“Mama, don’t believe a word that woman say,” Vita said. It was the evening after Lynnette visited the old woman on her porch, and the old woman sat in the same chair as the sun was setting.
“She ain’t never did nothing to deserve trust,” the old woman said, “but I believe her.”
Vita looked very much like her mother, like the old woman had looked a couple decades before and the scowl on her face was as biting and judgemental as the old woman could still manage to conjure in the prominent lines on her brown face that wrinkled her skin. They were a kind of reflection of one another, though Vita didn’t have any gray hair in the thick mass of black that sprouted from her head. She usually kept it combed back and knotted into a large puff at the nape of her neck. As she stood shaking her head at the thought of Lynette Jones at her mother’s house and bringing up her long lost twin brother Kevin, she had neat cornrows that met in a thick braid down her back. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against the bannister of the porch where Lynnette had sat the evening before.
“I don’t want to believe Kevin dead either, mama, but…”
“I ain’t never believed he was dead,” the old woman interrupted.
Vita nodded slowly.
“I couldn’t believe it for a long time. Lot of stuff that happened to us is impossible to believe. But when Kevin left here with that mysterious package from that trafficker with the stupid name, he got mixed up in something it wasn’t no coming back from. Lynnette made sure of that.”
The two women went silent and let the quiet settle over the porch.
The house was dark, even under the rapidly setting sun. A tall tulip tree dominated the front yard and the angle of the sun cast shadows on the house from sunrise until the late afternoon. At night, the moon could only light the two stories of the plantation-style home with its columns and balcony over the covered front porch when its position in the cosmos allowed the moonshine to fall on the back of the home.
It was hard to believe that anyone still lived in the house, with the creeping vines and kudzu that covered much of the bricks and looked alive in the dark, like dark forms slithered in a thick mass. But the old woman was always there and usually rocking slowly on the front porch in a chair that her husband had built for her decades ago after he finished building the home.
Even though the home was technically within the limits of the town of Ellerson, it was far away from the town center that was larger than it had been at any point in its history. Over time, the quaint, small town infrastructure was replaced by many high rise buildings and wider avenues, and a town more akin to Stallings, North Carolina began to rival the major metropolis of Charlotte, but without the sprawl, which made it even more attractive to young outsiders being recruited by business that flocked to Ellerson following first contact.
The outskirts of Ellerson was the only vestige of what it was at the founding in 1992, and many of the current dwellers of the outskirts have lived in Ellerson their entire lives, or have family who did. The outskirts of Ellerson were like a town unto itself, and the old woman and people like her refused offers to buy their property following the hike in property value that resulted from the influx of new residents in 2019. The old woman was defiant in the face of new arrivals who only seemed interested in aliens, so much so that they trampled on the history of the people who had greeted them. She refused the offers because they did not deserve Ellerson, the town where thousands had given their lives in the name of racism and scientific advancement, and if not for her daughter, if not for Vita, that history would have been covered up, and the descendants of the victimized would have likely suffered the same experimentation instead of receiving the reparations that allowed them to secure property on the outskirts of town in nice homes and tranquil neighborhoods.
“I know what she did, Vita. She took your daddy from us, and even though I hate her with all of me, even though she responsible for some pure evil, I know she want her soul back. I lied to her. I told her she was hollow, that her spirit was gone, but it ain’t. It’s so sad and weeping like she won’t let herself do. She want to show me that it all happened for a good reason, that if a good person do evil things for the greater good, then it’s worth it. She want to be a good person to somebody who knew her before all the experiments. Everything they learned experimenting on the people in Ellerson back then, she did it to herself. She’ll live as long as them Druinte aliens with the dreads, maybe five hundred years. But she didn’t do it for that, she wanted to go through what she put all them people through. I saw it, Vita. She want to do right. And I think she want to find Kevin alive more than we do, ’cause she regret what she had to do to your daddy, or she feel like she had to do it.”
Vita shook her head. Her history with Dr. Lynnette Jones was extensive and she had spent most of her life trying to unravel all of the intrigue surrounding the doctor, and the Consortium, and their true intentions with the people of Ellerson. Dr. Jones was complicit in the mass murder of thousands, but she was never incarcerated, and was in fact, promoted to a career in intergalactic diplomacy. Vita knew Dr. Jones to be the most manipulative person she’d ever met in her life and if she showed up here talking about Kevin, she must have very selfish reasons for doing so.
But her mother was an excellent judge of character. Vita knew that her mother could actually see into people’s minds and read their thoughts; it was a gift of heredity as the descendant of humanity interbreeding with extraterrestrials that occured long enough in the past that the extraterrestrial traits were easily hidden.
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