Alien or Alian

The crisp March air made February’s leftover feculent mounds of snow that were scattered all over campus, a minor inconvenience to Belrynn’s students. The only place free from the squalid sight were the outdoor sports grounds, and Ozias had been thanking his lucky stars for the past week that football tryouts were going to be on for two weeks.

He sat sideways on the fifth row of the cardinal red and amber yellow coloured bleachers, one heel crossed over and pinned under his thigh. Splayed before him on the aluminum seat was a decrepit blue notebook, thick with pages of inane and fantastic scribbles of formerly attempted story ideas. Ozias had dug it up from the depths of the few unpacked bins in his bedroom closet. He’d had the notebook since he was 14, but hadn’t touched it since the fall when he started university.

Not a single one of his imaginative ideas ever made it off the pages and onto a word processor because they were never solid enough or sensical enough or stimulating enough, at least to him anyway. For as long as he could remember, writing had always been an exhilarating hobby for Ozias, but it also tended to call for quadruple the amount of brain power, creativity that spanned the seven seas, commitment and drive that lasted an eternity, and if he was really having trouble developing plot points, a sacrifice to the gods of fictional writing (if there were any). His parents had always provided their obligatory praises of whatever inadequate draft he’d stapled together, but Ozias could never take their sugary opinions seriously.

But now, things were different, things were fresh, things were plentiful.

Not only did he have an idea he could actually work with — aliens, though an unforeseen and in times past a dreaded topic, currently made for exotic and engaging content — he also had a sizeable assembly of readers (both the Knillimhyr’s and Corte’s agreed on the condition that the spelling ‘alians’ be used consistently) who were more than willing to lend their eyes and share their thoughts on whatever tale Ozias constructed.

Things were...looking up.

And as Ozias looked up from the withered notebook pages, he was just in time to see Ezra catch a football that’d been thrown 30 yards from one of the goal boxes. It was a near fumble, but after two months of practicing in the heavy snow with whoever he could each week, the fact that it was only ‘almost’ a fumble, was still a success.

Ozias hollered and clapped as loud and brazenly as he could, which wasn’t much to any ordinary onlooker, but for him it was way more than the standard amount of expression of approval he ever gave out.

Ezra pulled off his helmet then slammed the football against the ground in celebration, leaving it to bounce gaily astray. More shouts and roars came from the other team members to commend his mostly sensational catch:

“Ayyye! And he gets one!” Johns howled. He removed his helmet as well, and threw his head of golden locks to and fro in a celebratory gesture.

“Do we got ourselves a wide receiver in the making here, or what?” Kramer shouted. He made a triangle with his gloved hands, pressed them around his lips, and let loose a round of wild, high pitched clicks resembling that of bats, Belrynn’s mascot.

The rest of the team followed suit with cheerful noises, and though cringing at the collective sounds, Ozias smiled at the blatant show of support.

The story of Ezra’s arrival had gone like this:

The Mayor of Elbel Court, Nina Knillimhyr actually had another son, and Belrynn University’s Football Captain, Ethen Knillimhyr actually had a brother — an identical twin brother. This twin brother, Ezra Bode Knillimhyr was his name, stayed hidden and isolated and homeschooled for more than a decade because first, it was a known custom of Elbel Court for certain parents to homeschool their children for at least 10 years, and second, Ezra Knillimhyr had apparently developed an acute phobia of conforming to typical North American school regimes, leading Nina Knillimhyr to take great pity by instead allowing him to travel here and there around the world and take in the sights through an instructional lens. Homeschooled and living reclusively in the manor until a more mature age of 16, Ezra Knillimhyr had finally taken off, accompanied by his out-of-town cousin, Kaine Knillimhyr, and Sid’s out-of-town cousins, Lyza and Dimitri Corte.

But now, at the tender age of nineteen, Ezra Knillimhyr had returned in December from his educational travels purged of his phobia and yearning for companionship. He came to his mother one dark and snowy night ready to officially be exposed to the town, and begin studying in a formal setting. When January came, the second semester of the school year commencing, many Elbel citizens and Belrynn students were shocked beyond words, but the few who had long known of Nina and Rhys Knillimhyr’s twin children were merry beyond belief that the eldest twin was at last getting a savoury taste of an ordinary life.

The one thing that caught everyone, including the Knillimhyr’s and Corte’s, by surprise was Ezra’s sudden interest in football (Ethen and Ozias being the only ones unsurprised by the twist). No matter how joyous everyone was about Ezra Knillimhyr’s introduction to the town, no one was more so than the Belrynn Bats. Another Knillimhyr on the football team only spelled more propitious things, both on and off the field.

A sharp whistle cut through the team’s animalistic acclamation.

“All right, all right, let’s break — five minutes!” Coach Morrison was an intimidating figure, but Ozias knew from accidentally ending up at the sports grounds once trying to find the student centre back in September, how hospitable the man actually was. “Good catch, Knillimhyr! Keep it up.”

“Thanks, Coach!” Ezra tucked his helmet under his arm and started jogging to the bleachers. In one suave show of strength, he used one hand to climb the short metal fence acting as barrier between the seats and the field, and landed superbly on both feet on the other side. “Did you see that!” he said to Ozias, as cheerful as a child. He started jogging again, this time up to the fifth row where Ozias perched.

“I did,” Ozias replied, beaming. After witnessing almost an hour of Ezra running back and forth on the field and then seeing his impressive fence climb, Ozias wondered just how much energy the alian boy had. “You stink.” He waved a hand in front of his face to clear away the scent of perspiration clouding him as Ezra drew near.

“Yes, like hard work and awesomeness!” Ezra moved past Ozias with swift, high steps to get to the spot next to the worn-out notebook.

As he did, Ozias had caught a flash of Ezra’s sweat-soaked sleeveless top clinging to his defined abdominals so tightly that there was a light outline of them through the fabric. Ozias could practically feel the blood rushing to his capillaries as he recalled the last and first time he’d seen Ezra shirtless: him bleeding in a bathtub due a gash on his stomach caused by his possessed cousin all those months ago. The wound had since healed then leaving a plane scar, but Ozias couldn’t deny the itch of disappointment that he had never gotten to see it for himself.

When Ezra sat down, he swung his helmet over into Ozias’ reach, then snatched the notebook to get a better look at its written contents. “Bout ready to start on that masterpiece of yours?”

“Just about,” Ozias partially confirmed. He wove a hand into the amber yellow face mask of the helmet and let his other hand cradle part of the cardinal red outer shell. “Tonight I’ll definitely start writing and see where it goes. Better than not starting at all, again.”

In the corner of one of the pages, Ezra grinned, amused, at a diminutive and androgynous stick figure doodled beneath a speech bubble that said in honed pencil penmanship: ’These Alians are our brethren, for they bleed just as we do!’

“That’s the spirit, Oz!” he said. “Start, start, start. Try, try, try. Oh, and before we go home we gotta stop by the Manor. Ethen’s making me give him a recap of tryouts this week and then again next week, so he can ‘give me a few pointers’.” Ezra shut the notebook with a pained sigh. “Promise you’ll jump in and save me if he starts dishing out entire tutorials.”

Ozias had tuned out at the mention of Ethen’s name. The younger twin had moved out of his ‘fun-sized’ palace before Christmas came, and moved back into the Knillimhyr Manor to prepare for training. On the other side of things, Ezra had moved out of the Manor to live with Ozias while they attended school, and Ozias had taken immense pleasure in telling his parents all about his new roommate. They of course didn’t buy into the whole existence of aliens at first, but after a few virtual calls filled with finger-pricking for blue blood and vivid diagrams of alian biology (provided by Nina), not only did they finally believe it but they immediately approved of Ezra living with their son.

“Look at my boy go! Charming the pants off literal aliens,” Damien had cheered.

“Always knew he’d pull in a cool crowd,” Rina had claimed.

And they had said these things with Ezra still in view, which made Ozias shrivel up into the couch cushions, regretful of telling them anything at all. Though, it at least gave them an appreciable reason to stay abroad and carry on with their travels; all three Prechts knew it was a win-win situation.

And now, with Ezra just a bedroom away from him, and Ethen, Kaine, Nina, Lyza, Dimitri and a number of other Knillimhyrs and Corte’s visiting on a daily basis whenever they weren’t busy, the little house no longer felt empty. It overflowed with more company than Ozias knew what to do with, but he wasn’t going to look an otherworldly gift horse in the mouth.

“Oz?” Ezra had slid over filling the space between him and Ozias, and nudged Ozias’ arm with his elbow, tugging back his attention.

“Oh, sorry. What were you saying?”

Ezra’s mocking gaze was unapologetic. “Ah, I get it. Thinking about Ethen, huh?”

For both Ethen and Sid, the story of their departure went like this:

Before the examination period at Belrynn could conclude, Sidriel Corte had to pack up and leave town in a hurry to tend to a Corte family emergency which had occurred somewhere that required an airplane to get to. Because they had always been closer than family anyways, Ethen had packed a few bags of his own and tagged along without an ounce of second thoughts.

The dire emergency that had every Corte member scrambling to gather at an undisclosed location, was none other than the passing of Wylliam Corte — the most scholarly Corte, one half of the curious duo that was him and Linus Knillimhyr, also Fennik Corte’s father and Sidriel Corte’s grandfather, and who had already died of his old age nearly two decades ago.

Before Christmas approached, Sidriel Corte had been a hapless target of a fatal car accident that happened outside of the airport en route back home. The Corte’s were few and far between with the details of the tragic event when the news hit Elbel on Christmas Day, keeping everything about it as under wraps as possible, so barely anyone else in Elbel or Belrynn knew exactly what had happened for sure. Not even the Knillimhyrs, the beloved extended family to the Corte’s, knew the whole story, but there were many in town who to the day suspected it was just a backwards rumour serving to maintain the Corte’s privacy.

There was apparently one Knillimhyr who did in fact know the whole truth of Sidriel Corte’s pitiful demise; someone who had witnessed the horrible scene first hand. Ethen Knillimhyr wasn’t the same after that unfateful day. Sidriel Corte was to Ethen Knillimhyr like water was to fish, like sunlight was to plants, like a dog was to its pet parent, and there was hardly anyone in Elbel who didn’t know that. And because Ethen was no longer the same without his free-spirited person living and breathing, Belrynn University and football and the entire town all together no longer felt the same to him either.

He came to his mother one frigid January morning, equipped with a plan to withdraw from school and set off of a journey to some region or continent or province in the world along with the usual party (Kaine, Dimitri and Lyza), and he hadn’t taken no for an answer that day.

“He’ll be fine, he’s a fast learner,” Ezra said before Ozias could answer. “Don’t worry about him.”

For a moment, the latter words were just words to Ozias, regular run-of-the-mill reassuring words. But in the next moment, something in his mind was shouting at him, kicking at the walls of his head and poking at the pervious skin of his brain, impelling him to remember—

The dream.

The enigmatic vision featuring the Knillimhyr twins that had left Ozias unequivocally bothered for sometime all those months ago. Ezra had said those exact words about Ethen then too, ’Don’t worry about him’, and finally now, under the mild warmth of the cloud-cloaked sun, Ozias understood what the dream was trying to tell him.

As the days went by, Ethen became more and more involved with his new life of training for interstellar globetrotting, and further and further away from his old life of schooling and footballing — fundamentally becoming a different person, one that was learning to restrain his accumulated sternness and unrestrain his formerly renounced vulnerability, and Ozias was eager to get to know that newly knitted Knillimhyr.

“I’m more worried about you,” Ozias grinned as he gazed up at Ezra’s glinting blueberry eyes. Despite the acrid scent drenching him, his very closeness was too potent for Ozias to refuse. “Or should I say, for you. In that second scrimmage you had the ball, but then defense closed in fast. You could’ve made a handoff to Kramer before it happened, there was time. Ethen will be disappointed when I tell him.”

During Ezra’s two months of lone football drills, Ozias had been surprisingly, though minimally, vocal about the techniques he observed throughout his short-lived days of watching Ethen in action on the field, but it still thoroughly shocked Ezra whenever he was called out by him.

“As if you could do better,” Ezra scoffed.

“No, I couldn’t,” Ozias coolly agreed. “But there’s still time for you to change the narrative before practice is over. But if you can’t, I’m telling Ethen.”

Ezra made another derisive sound but the smile he wore said the opposite. “One of these days it’ll be me and Ethen on one side, and you on the other.”

It was an effective threat, Ozias thought, and because of it he realized just how much the eminent Ethen Knillimhyr and his formerly non-existent brother, Ezra Knillimhyr had become present in his life.

Gone were the days of loneliness, bleakness, meekness; welcomed were the ones that were fuller, brighter, louder. It was a marvelous sight that Ozias was sure could rival that of the stars, the planets and all the other celestial curiosities out there.

The whistle came again curt in warning, meaning there was a minute left until the break was over.

Ezra set the notebook down and stood as he said to Ozias, “wanna try a handoff yourself? There’s time.”

There was, Ozias thought again as he got up as well, and it was an amount that was as infinite as outer space itself. “Let’s go.”

The End