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Cucumbers, lighter fluid, toothpaste, apple sauce, quick rise yeast, mineral oil...
Almost everything! All that was left was condiments. Except...had he written ketchup, or catsup? Did it matter? Of course it mattered, they were totally different things! Weren't they? Well, they had different names.
Lobot stared between the bottle of catsup and the scribbled list, trying to read his own handwriting.
"No, no! Put it down--Chloe put that down right now."
Ooooh, drama! He loved drama. Loboto poked his head around the corner of the aisle in time to see a small child standing on their tiptoes, arms outstretched to the cereal boxes on the upper shelf. A brightly colored box of sugar pretending to be a nutritious breakfast was wrapped in a purple glow and descending, slowly.
A woman materialized next to the girl. Her face was tight with anger and she snatched the box out of the air. Shoving it back on the shelf she hissed " What did I tell you? How many times do I have to say it, Chloe! Don't do that! Especially not in public! And I told you take that stupid helmet off when we're in the store!"
The child's response was unintelligible, muffled by the space helmet they were indeed wearing. He wondered what the big deal was. It wasn't the 1940's; nobody cared if you wore a hat in public anymore. Just look at him ! He was wearing his showercap and no one had said a word! They just left the aisle as soon as they saw him.
“Take it off, now!”
A man appeared and grabbed the woman's arm.
"Keep your voice down, people are going to come see what the fuss is."
The woman rounded on him, her expression one of frantic desperation.
"I can't do this anymore."
I just don’t care anymore.
"I can't deal with this, the helmet and the moving things around--!"
He’s a monster!
"I know, I know--"
Soon we’ll be free of this devil child.
"How much longer is this going to take? If I have to deal with one more dismantled radio, one more time trying to get her to take it off for company, one more bent spoon--"
Every! Spoon! Bent!
"I've been asking around, and Johnson knows someone who can do a procedure that’ll fix her--"
They all agree on the diagnosis and what must be done.
He felt strange. Cold and hot and angry and...sad. The child didn't seem to notice the conversation. She was trying to float the cereal box back down again. She probably didn't understand what it all meant. She was young. Very young.
Younger than he had been.
He hadn't understood either, until it was too late.
The humans were arguing again. They were always arguing these days. Arguing about such petty problems, when they could be focusing on the whole galaxy around them. She ignored them. It wasn't like they listened to her anyway. How many times had she explained to the woman why she needed to wear the helmet whenever she left the hermetic seal of her room? It never mattered.
The box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs landed gently in her hands. Excellent. She would slide it into the cart under the frozen peas. By the time they got to the cash register, the woman would be bound by social convention to make the purchase, or risk making a scene in front of the cashier.
Chloe still hadn't figured out what making a scene meant. The term was definitely in regards to public behavior, but was applied to anything from yelling in public to silent refusal to remove her helmet. Human rules were so strange and arbitrary.
The boxes in front of her rustled. Chloe tilted her head to one side. Odd. Sometimes things around her moved on their own, but usually she got that strange tingle in the back of her head when they did. She wasn't feeling it now.
The boxes of cereal parted, excess tumbling off the ends of the shelves. Two small lights gleamed in the newly made gap. One red, one green.
A metal claw shot out, grabbed Chloe by the shirt, and hauled her through.
She had half been expecting to be pulled into another dimension, but instead she was just in the next aisle. There was no time to feel disappointed before she was dumped unceremoniously in a grocery cart. Someone loomed over her, but Chloe only got the impression of blue skin and flowers before the stranger scooped up half a shelf's worth of bags of macaroni and dumped them on top of her.
It didn't hurt. She could breathe fine with her helmet protecting her face-- see , she wanted to say, I told you I needed it --but she couldn't move very much. The cart rattled and bumped, one wheel squeaking obnoxiously. They paused briefly, and Chloe considered shouting for help, but didn't. She wanted to see where this was going.
So she stayed quiet and still, holding the box of cereal to her chest as a cheerful voice cried "No need to do your beeping scans! I know what I bought! Keep the change!"
Then they were off again. The sounds around her changed as they left the store and rattle bumped their way through the parking lot. She heard a trunk open up, and decided now was a good time to figure out what was going on. She had no interest in riding with the groceries.
Chloe made the purple glow around her hands and pushed until the groceries around her lifted enough for her to move. She popped out from beneath the macaroni like a beach ball being released underwater.
The stranger was. Strange. Very tall. The lights Chloe had seen were his eyes--or rather, small tubes where his eyes should be. They twitched and turned independently of each other. He was smiling at her, and his smile seemed to stretch much, much further than most human smiles.
He was wearing a labcoat and a shower cap.
"Hello!" he said. "I'm going to kidnap you and raise you as my own so your parents can't stick an icepick in your brain to take away your psychic powers!" He tapped his chin, brow furrowing. One of his arms was made of metal, and ended in three claws. "Although I already did that first part, so...I have kidnapped you and am going to raise you as my own so that your parents can't stick an icepick in your brain to take away your psychic powers!"
Chloe considered this with some alarm. She didn't know what an icepick was, but she was sure she didn't want anything stuck in her brain. Psychic powers? Ah. That would explain the purple glow. Her caretakers had been very frustrated by it. But could she believe that they would stick things in her brain just so they could be less frustrated?
Yes. She could believe.
Her chest hurt. The macaroni was heavier than she first thought.
"Will you let me wear my helmet?" she asked.
"Of course!" He patted his showercap. "Headwear is a very important personal choice!
Chloe thought some more.
"This is acceptable," she said, and lifted her arms. The stranger stared at her. Neither of them moved for several seconds.
"What are you doing."
"You need to lift me up."
The stranger stuck his hands under her armpits and did so, holding his arms fully extended out in front of him. She dangled in the air, up, up, so high up, higher than she'd ever managed on a swing, and without the heavy weight of rope and swing seat to remind her she was pinned to this mudball planet. She felt weightless, floating, a dizzyingly wonderful feeling.
They stayed like that for several moments.
"Is this what parenting is?" the stranger asked. "It's a lot easier than they made it sound."
Chloe was so high up, her vision extended over the sea of cars, and she spotted her caretakers-- former caretakers--rushing out of the grocery store, looking around wildly.
"Put me down," she said. She would have liked to stay up there for longer. For hours. Maybe she could get him to do it again later. The man used to do it all the time, before the arguing started. The stranger set her feet on the pavement, and began to toss the cart's contents into the trunk without any care for fragility. He did not seem particularly rushed or concerned, for all that he said he was kidnapping her. And wasn't kidnapping illegal?
The car was nothing like the sleek blue sedan her parents drove. The man washed it obsessively, and acted as if you had removed an organ if you so much as borrowed a single sparkplug, even if the project was important.
Not only did this car look as if it hadn't been washed, ever, it also looked like it might dissolve if you tried. It was mostly rust held together by duct tape. The car was decorated in strange patterns picked out by objects hot glued to the sides: rubber ducks, dice, plastic flowers, and many, many teeth. From the looks of it, mostly Odocoileus virginianus and Procyon lotor, although she had to wonder about some of the molars.
"Chloe!" someone shouted. "Chloe, where are you!"
Chloe opened the door of the car and climbed inside. There was a moldy grey blanket on the car seat. She unfolded it and draped it over herself. It smelled like seaweed and toothpaste. She tried to look as much like a non-child lump as she could.
The trunk closed. Through the thin blanket she saw the shadow of the stranger--her new caretaker--lean over her. He wound all three seatbelts across her, pinning her to the seat.
"Safety first!" he said.
The car's engine whined and groaned and the calls got closer. They wouldn't be able to see her under the blanket. She was hidden. It was safe.
All the same, she felt a rush of relief when the engine finally growled to life. The car shot backwards and then came to an abrupt halt with a crash and the tinkle of glass. The seatbelts held her so fast Chloe didn't even move.
"Whoopsie!" the man said. The car lurched forwards and came to another abrupt halt with another crash. "Sorry!" Forward. Smash. "Oopsie daisy!" Back. Crash. "Almost got it!"
This time when the car sped forward, it did not stop, although Chloe did hear a scream and a bump as they turned a sharp corner.
"There we go!"
Chloe waited a few more minutes before working her arms free and pulling the blanket down from over her helmet. The car was zipping down the road, swerving violently between the other cars. In the space of three minutes they shot through two red lights. Her new caretaker was humming an offkey ditty to himself, as if he was taking a casual stroll through the park.
"Who are you?" Chloe asked.
"I am Dr Calligosto Loboto! The greatest dentist in the world!" He threw out an arm dramatically and his claws punctured the roof of the car. She could see many similar holes clustered in the same area.
"My name is Chloe. I hail from the planet Cygnus A."
"Ooooh, you're an alien! That explains the helmet! You better keep that thing on, I don't want you suffocating in our atmosphere!"
Chloe couldn't name the feeling in her chest, except that it was a good one.
"That's what I kept telling them! Just because I can breathe your air doesn't mean it doesn't have a detrimental effect on my lungs!"
"Of course!" the doctor said, genuinely annoyed. "That's Alien 101! Boy, your parents are weird ."
"They aren't my parents," Chloe said, firmly. "They're my human caretakers. They were looking after me while I'm on the planet. Someday my real parents will return for me, and take me back to the home planet."
"Makes sense to me! I wonder if that makes this less of a felony."