Free Alien Taste by Wen Spencer

machinery. In a small side window, Mom Lara was watching the local news channel. More thunderstorms rushing down on Pittsburgh. “I’m just puttering around during the communication delays. The ship’s landed on Mars and they’ll be dismounting the rover soon.” Her eyes were sparkling with excitement. She was always so vibrant when she talked about stars and planets. He wondered how she ever gave up her work to raise Cally. “Is Max staying the night?”
    â€œYeah.”
    She sighed slightly, rinsing the soap from her hands and drying them on a tea towel. “He wasnever meant to live as a bachelor. He’s one of those men that needs a wife and kids to be happy.”
    â€œI know.”
    â€œDoes he ever talk about starting to date again? It’s been almost six years since his wife was killed.”
    Ukiah shrugged. “He didn’t look at women before, but lately he’s been checking them out. He asks me occasionally what I think about certain women, you know, a waitress at Ritter’s diner, one of the 7-Eleven cashiers.”
    â€œWhat do you tell him?”
    â€œThe truth.”
    â€œUkiah, your truth is so brutal at times. I hope you’ve tried to be nice about it.”
    â€œWell, I try.”
    â€œGood boy.” She turned back to the TV. The weather ended without the Mars shot changing. A remote story started up with a pretty blonde reporter playing with a rover prototype apparently developed locally.
    He frowned at something wrong, out of place. Then he remembered. He had put a mouse in his pocket earlier. He tented his breast pocket and looked in. The mouse was gone. When had he lost it? In Schenley Park? At the morgue? In the Hummer? When he took his nap? He grimaced at the thought of losing it in his bedroom—Mom Lara would freak. Surely if he had had it until he had gotten home, it would have moved around, tried to get out, or otherwise drawn his attention to it. He must have lost it earlier, probably when he was tracking and too focused to notice its escape.
    The obligatory local take on the world news over, the studio reporters came on the air, their faces grave. “Early this morning deputy coroner Earl Frakes was killed while conducting an autopsy on a womansuspected of murdering her three roommates and a policeman.”
    Ukiah turned away from the television, wishing he could tune it out. “Mom Jo still running the dogs?”
    The television continued on behind his back. “Janet Haze had been killed in a police shootout yesterday. Police say that they believe Haze acted under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug. We go live to Hap Johnson on the scene.”
    â€œUm-huh.” Mom Lara murmured, eyes on the main screen as the uncoupling countdown started.
    Ukiah glanced out the kitchen window to see if he could spot his other mom. The moon was a few days from full; it coated the wheat fields beyond the yard in soft silver. In the center of the field stood his oak. The tallest tree on the farm, it had been his sanctuary since the first day he arrived here. Its leaves tipped with moon glow, but his tree house was lost in the dark shadows of the night.
    â€œThanks, Ashley,” the remote, Hap Johnson, was saying. “I’m here at the county morgue, where early this morning deputy coroner Earl Frakes was the victim of a grisly murder—”
    Ukiah felt the desperate need to escape the television. “Good night, Mom. I’m going to go out to my tree house. Don’t wait up for me.”
    â€œOkay, honey.”
    He strolled out to the tree, climbed the battered ladder up to the large platform built in the massive limbs. He hadn’t been out to it in months. Strange how he used to all but live up here. When Mom Jo first brought him home, he’d hid from punishment up in the branches of the oak. The tree house had been built as a compromise, a place for Mom Jo when she came out to comfort him. He hid