Noise Complaint

Wanda grunted and gave the mound under the covers next to her an experimental shove.

"Don't smell too fresh, does he?" she thought to herself, then paused. Raising an arm, she realized she, too, was riper than a lady ought to be. Furthermore, she had no fucking idea where she was.

The night had passed in a blur of warm cans of Shaeffer's six months past their expiration date. They had started playing "Fizzball" -- a time-honored version of baseball which used "cheap, evil-smelling beer" in place of a ball -- and wound up drinking the balls instead while watching the meteor shower overhead.

When, exactly, had she gotten the idea that going to bed with Wilberforce -- and what kind of a name was that anyway? -- would be a good idea? Had roofies been involved?

No. The sex had been way too good. By which was meant memorable. And yes, rather smelly.

Also loud.

"Oh God," she said, putting her face in her hands. Vague memories of indignant pounding on the trailer door floated to the surface of her mind. An angry fist, a huffy neighbor, a verbal spat, and Wilberforce stepping in between Wanda and the bulb-shaped woman, a trailer park Willendorf, before it got physical. "We'll keep it down," he'd assured the woman -- his neighbor? "Don't you worry."

If only Wanda had known how wrong he had been.

She made her way to the tiny bathroom off the nasty master bedroom, tripping over unknown snags in the pile carpet that smelled vaguely of WD-40. Oh no, had she confessed her weird fetish for that scent to Wilberforce? No wonder she could barely walk!

A few dry heaves verified she had not had any dinner the night before and had long ago puked up the beer. The unspeakable mess in the bathtub probably accounted for that. At least Wanda hoped that's where it had come from. And that it wasn't older...

A loud moan sounded from the bedroom. Was he awake? So much for a clean getaway. Not that she had much chance of that with her clothing strewn God-knew where.

She paused at the bathroom door and looked around. Sweet Fancy Moses, what had they gotten up to? There, hanging from one strangely bent pronghorn horn glued inexpertly to a taxidermy rabbit's head, was her favorite tube top, the red terrycloth number with the white blaze down the middle that emphasized her tits. How had it gotten up there?

Wanda giggled for a moment, imagining Wilber having perhaps fired it like a slingshot. Like he had, oh, Great Bog & Coffee, done with her thong. Yup. Bullseye, right in the center of the battered cork dartboard, dangling from a dart.

Who hangs a dartboard in his bedroom?

As Wanda pondered this roomful of evidence in her personal trial for bad judgment, Wilberforce moved. Not in that sleepy, stretchy, just-waking-up-and-getting-his-bearings way, not in the tossing-his-way-through-a-wet-dream way, but -- was she still drunk? -- floating.

Wilberforce was floating.

So was she.

So was pretty much everything in the trailer.

To say nothing of outside.

Entire car bodies, tricycles, torn garden hoses, lawn flamingos, stolen traffic cones, plastic yard furniture, each describing its own aimless orbit through the abruptly darkened sky, drifted lazily past the bedroom window. In the bedroom, Wanda's cutoffs, platform flip-flops and purse vied with all of Wilberforce's (disgusting) worldly possessions for weirdest hazard to her person as they sloshed -- yes, sloshed -- around the room.

Wanda blacked out.

No one from Boysen Grove ever knew for certain how much time had passed -- Minutes? Hours? Months? -- since the morning gravity had failed them and the sky went black. Nor could any of them account for the fact that they all now had to work much harder just to move around and breathe. At least not until THEY came.

The leading figure wore a Richard Nixon mask and carried a tape recorder. When enough of Boysen Grove's residents had assembled under the disused volleyball net and its array of orphaned sneakers, he extended a misshapen finger and hit PLAY.

Paul Harvey's unmistakeable cadences and tones issued forth from the recorder's tiny speakers. They had carefully spliced together an introductory speech from snippets of his broadcasts over the decades as a kidnapper assembles a ransom note from magazine clippings.

This is what he said:

"People of Earth, you have been brought here to stand trial for your continued disregard of all known standards of decency and respectable behavior," he, or rather the tape, began. The figure hit PAUSE to allow the murmurs to subside.

"You have been issued repeated warnings over a period of over 75 of your years that you are in breach of local noise ordinances. You are also in violation of numerous statutes governing breach of peace and posing a public nuisance."

More murmurs, of protest, of incomprehension, of ire and irritation. Mostly incomprehension.

"Your initial assault in the form of your great spiritual leader Adolf Hitler was bad enough. Your repeat offenses -- No one Loves Lucy, Bewitched was a Bother, and we dare not even speak of the abomination that was Knight Rider -- were intolerable. But then you assaulted us with Defying Gravity and for this... for this you must answer."

"Wait a god-damned minute," Wanda shrieked, forcing her way through the angry but seemingly impotent crowd. "None of that is our fault, you black-suited retards. That came through the TV box."

The figure raised an elegant but oddly proportioned hand to the forehead of the Nixon mask and lowered its head. Its bony shoulders sank.

"You are human. You are at fault. Prepare to be judged," it finally said after a moment.

"What if we don't want to?" Wanda asked, hands on her hips. Behind her, the crowd seemed to wake up, to rally, if timidly, to her cause. "Wait a minute..." she said as they began to mill forward in a group. She held up a hand to halt them. "Wilberforce, is that you?"

"Of course not," a voice said from behind the mask. A voice she was pretty sure did, in fact, belong to Wilberforce, but she had to be sure.

Boldly, Wanda strode forward, reached into the folds of the figure's black cloak, and twisted hard at the nipple ring she found there. An instant masculine salute elevated a fold further down and the masked, muffled voice, said "Jesustitsfucksake."

"It IS you, you toadfucker!" Wanda screamed, then paused. Had she just called herself -- never mind. "Hey Jacob! Hand me that there tire iron!"

The massacre that followed is related only in whispers in seedy watering holes in farway space stations. And no civilzation ever dares go near the second Moon of the third planet orbiting the star rechristened Boysen as a dire warning of the terrible savagery of the transplanted inhabitants of that quarantined system.