Pint-size Pineapples and a Great Big Cosmic Conundrum

Intergalactic Hydrangeas

Date: FOURTH ERA, 3984

Galaxy and position: MILKY WAY, PLANET COMMONLY KNOWN AS "EARTH"

Life: AFFIRMATIVE

***

Some people are autumn days and rainy afternoons and warm cinnamon spice lattes sipped in shady patios with friends; soft pastel shades and seafoam-colour hairclips and bubble tea; some are sugar cookies and scrunchies and fresh spring daisies and the smell of home-made bread.

Some people are cold coffee drank silently under the shadows of a skyscraper, sharp wine savoured beneath a chill winter's moon, a storm tossing a dark sea, black and red and fire and midnight and blood.

But not Toxy.

Him? He was more that feeling after you eat a mint and inhale and wonder how the hell something can taste of cold – bamboozled, and even more bamboozle because you're bamboozled as to why you're bamboozled. He was weird Norwegian folk music and randomly yelling at moths and symphony orchestras, and dwelling on something that a vicious 13-year-old girl said to you in a supermarket queue four and a half years ago, and wondering how in splark's name you forgot to put the cat out before you decided to crank up some Rammstein and parade around in your underwear reciting the Zimbabwean national anthem.

You get the picture.

He was British, but not in the kind of "suave, oh-I-say, stiff-upper-lip, old chap" kind of way – he had a more a sort of "well, butter my crumpets and call me a whore" theme going on. Despite the hoots from the native Eartherns about being an illegal alien, it was Toxy's grandparents who had arrived on this planet just in time to watch Turicon IV, their home-planet, get viciously ripped apart by angry intergalactic voles; he was third generation Turiconian, born and bred right here in New London. Still, he thought, his grandparents might've been better off by observing a few more Earthen customs – for example, inviting the neighbours round for a nice cuppa instead of eating their firstborn with a nice Pinot Noir. Ah, well.

Monday morning. Toxy was finishing up the knot in his tie – it was actually a ribbon, because Earth ties were too long for his 3'2'' Turiconian statue, which was infinitely annoying because he'd have been splarking tall on his home-planet – when a rumbling set the skies above him shuddering. A brilliant bluish-white glare ripped through the gloomy Earth sky, casting a harsh whitewash over the nearby buildings and whirring like one of those PlayStations in the ancient history museum, which were believed to have been holy sacrifices to ancient Earthern gods in the old times. He used to work there as a guard and sometimes he'd see people praying to them, but he just couldn't work there after what his boss had said to him.

Namely – "Toxy, you're fired."

A UFO – Underappreciated Fuzzy Orange, which was even more confusing considering that it was smooth and green – droned to a stop at a vast landing pad. It was a booming green expanse of rounded shamrock panels and smooth, galvanised juniper. It greened greenly to a very green stop just outside Toxy's garden, knocking a plant-pot over.

"My hydrangeas!" Toxy cried in dismay, glaring accusingly up at the spaceship, his eyes blazing with the heat of about sixty-two black puddings.

A passing Earthern walked by, spotted the interstellar chartreuse monstrosity, and rolled her eyes. "Bloody spaceships," she muttered. "Eyesore to the public, that's what."

"Mr. Toxicon Neoxrun," an automated AI voice spat at him. This was an intergalactic bright lime spaceship sent to Earth, an astrophysical outer-space pickle sent hurtling through space and time just to be here – a few centuries back, this might've been huge, but these days...

"You're late for work."

"I know, I know," Toxy grumbled, stumbling over the fallen soldiers that had once been his hydrangeas – I promised myself I wouldn't cry, he thought, choking up just a little – and spilling haphazardly onto the conveyor belt entrance of the ship.

The enormous basil orb swallowed him whole, a vast green sphere squatting fatly in the centre of New London's spaceship dock, Heathrow. There had been discussions about building another runway for about nine centuries now, but officials still hadn't fully made up their minds.

As Toxy rolled up the conveyor belt (the bosses called it the Good Morning Belt, and Toxy wondered if they realised that saying something was a good morning did not, in fact, make it a very good morning at all) towards his desk, he frowned. Of all the shapes, why a sphere, for the love of shrik? It was the biggest lump of non-aerodynamic spleesh he cared to name. It was as out of place as a violent rhinoceros in a toddler's petting zoo. It made about as much sense as this sentence.

"Why is that?" he asked suddenly, turning to face the mountain of heaving purple that was next to him on the Good Morning Belt.

"Why's wha?" Purply McPurple grumped grumpily.

"Why a big green sphere? Of all the shapes, I mean. Could've been an oblong, at least, or a horseshoe, or... one of those weird twisty pastas, you know, with the little green ones..."

Mr. Purple shrugged. "We're from outer space," he explained, looking at Toxy like if his brains were made of dynamite, it wouldn't even blow his antennae off.

"And...?"

"We come in peas."