The Alien Pogostick Caper

A Story by Ron John31

Flash Fiction Friday Prompt: Write a story using the words banana, iguana, elbow, flaming, pogostick . Genre: Any Word Count: 1000 words

Finding a tuxedo-wearing, Jewish iguana in my apartment and sitting on my couch did not surprise or upset me in the least, in these crazy times of the late 22nd century all sorts of insanity is the norm. That he was smoking his nasty peanut butter flavored cigarettes in my living room did highly piss me off though. Fingering the plasma blaster in my sports coat, it would have been so easy forcibly end his bad habit, the only problem with that solution was that he was sort of a friend.

“Avrum Cohen you scaly b*****d,” I yelled out, “what have I told you about smelling up my apartment! What are you doing on Earth anyway; I thought you had made citizenship on the new Israeli orbital habitat? ”

“Easy Eddie,” Avrum chuckled in his deep southern drawl using one of my many names, “I’m here to give you a lead on your next case, which could be very profitable for you.”

“What case Avrum?” I asked after walking over and opening the patio doors facing the Atlanta skyline. “Anyway, I do not need work right now I just got back from London after finishing up a nasty adultery investigation. I have plenty of cash and a full stomach.” I said thinking of the enhanced intelligence squid that I had been hired to assassinate. The cephalopod was having an affair with a New York socialite whose husband wanted him dispatched with imagination. I pan-fried the eight-armed adulterer in a flaming wok with white wine and father beans, after adding a banana sauce the smell was so enticing the squid’s human lover joined me in the meal.

Do you remember when we first met Eddie?” Avrum asked. The last thing I wanted to do after a long, exhausting trip was walk down memory lane with an irritating alien iguana of the Jewish faith but I did remember.

It was a one hundred-fifty years ago and I was working the now defunct “Men in Black” organization trying to stop the illegal export of peanut butter off the Earth. It‘s old and disturbing news now but peanut butter in raw form is the most addicting and toxic substance in the galaxy reducing the most intelligent and sophisticated species to slobbering primitives.

MIB had traced the supply line to a small island off the coast of South Carolina and I found Avrum playing the pet of a deranged astrophysicist who daily dressed up as Carmen Miranda. Avrum was the linchpin of the operation getting the illegal peanut butter off planet from his ship he hid just off the beach underwater. After cornering the little b*****d and tricking him to confessing so it would clear Earth, I let him slip away only so the battle cruiser from his home planet in orbit above Earth could snag him.

He spent close to an Earth century in prison back home and in that time became a born-again Jew, where he eventually moved back to Earth to be closer to his adopted homeland. While walking the straight and narrow now, Avrum still had friends on the other side of the law, friends that occasionally needs high priced errands done.

“So what is the case Avrum?” I asked after slumping down in my easy chair fighting off a growing bout of indigestion.

Avrum took a deep draw off his cigarette and smiled something that did not mean the same thing to his species as it did to humans. “It’s simple really, I need you to retrieve something.”

***

“Avrum you slimy b*****d,” I whispered to myself after stepping through the wormhole into the facility where an item he needed was being stored. It was the old MIB North American headquarters deep inside Wyoming, a place supposedly abandoned in 2025 after one of the grey-skinned, big eyes aliens of all the old UFO abduction stories finally put down in some place other than a redneck trailer park. After crash landing outside a vegan restaurant, the real story got out and the ensuing scandal exposed MIB and ruined its reputation.

These aliens, called the Yuppies, had heard about the Colonel’s fried chicken with its secret recipe of twenty-one spices and had spent decades searching for the elusive Colonel and his magnificent food. The whole anal probing and microchip up the nose thing was just a gross misunderstanding of Yuppie customs.

The passageway lights were on and the sound of conversations coming from behind many of the closed doors actually surprised me. I knew this particular area of the complex well but my progress was slowed by my need to stay hidden. My curiosity was building as to who was using the place now but that was quickly answered when one of the doors to a conference room slid open and out walked twenty of the most powerful zombies in American politics.

It made sense now, right after Yuppie first contact the Zombie Uprising occurred a year later with the aging political elites using the zombie virus as a method to stay in power. It was time for the Republican political convention with scuttlebutt saying Zombie Bob Dole would finally get his chance at being President. I gripped my plasma blaster tighter wanting nothing more than to blow each and every one of them into subatomic particles. But, I had made my promise to Avrum and I was honor bound to fulfill it. Still though, some revenge came my way as I recognized a strangler stumbling out of the room, it was a perpetually fat and balding radio show host who irritated the living s**t out of me. With little struggle I quietly shoved him down a trash chute that leads straight to the facility’s ten-thousand degree furnace.

The zombie elite never even knew I was in their secret lair, I found the correct storage room, the right container, and triggered the opening of the return wormhole. Stepping through I was back on Avrum’s estate in Cuba. My iguana friend elbowed me out of the way and took the containers placing it on a table surrounded by the royal court of his home planet.

With a reverence unheard of these days on Earth the lizard Crown Prince opened the box and removed the item I had been sent to repossess. It was their most precious historical item, the ancient battle Pogo stick that every king used as a symbol of authority since their history began. In my over two-thousand years of life it was one of my proudest moments to return it to them.