two men followed her gaze to the LIVE monitor and watched the rusted steel container vanish like a burning sheet of paper. It left a rectangular edifice of packed plastic sacks and crumpled cardboard boxes which paused, briefly holding shape, before collapsing and emitting one yowling grey streak of animal life, departing the camera frame and the alley at top speed.
Under cover of the tumbled trash, the alien completed the process she had been engaged in ever since landing. Now there were two of them.
"It got away!" yelled Commander Borovski, reaching for his microphone. "Attention all units! Bogey loose and headed - uh - east. Correction - west - down the alley. Shoot on sight. I repeat shoot on sight!"
The cat took cover under the treads of the tank blocking one end of the alley and sat, licking a paw, congratulating itself on a full stomach. The stutter of automatic weapons made it cringe and flatten its ears, but when the raucous sound was not repeated it settled down to rest, unaffected by all the yelling and screaming which followed.
Patrol Unit Bravo was doing all the shouting. They had been fired upon by Patrol Unit Opera. Other than several severe cases of brown trousers, no one was injured.
Equally unaffected by the confusion, the aliens prepared to leave. Mother and daughter, their body chemistries invigorated with iron and carbon, activated their movement organs and began to rise up through tumbling trash.
Well inside the intense, modulated electromagnetic fields of both aliens, the police robot went crazy as its digital controls randomised.
"What happened to the picture?" yelled Commander Borovski, staring at swirling colored snow on all the monitors.
"Dunno, sir," replied Observer Cummins, desperately trying everything. "We have a massive malfunction."
"It's the alien. It's taken over," said Technician Sandra Spink, crossing herself. "We're toast."
"All units report. All units report," said the Commander, wondering why Sandra was unbuttoning her blouse. "Hello? Hello? Anyone?"
There were no answers. Borovski goggled at Sandra Spink's magnificent mammaries as she unzipped her pants.
"What are you doing, Sandy?" he gasped.
"It's the end of the world," she said, peeling off her panties. "Let's party!"
-I get these cravings,- the alien had told Willa that first night.
-Yes, dear, I remember them well. Pickles and icecream. Peanut butter and onions. It was different with each kid.-
-So, is it all right if I eat?-
-This garbage?- Willa asked, patting the dumpster. -Sure thing, deary. Help yourself. I do.-
Out in the alley the Camaro steamed, the only other sounds were gibbers of fear from its terrified passengers.
-Thank you. You are very gracious.-
-Think nothing of it.-
-You have children?-
-Two, dear. Long grown up and gone. I swore a vow of silence when I walked away from their detestable father.-
-So what do you do now?-
-I walk. I think. I wonder if some day I might write it all down, you know.-
-Yes, you should record your wisdom. It is what you do best, I feel it.-
-Thank you, dear. I hope your baby is all you ever hoped it might be.-
-I must eat now.-
-Don't let me stop you.- Willa smiled at the peculiar being, feeling the warmth of shared experience.
Terrified by the voices in their minds, from their bedroom over the restaurant the two Campones (in a later much-regretted fit of social conscience) made an anonymous call to the police telling of aliens and wrecked cars.
Shortly after that the first police car arrived on the scene and things got messy.
SFWoE Note: SFWoE thanks Dick Bellamy, the author of "Willa And The Alien," for allowing SFWoE to place his SFWoE 2006 Contest First Place Story on the SFWoE Website.
Well, what's your opinion of Dick's story? SFWoE invites you to send us your comments on "Willa And The Alien." Please keep your opinion relatively short and to the point, and we will place your remarks online.
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Mr. Bellamy you have succeeded admirably in this tale. Glad you won. Keep writing. Your dialogue is great and you have a great sense of humor.I really enjoyed it.
--- Aaron Albrecht Tokyo, Japan
I thought the story was clever and funny and very well-written. It was creative and original.Mr. Bellamy did a terrific job.
--- Angie Lofthouse Elk Ridge, UT USA
Good story. Some of the "supporting cast" seemed a little too "Keystone Cops" to me. However, overall it was a well-crafted tale.
--- Joel Fink Dallas, TX USA
You said you wrote "Willa And The Alien" as an experiment to see if you could tell a story backwards. Well, I think you did it!Keep up the good work.
--- Rob Johnson Fort Worth, TX USA
Dick Bellamy's "Willa And The Alien" is different -- not the "run of the mill."Thanks for a good read.
--- Mary Banks Buffalo, NY USA
You wrote "Willa And The Alien" backwards. That must mean the end of the story is the beginning of the story and the beginning of the story is the ending. Have I got that right?Dick, I do know one thing. Your story is much better than most short stories now days that do not seem to begin until some where in the middle and do not seem to ever reach an ending.
Your on to somthing, Dick. Keep writing!
--- Randy Fairchild Portland, ME USA
Thanks Dick for your story. I really enjoyed reading it.I think what I liked most about your story was the way you told your story.
--- Louis Montfort Flagstaff, AZ USA
To tell the truth, I had to read this story twice before I realized what a good story Mr. Bellamy has written.This story is a winner!
--- Margaret White Toronto, ONT Canada
