INCOMING AVIANS AND ARDENT INVADERS: REUNIONS FOR THE ONCE CAPTIVE CARTERS
By Quillon42
There was really no way in which Janet could have climbed to the stars the way she had wanted. For all she had known, Cal was not coming back anytime in the scope of her existence. She remained beside herself with anxiety over this for such a spell of time and then she permitted herself to soften, to relax, and to accept the idea that her other half from across the interplanetary spread was one to never be beheld again by her own eyes.
Through frightening fights across the cosmos, there were ships and squadrons alike who were brought down by the sheer shrewdness of the Styrolians. An average such alien was inhuman and very unyielding, and he or she would derive much of what was desired in a given day by way of making other races suffer in space. So it could be posited in fact that soon these people would possess all the planets, their peoples, and their resources in due time, if matters continued to play out sadly in their way.
Thought involving such grim outcomes on the part of such a savage antagonist as the Styrolians made tenderer people such as Janet Carter very depressed. In a wry kind of fashion, though, the idea of alien domination was somewhat of a mercy, insofar as it might actually take the woman's mind off of the limitless loneliness that she had suffered season after season, she looking across the horizon and into the infinite exosphere and finding nothing harrowing her from the lonely oneness she felt always.
Within the diminutive cabin in which she shared her life with her gruff yet gracious grandfather, her playful and precocious sister, and her loving and loyal brother who could never think to act either traitorously or thespianically (so terrible was his talent in the latter in fact), Janet found herself ever so surrounded by affection indeed yet still so sullenly alone. Missing from her existence was the element of intimacy an amorous man could provide, to soothe her throughout the infinitude of isolated nights.
Similarly separated from such connections throughout so much of his own existence was Cal himself. Grown from a tube rather than from a womb, the extraterrestrial interloper had not even so known the compassionate care of a mother, to say nothing about a lover. That he had been paired most recently with an alien most uncouth named Gropper, a handle most apropos in light of his abuse toward the opposite gender, only served, at least initially, to bar Cal ever further from an understanding of love.
All of this unfortunateness for this visitor from the void changed when he met Janet. Sustaining an accidental shotgun discharge during a scuffle with the Earthen individuals (a conflict which Gropper had stirred), Cal was looked after by the delicate Carter dame, she tending to his wound and talking him through all the discomfort. It only took so many minutes for the two to navigate from the solitariness each felt to determining that the one was a soulmate for the other and vice versa.
Pulsing through the woman's mind at the moment was the memory of the two of them by the horses out front, Miss Carter and Cal Styrolian snuggled up and bating each other's breath with lips so long bereft of the kindest of contacts. She remembered having to shoo away the mare who kept on trotting up, the latter seeking the attention she would usually get from a fellow lady who was a human weary of the war beyond her own world as well as the desolate backdrop of her too tranquil farm.
Now Janet looked outward and upward again into the ever-scaling yonder, she wishing once more for a euphoric experience akin to the one she had then with Cal. As the stance would so happen during this evening, though, there would indeed be an animal-associated encounter that would uplift the spirits of this solitude-cursed Carter sister, but it would be one which was not equine but rather avian in nature and which in turn made the woman feel as if she had wings on which to soar.
Energetically the most minuscule of canaries appeared upon the wooden gate, just alongside Janet. She wouldn't be able to accept the sight of it in a lucid dream, but there the bird was, she alive and preening herself now all the same. Particularly the pet was Cleo, the cutest of feathered familiars for whom the younger Carter daughter had cared for a number of years, and who was seemingly shot out of existence after that egregious Gropper gathered a scattergun into his hands.
Yet as it had now appeared
[CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP CHIRP]
she, at least, was back in Janet's life once more; for certain the agrarian girl's little sister would be all the more ecstatic about this. Now the beauteous brunette reached carefully, deliberately for the animal estranged from her homestead by the evilest of interlopers, she afraid that a sudden wayward motion would frighten the tiny flyer away. It remained there nonetheless and very serenely it seemed, as if the bird wished for a human to hold her as much as Janet wanted Cal to come back and do the same.
It was just then that the cutest Carter had caught sight of what looked like a small scroll affixed to the neck of the canary by a small ribbon. Janet cautiously scooped Cleo up with an open hand and, covering the precious pet lightly with her other palm, took the bird back to the cabin.
For the time being here, Cleo would have to make do with the carrier used often in past years to take her to the veterinarian. Before announcing the magnificent news to her sweetest sibling, Janet made sure to relieve the comfortably captive canary of its postal burden. Gaily and lovingly the other Carter daughter stroked her pet's neck, the latter more docile than she had ever been before the Styrolians rolled on in, while the older girl gazed at the words scrawled upon the secreted scroll.
Dearest Janet: I cannot begin to express how lost I have been considering your crushing absence from my existence. Even in the vastest reaches of outer space where I experienced so much emptiness through propulsion in a plastic ship across a cosmos that did not even qualify as green-screen-created, I have not known such a vacuum as I know now the one which resides within my soul and without you.
Verily, no swing upon a string in front of a black velvet tarp of stars could replace the passion of displacement in which I had engaged with you, my most serene of seductresses residing with those of my race's most sworn enemy. And each evening's tempting titillates and torments again and again, merely the memory of what I spent with you compelling me to come back as quickly as I can. Believe me when I tell you, Janet: as sure as our side's laser cannonfire reflects the lowest possible common denominator of cinematic computer generated imagery, so certain too is the sureness of my return. You will receive an arrival from an alien again within the next several hours…but this time the visit will be not fraught with danger, but rather frantic with desire.
An extraterrestrial who will never alien-ate your affection ever and on…Cal The Tuber.
Gazing at the ether above her once more was Janet, she pushing Forty but still provocative of figure as she stood there curvily crammed into her Eighties Jeans. A minor allotment of minutes, as far as she was concerned, separated the longing lady and her passionate person from parsecs away.
Soon the cabin's birdcage was repaired and Cleo restored thereto, much to the delight of the younger Carter girl. Janet in turn hoped that Cal would be restored to her side as well. Across the den, she couldn't help but notice the glumness of her brother as he peered wistfully on while their mutual sibling enjoyed mothering her canary anew. Grandpa noticed this as well, and went over to his older daughter to speak in confidence.
"He's down in the dumps because even though his sisters have just been or will soon be reunited with their loved ones, he will never see the likes of his dog Vicious again."
"It's a shame; really it is," mused Janet ruefully.
Granddad merely sighed. "What to me is the most major tragedy there is that, between the two of them really, the better actor was bumped off."