Hoss and the Space Woman
Some outsiders are worse than others. Turns out, Space Women are the worst.
I wrote this story a few years back when I first started getting serious about writing goofy, disturbing stories about the Ozarks. There’s a very peculiar sort of sexual violation if that’s a problem for anyone. I published a slightly different version of this story in an anthology under a pen name a few years back, but I doubt that anyone subscribing to the Missouri Ozarker were amongst the few dozen folks who bought that book.
Hoss was tending his still that night when the saucer crashed. He was minding his own business, filling mason jars with fresh moonshine, and then all of a sudden there was a mighty BOOM! and the creek set in to spitting and hissing downstream just around the bend from him.
Hoss kept a shotgun in his pickup to help him deal with trouble of various sorts, so he fetched it and went to see about the disturbance. He liked to have dropped the gun when he saw that saucer-shaped thing sizzling there in a quite little pool, but he collected himself enough to point it at the spaceship and holler “come on outta there with your little green space man hands up!” There wasn’t any response.
Hoss shouted at the flying saucer a couple more times, but no one came out. As he stood there in the Ozark darkness, Hoss began to worry that a spaceship falling out of the sky might bring the kind of attention that a guy with a pickup load of bootleg corn liquor didn’t need. For a split second, he reckoned he ought to load up the still and run, but then Hoss began to wonder how much spaceship parts would sell for.
The ship was bigger than his truck, too big for him to haul off whole, but he figured that maybe he could pry something off and sell it in town. Then he realized he was thinking too small: there probably was a space alien in there, whether alive or dead he didn’t know, and one of those would fetch a high price. He knew he’d have to hurry, on account of how there would probably be law a-coming to see about what’d crashed out of the sky, but since he was already there Hoss figured that if he moved quick he could have his whiskey and a space alien too.
Getting into the spaceship turned out to be harder than Hoss expected. He had to fetch a pry bar from the pickup to wrench open a seam that’d split when the saucer hit the creek bed. From there, it was a tight wriggle, but Hoss was able to get in.
Inside, there was a dim greenish light coming from nowhere in particular. There was also an unconscious creature strapped into a chair wasn’t little, or green, or even a man, at least as best as Hoss could tell. It looked tall, kind of gray and blue, mostly human shaped, and maybe even woman shaped. Hoss managed to undo the straps and drag his space alien out. He hid the creature in the back of his pickup under a tarp with his still and headed for home.
Back at his cabin, Hoss inspected his alien closer. He realized that the gray parts seemed to be clothing and the blue parts seemed to be skin. The alien wasn’t exactly breathing, but somehow it didn’t exactly seem to be dead, either.
Hoss thought it looked real pretty, so pretty he that he thought it had to be a girl alien. He figured there was only one way to know for sure, but he couldn’t figure out how to take the gray clothes off. He took his pocket knife out, but they were made of something so tough and rubbery that he couldn’t cut it. Eventually, he got his tinsnips from the toolshed and managed to get the gray parts off. As he pealed off the gray pieces, the blue flesh revealed underneath looked like girl flesh to Hoss, but the alien anatomy was so different from what he’d expected that Hoss still wasn’t quite sure.
Hoss thought on it hard, and finally he convinced himself that the alien had to be a space woman. He decided to keep her. He named her Zelda.
Hoss wasn’t sure Zelda was going to make it, but she opened her eyes the morning after he cut her clothing off. She was laying on Hoss’ bed underneath the quilt his mama’d made for him, and Hoss was sitting beside the bed eating eggs and bacon. Hoss was so busy with his breakfast that he didn’t see her eyes flutter, but he dropped the plate when Zelda said, “You have removed my body cover, human. The mating has begun.”
Now, truth be told, Hoss’d been thinking about mating with Zelda the whole time he was snipping off that gray suit, but he never dreamed space women were as easy to woo as this. Not one to let an opportunity pass him by, Hoss hopped right into the bed next to her and got to it. He even forgot about his bacon.
Six weeks later, Hoss was tending his still at a new spot while Zelda was back at the cabin. Just like every night, Hoss had told her to have some cornbread and beans ready for him when he got home, but she never seemed to get that right. Women sure were a lot of trouble, Hoss thought, and that included space women. He was even beginning to worry that Zelda had given him space herpes or something, what with all the little blue bumps that were coming up all over him. They’d started on his privates about a month after Zelda arrived, and pretty soon the bumps were all over his back and chest, and even down his legs and arms. They itched something terrible. He was scratching up a storm when he got back to the cabin with his fresh shine.
Zelda was there, and Hoss couldn’t help noticing that she didn’t have a pot of beans or even a bit of cornbread for him to eat after his hard night making moonshine. He was powerful angry, but before he could yell at her, she beamed at him with her space alien eyes in a way that made him forget about his supper and not worry so much about the space herpes so much. He started to reach for her, but then he got to feeling so woozy that he sat down hard on the bed.
Zelda was right there beside him.
“Oh, my mate,” she said to him, “I am so excited to meet our brood. You have been a good mate. I love you, and I will miss you so!”
Then the bumps all over his body started bursting open, and the tiny space alien babies that crawled out of them were all blue like Zelda.