The Boy from Mars

by Scott Liapis

It wasn’t the fact that, at twelve-years-old, Josiah was already fifteen pounds overweight that made him the target of ridicule in the tiny hamlet town of Mars, Pennsylvania. Nor was it due to the tufted cowlick that sprang from the top of his head, no matter how much mousse or hair gel he used to try and tame it. It wasn’t even the hook-shaped scar that formed on his upper lip after a cleft palate surgery when he was a baby. Josiah’s otherness stemmed instead from the fact that he was just plain weird. An oddball. An outcast who never seemed to fit in, no matter how hard he tried to assimilate.

And nowhere was Josiah’s strangeness more obvious than at home, juxtaposed alongside his more traditional younger brothers, Donnie and Jaden, who filled their free time paying full-contact sports in the front yard with their friends while Josiah, more often than not, could be found crawling along the gravel driveway, collecting rocks in the bucket of his shirt to haul up to his bedroom so he could paint a colorful face on each one to match the intergalactic name and personality he’d ascribed them.

“I shall call you Lord Zimmerman. Ruler of the Goblin Closet. Keeper of the shroud and master of the nebutal death ray!” he’d announce, marching his new rock around his room while singing a Romulan verse.

“He’s not a weirdo, Hank. He’s just different, creative. That’s not a bad thing.” Josiah’s stepmother, April, would explain to his dad whenever he’d use a pejorative in private to describe his unusual son. “We shouldn’t make him feel ashamed about it, either. Lord knows he gets enough of that from his brothers and everyone else around town.”

Josiah’s dad was a regional pilot for a commuter airline based out of the Pittsburgh International Airport, thirty miles away from their home in Mars. And although the airline only serviced limited daily stops to six cities across the tri-state area, his dad was hardly ever home, leaving the house each morning at 5 a.m. and returning late at night after April and the boys had already eaten dinner and were ready for bed. But his absence hadn’t made the heart grow fonder.

At least not for Josiah’s younger brothers. It seemed to fester in their nervous systems until the fury over their abandonment got so intense that an explosion of anger became its only outlet for release. And Josiah was always an easy target.

“Why can’t you just be normal for once in your life, ya dang freak!” Jaden snapped at Josiah from across the dinner table. “You’re so friggin embarrassing!”

“Hey, that’s enough!” April warned Jaden. “There’s nothing wrong with your brother!”

“Oh yeah? Then how come everyone at school makes fun of us for being related to him, huh?” Jaden snipped, kicking at Josiah under the table. “You’re such a loser!” He shouted as he jumped up from his seat and stormed out of the room, followed closely behind by his brother Donnie.

April studied Josiah’s face for any signs of breakage. A tear. A trembling lip. Anything she could interpret as an invitation for her comfort. But his defensive posture had been built up over the years to withstand even the cruelest assault. Ever since April had moved into the boys’ home two years prior, after dating their dad for only a few months, she’d been witness to countless verbal attacks on Josiah from his sneering, unrepentant brothers. And more than once, Josiah had come home from school looking disheveled and wet with perspiration after some kind of physical altercation with a bully. But no amount of cajoling could ever ferret out an explanation for his disorderly appearance. So she learned to bite her tongue and pray that one day Josiah would let his guard down and finally open up to her.

“They don’t mean the things they say,” April offered Josiah in consolation. “Your brothers just miss their dad, is all.”

“I am a fortress. I am impervious,” Josiah said, staring down at his plate with his hands planted on the table as if to stabilize his body from tipping over.

April reached out to touch his hand, but he retracted it before her comfort could be delivered.

“Thank you for the sustenance,” he said, mimicking a robot’s cadence. “May I be excused, please?”

“Of course, Josiah. You don’t need to ask my permission.”

Josiah pushed back from the table and carried all three boys’ plates into the kitchen. Then he darted across the dining room, heading for the stairs and the safety of his bedroom.

“Wait!” April said, walking over to the mahogany hutch that housed the family’s prized Christmas plate collection. She opened one of the beveled glass doors and pulled out a piece of paper folded into a square. “Have you seen this?” she asked, handing it to Josiah.

Inside, Josiah found an advertisement for the town’s Mars New Year’s Festival that took place every twenty-two months to align with their namesake planet’s 687-day year. At the bottom of the flier was a list of local restaurants and shops that would be sponsoring this year’s event, and below that was an announcement that Jimmy the Spaz would be this year’s celebrity guest.

“It can't be!” Josiah gasped. “How was I not notified?! I’m on all of Jimmy’s socials!”

“I bumped into Mrs. Gottlieb at the bakery, and she said Jimmy was a last-minute addition. Apparently he’s part of some kinda science fiction conference in Pittsburgh, and he’s agreed to swing by the fair for a meet and greet. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Very exciting!” Josiah said, refusing to take his eyes off the paper.

“I was thinking, if you wanted to, maybe you and I could go together? Sort of like a mother-son type of thing.”

“But you’re not my mother,” Josiah said, starring at her quizzically. Then, before she could correct herself, he raced up the stairs, flier in hand, and slammed his door shut behind him.

*****

Jimmy the Spaz was the host of a late-night show on cable access that played low-budget science fiction movies with a heavy emphasis on films from the 1960s.

“The heyday of extraterrestrial melee,” Jimmy would joke when pressed about his myopic focus. Josiah had discovered the series by accident during his mother’s battle with esophageal cancer. Unable to sleep and too scared to sneak into his parents room for fear of what he might find, he’d instead carry his pillow and blanket down to the family room, curl up on the floor, and watch Jimmy on TV until he was able to fall asleep.

Each one of Jimmy’s shows included interviews with costumed guests from the entertainment industry appearing before and after the film, and campy skits performed by Jimmy’s cast of oddball sci-fi geeks, bookending each commercial break. Watching the troupe nerd-out over their love of space aliens and astral planets populated by strange, imaginary creatures, felt less like a salve for insomnia to Josiah and more like a family reunion. After his mother had passed, he started taping the live broadcasts so he could watch them on repeat in his bedroom. And when he discovered Jimmy’s YouTube channel, he begged his dad for a cellphone so he could log-in to the comment section and interact with the troupe whenever he was feeling lonely.

“That’s gotta be Josiah under there! What the heck are you supposed to be? Some kinda deranged Statue of Liberty?” Mr. Lerner, the junior high football coach, snarked from his festival booth on Grand Avenue. He was working alongside the entire P.E. department, each dressed up as a clown, twisting stretched balloons into pastel animals for a long line of eager kids.

“I’m not the Statue of Liberty! I’m the alien from The Green Slime movie! It’s Jimmy’s favorite cult film of all time!” Josiah protested, shifting angrily under his towering, lime green, paper-mache mask that was dotted with multiple red beady eyes, clapping the costume’s long arms together, which were made out of wrapping paper tubes that protruded out from two slits in the green sheet he’d wrapped himself up in to cover his body.

“Mommy, I want a picture with the monster!” a little girl in double braids demanded, triggering a rush of kids to surround Josiah and pick and poke at his costume like fiends. Then a barrage of camera clicks erupted around him as their parents elbowed their way to the best shot.

“Turn this way, Mr. Alien! Over here! No, look this way, Alien Man!” the parents demanded.

Overwhelmed and concerned that the pawing kids might ruin the costume he’d spent three days crafting, Josiah pushed through the crowd and took off running down Grand Avenue, dodging the masses of festival-goers who were milling around the closed-off street, eating saucer-shaped funnel cakes and space alien cookies glazed with green royal icing. Once he got to the intersection of Grand and Pittsburgh, he ducked behind the town’s silver flying saucer statue that hovered a few feet above the lawn in Mars Park.

The 2800-pound saucer was the size of a playground carousel and had been built in 1973 as a way to capitalize on the Mars moniker with the hope of convincing looky-loo travelers to make a detour from their roadtrip itineraries in order to get a photograph next to their ship.

Josiah inspected his costume for damage and realized to his horror that, in the scuffle, one of his cardboard arms had been torn. But before he could attempt a repair, he was once again set upon by excited parents and their kids.

“Climb up on the ship, Mister Alien Dude! Lemme get a picture!” a dad carrying a toddler on his shoulders said, pointing his camera at Josiah.

“Yeah, I want one too!”

“Me too! Do something funny!” a mother wearing glasses that fluoresced green in the dark ordered Josiah.

But as the crowd circled in on him, drawing closer by the second, Josiah panicked, squealing out in a shrill cry, “Leave me alone!” and inciting a cacophony of laughter that sounded insulting and cruel. So he took off running once again, dropping his cardboard arms in the grass and picking up his sheet so he could move faster to escape them. He hung a left on Marshall Way and then beelined for the Mars Community Playground, where several rusted-out amusement park rides were crammed together in the baseball field, offering festivalgoers a two-minute thrill for five bucks a pop. As he hurried between the lines of locals, he got his arm grabbed by a teenager who pulled Josiah into their group of rowdy boys.

“Whoa, check it out! Look at this freak!”

Josiah instinctively yanked his arm away, but in the process, he got his sheet snagged on an exposed bolt from one of the protective bars keeping guests at a safe distance from The Hornet’s Nest, a scrambler ride with cars painted yellow and orange to resemble wasps that whipped riders around in concentric circles so fast it made Josiah nauseous just looking at it.

“You ripped it, you-you bloviating jerk!” Josiah yelped in fury.

“What’d you call me, ya little bastard?” the teen said, shoving Josiah backwards, knocking him to the ground, and in the process, splitting his paper-mache mask down its center.

“Look what you did! You ruined it! You ruined it!” Josiah snapped and then raced out of the park, cradling his broken mask in his arms like a baby. All my hard work crafting the perfect costume to impress Jimmy with was for nothing!

*****

The meet-and-greet with Jimmy the Spaz was taking place under the town’s old circus tent, hoisted up in the parking lot of the now-shuttered Martian Inn motel, just off Clay Avenue. The motel had been abandoned by its owners more than a decade ago, after twenty years of faithful service. And when no buyers appeared on the horizon, the deed transferred back to the town, and ever since then, they’d been using the lot for community events: the 4H club’s Holiday Craft Bazaar, the Mars High School charity car wash, and, on the rare occasion that the Butler County Humane Society got overcrowded, an adoption event to help clear out their shelter.

By the time Josiah got to the tent, ego bruised and costume in shambles, there was already a line around the block to get in.

“What on earth?” he huffed to himself as he joined the queue. “Why are all these people here?”

“Well, it’s not everyday ya get to meet a real-life celebrity!” an intoxicated man slurred. “You know, once I got to meet Joe Piscopo in a Hardee’s just off the turnpike! I walked in and bam! There he was, plain as day!”

But Josiah wasn’t taking the bait, and eventually the man lost interest and directed his attention to the elderly couple in front of him. Josiah’s stomach twisted into knots, tied up by a heady mix of outrage and terror, as he considered the possibility that he might not get his chance to meet his idol. “Where did all these people come from?” he mumbled angrily to himself, looking up and down the line impatiently.

“Well, it’s not everyday ya get to meet a real-life celebrity!” the drunken man repeated. “I met Joe Piscopo once in a Hardee’s off the turnpike!”

By the time Josiah reached the tent, two hours later, his anxiety had reached a fevered and sweaty pitch! As he approached the folding table where Jimmy was signing photos and memorabilia, his brain raced to come up with something witty and connective to say. But when he was at last face-to-face with his salvation, all he could muster out was an emphatic, “Take me with you!” There was a stunned silence between them that seemed to drag on for hours. Josiah tried, in vain, to draw his words back into his mouth, but it was too late. Jimmy wrinkled his brow, watching Josiah curiously, and then exploded in laughter.

“I don’t think my girlfriend would be too happy about that, Bucko!” he said as he autographed a stock photo and handed it to Josiah. “Here ya go, kid.”

Unable to self-correct, Josiah sputtered out nonsensical words, panicked that his moment was slipping away from him. One of Jimmy’s handlers stepped in and guided Josiah towards the exit. “Wait!” Josiah shouted, regaining his senses. Then he reached into the pocket he’d sewn into the underside of his sheet, took out one of his rock creatures, and set it down on the table in front of Jimmy. “I made this for you. It’s a hemi-goblin from the planet Kazzar. I call him Lord Zimmerman. Ruler of the Goblin Closet. Keeper of the shroud and master of the nebutal death ray!” Josiah said proudly while watching Jimmy eyeball his strange creation.

“Gee, uhh.. Thanks a lot, kid,” he said, smirking at the next guest already waiting at the table for his attention.

Josiah was once again ushered away by Jimmy’s man, but just as he was exiting the tent, he looked back at Jimmy in time to see him pick up Lord Zimmerman and drop him into a trashcan.

*****

Josiah slumped over his knees on the curb and then spilled back onto the grass in defeat. The festival’s drone show was lighting up the night sky above him. He watched as the drones danced into a kaleidoscopic rainbow of choreographed shapes, to a smattering of ooh’s and ah’s from the crowd. For the finale, the drones formed a giant spaceship like the one in Mars Park, and then it zoomed up into the abyss, as if abandoning Josiah on the strange planet below.

“Is it okay if I join you?” April asked, standing over Josiah. “I brought you a funnel cake.”

“Sure. But I'm not hungry.”

“Not even for a funnel cake? But they’re your favorite,” April said as she sat down next to him. “So, how’d it go with Jimmy?”

Josiah’s face soured. “Fine,” he said dejectedly.

“That bad, huh? Well, you know what they say: Never meet your idols.”

“I guess.”

“Did he at least like your costume?”

Josiah shook his head. “He thinks I’m a freak. Just like everybody else.”

“I don’t think you’re a freak. Neither does your dad, not really. And from what he tells me, neither did your mom. She thought you were pretty cool, actually.”

Josiah looked up at April with tears in his eyes and then fell into her arms, crying. “I miss her so much.”

“I know you do, sweetheart. I’m so sorry,” she said, kissing the tufted hair on top of his head.

“She was the only person who...” Josiah trailed off, sobbing out his pain into her sleeve, while April rubbed the back of his neck. “I hate it here.”

April rocked Josiah in her arms while he sobbed. “You know, if you think about it, you’re actually really lucky. People who are different, who don’t fit in, have more of a reason to leave. To get out into the world and find their place. Their people. The rest of us just get lazy. We settle for boring lives that maybe aren’t the best for us.”

“You mean that in a good way?” Josiah asked.

“Absolutely. I’m in awe of the things you can do. Your creations. The way you think. When you’re older, you can use your gifts to help you start a new life somewhere else. Someplace more exciting than Mars, Pennsylvania.”

Josiah smiled, wiping away his tears. “You mean it?”

“I do. I’m always in your corner, Josiah. I promise.”

April offered Josiah her funnel cake again. This time, he devoured it, tearing it apart piece by piece. When he was finished, April stood up and reached out her hand for him.

“Come on. Let’s go home.”