“A man opens his mail box … “, my grandfather starts in his story-telling voice. He sits on my bed waiting for me to slip under the covers. As soon as I lay there, he smiles one of his big smiles that I love so much, “Ready?”
I nod.
“Okay – So, Mr. M opens his mail box to find an envelope containing a set of instructions. He takes it, slowly turns around and trudges back up the five steps to the old wooden porch. He takes his time to sit down on the bench and laboriously opens the letter. The word INSTRUCTIONS screams from a white sheet. Nothing else. What?
Confused, Mr. M scratches the tuft of hair that is left on his balding head. Where are the instructions? Suddenly the white sheet of paper starts to move. It shakes, jolts, riddles and jiggles until two forms submerge from within the sheet.
Mr. M stares on the paper. Is this real?
Two little white figures with four black eyes stare eagerly back. Each figure jumps quickly on one of his thumbs. It tickles. Mr. M cannot help but giggle. They look like human shaped white marshmallows. Big round heads and bodies, no neck.
“May I introduce the two of us?” the little thing standing on his right thumb says – in a strange voice.
To Mr. M it sounds like the voice of paper – or how he imagines paper would sound, if it could speak – a little raspy, like leaves raffled by the wind.
Speechless, Mr. M stares at the tiny thing.
“We are the Instructionairs – I’m Herbert, and this is my husband Luise!” it says, pointing at his fellow.
“Listen, now that we have exchanged the pleasantries, straight to the point, we need your help!”
“Don’t you think he looks like Doc Emmett Brown?” the marshmallow on the left thumb asks. His voice is a lot deeper than Herbert’s.
“No, I think he looks like Doc Holiday, the outlaw, but anyway, does it matter, Luise?” Herbert seems to be annoyed with her husband. “We don’t have time for small talk.”
Mr. M is not sure if he’s imagining the whole thing. If those little creatures would not sit on his thumbs, he probably would have rubbed his eyes.
The Herbert figure addresses him again. “Mr. M we need to get to the moon, to our space ship. With your help. We need urgently to get back to our planet! Our friends on METEA are in great danger. On our planet we can transform our dimensions from two to three dimensions and back. But we have no time dimension. That makes our mission more difficult, because I don’t know how much time we’ve left. I don’t know time at all. I heard about it, though. We are losing gravity at home and that hinders the transformation. I cannot go into detail, but … ”
Mr. M still sits there, lost in thought, trying to fathom the unfathomable.
Herbert shakes his head. “Ugh, don’t tell me you don’t understand me?”
He looks at Luise, “Oh my, I hope these Earthians aren’t like the Plutonians! They didn’t understand a word we said!”
Luise just shrugs his shoulders “See, if you would have let me handle it. I thought those guys here on earth would need some socialization,” his deep paper voice sounds rather arrogant now. “Watch and see!”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. M. How are you today?” He looks at Mr. M with a smile.
Mr. M grunts.
Luise sends a triumphant look to his wife. “Told you! They need small talk like a cup of syrup.”
Taking the grunt as a positive sign, Luise continues in the same sweet voice and tells Mr. M everything.
Well, almost everything: About their planet and the difficulties. What they have to do to make things better. About the journey they have to take, about the 125,000 million light years they have to travel.
In fact, Luise starts with his birth and goes on and on and on.
Mr. M sits on his bench, paralyzed, swinging back and forth. He cannot get up and away. He has tried. Several times. But he cannot move away from these annoying creatures.
Finally, Luise stops and asks “Are you going to help us?”
“Yes!” is the only thing Mr. M is able to say.
The spell breaks.
Finally able to get up, he walks over to his shack. He builds a rocket for the two little fellows and sends them off to space with everything they have asked for in no time.
After they left, Mr M sits down again, sighs and …”
“Grandpa,” I whine, “why are you hurrying through the story? I want to know every single detail!”
“Well, I can’t give you more. Your mother only allowed me 750 words, and we are over that already.”