Author : Harris Tobias

I knew they were lying.

“Don burry Bill, ebry thing bill be all bright,” in that crazy accent of theirs with their “B’s” and “W’s” crossed.

The house was a horrible mess. The furniture was dirty and old. What pictures there were were crooked and not of anything anyone in their right mind would hang on a wall–a photo of a toilet seat, a painting of a crumpled sheet of paper. The yard was littered with trash; the lawn was some sickly tufts of wiry grass; the gate was hanging by a single hinge.

“Ebry thing bill be just the bay it buzz,” he had said.

But it buzzn’t…er, wasn’t..

It wasn’t just that the house was a mess, it’s what lay beyond the gate that really stunned me. Desert. There were a few forlorn little houses like mine and then nothing but scrub and dust and tumbleweed as far as the eye could see.

“You call this the way it was?” I said to Bork. The alien stood a full seven feet tall and grinned down at me with its idiotic grin and its shiny suit. It looked human but you could tell he wasn’t really.

“Bell, it buzz harder den be thought. Wut, all in all, not too wad.”

I could only groan for what was once a lovely Midwestern town in the corn-belt. Put through Bork’s analyzer it was supposed to be digitized and reassembled exactly the way it was. But it didn’t take a genius to see that the reality that went in wasn’t what came out. In went my gorgeous sofa with the art deco arms and the fabric I searched all over Chicago for; and out came this dumpy Sears hide-a-bed I wouldn’t even sit on. In went my little dog, Muffy, and out came this cat-like fur beast.

“Stop” I yelled. “You’re getting it all wrong.”

“Don burry,” Bork said and squirted me with something that knocked me out for a week. When I came to, things were pretty strange and Bork and his pals were gone. He paid me though, just as he promised. I have a stack of hundred dollar bills in the basement. Every one has a picture of George Bush on it.