Alienable Rights
Book 1 of the Other Worldly Series
ASIN : B085YBJF2S
Publisher : Booklocker.com, Inc.
Publication date : February 1, 2020
Print length : 358 pages

Alienable Rights Chapters 1 & 2
Why on earth were cars honking with headlights glaring on this sizzling July day in downtown Reno? Did a tragedy occur while I endured the final stretch of a grueling exam?
The noise grated on my last nerve as I stood on the sidewalk.
I checked my phone for possible answers, but high-noon sunlight made screen viewing impossible. Rounding the corner to reach the covered parking lot, sounds were all the more jarring after three days in a windowless room.
Panic bloomed anew as I sat in my car and discovered I couldn’t get a signal out. I checked news headlines instead.
“THE TRUTH IS NOT OUT THERE, IT’S HERE: ALIENS COULD BE YOU!”
“WORLD LEADERS CONFIRM ALIEN LIFE AMONG US”
“HOPI TRIBAL LEADERS: WE TOLD YOU SO”
“PRESIDENT DECLARES NATIONAL EMERGENCY WHILE ON VACATION”
I guess the president was caught unaware like me, except he was having playtime while I answered questions on inalienable rights. I wasn’t trying to be funny. I felt sick to my stomach.
My name is Rowan Layne, local newspaper columnist who just finished the test to become a Nevada lawyer. Now I learn I may not be of earthly origins? As if being female wasn’t bad enough living in the wilds of small-town America.
Lack of cell connections might explain honking as a form of expression, but headlights? If they’re high-beams for added emphasis, I was headed for a migraine. At least it was horns and not sirens.
No wait, I heard those too. And I had to drive in this?
I turned the AC vent on high, hoping rushing air would drown out the craziness. Instead I got flustered into a wrong turn in my quest for I-80, putting me on an unfamiliar street with a curious line of people winding an entire city block.
I looked for doomsday signs in their hands declaring the end of the world but saw none.
There was, however, a giant sign for “BATTLE BORN GUNS” perched atop a building, beckoning folks to engage in their “God Given Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms!” It was difficult to see the gun store named after the Nevada state motto because of the crowd waiting to get inside.
Honking intensified as I drove past it hearing shouts of “Let’s go kill us some aliens!” and “God bless America, not aliens!”
Making any and all possible turns to steer away from this block, I entertained thoughts of heading for the California border, but for three males waiting at home. A dog, a kitty, and a former Marine veteran more than a tad paranoid and probably standing in line himself. For the first alien spaceship out of here.
As I drove closer to home, I was all by my lonesome on the rural stretch of two-lane highway that gave way to rolling desert. Foothills blended into rugged mountains in the distance. Not a speck of civilization visible where asphalt succumbed to sagebrush.
The persistent ear-ringing that plagued my existence was for once preferable to car horns and human screeching. Relaxing my grip on the steering wheel, I took a deep breath and exhaled on a sigh.
Even in bright daylight the near full moon dominated the sky and I smiled as if it was an old friend come to greet me.
The wind kicked up a dust devil to the right of the car and I heard laughter. Not joyous, but snarky, as if laughing at someone else’s expense. It was there, in my ear, and gone. Carried off by the wind.
In its place was a familiar sound, the ping of an incoming text, followed by a chime indicating a voicemail message.
It had to be Mom. It was always Mom.
Three months later
Last month I learned I passed the Nevada Bar exam and last night I dreamt about Honeycrisp apples and my ex-husband. In the dream we both wore the full dress uniform of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Several things to ponder, but I couldn’t lollygag over coffee, perusing the latest sub-journalism on my puppy-chewed phone, including headlines:
“PROPOSED CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT SAYS ALIENS ARE PEOPLE”
“GOD IS NOT AN ALIEN SAYS EVERLASTING EVANGELICAL MINISTRY”
“PRESIDENT CLAIMS ALIENS STEALING JOBS FROM AMERICANS”
After spending summer immersed in self-doubt studying for the bar exam, I must now take yet another test, on American Bar Association Rules of Professional Conduct. All for the jackpot of practicing law in Nevada. A job I might not mind an alien stealing from me.
Studying for any state’s bar exam was not for the faint of heart, but I recently surpassed 55 and once swore I’d never go through it again after years as an unsung government lawyer.
Now I chant a daily refrain of Am I crazy? Because at my age, I never dreamed I’d pass. And having emerged from the exam smack-dab into the quintessential question “Are we alone?” answered in a flashbang, the thought of practicing law lost its luster.
Nevertheless, I was headed to a favorite place, the Monterey Peninsula, for a least favorite thing to do—take a multiple-choice test. A test required for Nevada lawyers but not administered in Nevada.
Don’t get me started.
Stepping from the shower, I hopped to avoid Bodie’s lapping tongue. A Border Collie, Queensland Heeler mix who managed to survive past his first birthday despite chewing items inconvenient to replace, including the TV remote, coffee pot lid and my phone.
I spent the past few months writing my newspaper column about how local folks have something new to obsess about than whether legalized cannabis edibles are more dangerous than their ever-ubiquitous loaded guns. In Yearntown where I’ve lived for five years, too many now clung to those guns in fear laced with gob-smacked mortification.
“You know, Bodie, even if people have less petty things to focus on doesn’t mean they will,” I said to the dog.
After relearning stuff like “alienage” in constitutional rights, this was a whole new tango in the dance of DNA and life as we once viewed it, now peppered with the preposterous.
Inalienable rights were headed for a battle over alien rights.
I didn’t yet know how much of my DNA might be alien, but I could make a case on possible genetic origins of more than a few men I’d known. Especially the one I presently lived with, Lucas Rawlins.
Although I no longer had to wonder about my cat.
In last week’s breaking news out of Cairo, it was revealed domesticated felines evolved from those in ancient Egypt, except for a previously omitted tidbit that they didn’t originally hail from Earth. Many might have predicted that possibility, though some demanded proof.
As if we’ve ever had proof of how humans got here. People want immediate and irrevocable answers about aliens when the age-old question of our own existence hadn’t been definitively answered. I wrote a column about that, too, but the newspaper wouldn’t let me call folks “boneheads.” Apparently name-calling was not allowed and not needed to tick-off local residents. It didn’t take much.
One of few friends in this town told me I was agitating officials including the sheriff by siding with “those foreigners” and not claiming evil aliens were trying to take over the world. I don’t know if they meant foreign nations that broke the news about aliens, or the extraterrestrials themselves. Did they know what they mean?
My alien cat Morris had taken over the inside of my suitcase. I wanted to name the orange and white tabby with an extra-long tail Ginsburg, after Ruth Bader, but lost that argument to a whim of former cowboy Lucas, also the reason for a dog with herding tendencies.
Lucas lobbied to name Morris after the Nine Lives cat food mascot, which at least was a good Gaelic name and appropriate for an alien, given the paranormal nine lives thing.
So many questions to be asked and answered. For now, I wonder how I allowed myself to be outnumbered by males in my dwelling space. And how is it I wrangled the only cowboy in America who won’t dance?
“No kitty, you can’t go with me,” I lifted Morris from my suitcase and snuck a kiss on his nose before he scampered off in a noisy huff.
He’s a talker. With a purr resembling a chain saw, problematic when he settles at my head during times of slumber, and upon waking me in the wee hours for breakfast. I read recently a cat’s purr can be soothing for humans. The jury’s still out on that for me.
Perhaps the problem had more to do with my hearing itself. The medical profession deemed it auditory impairment known as tinnitus. I was holding out for a hypothesis more esoteric to explain persistent ear-ringing that began when, well I don’t know when it began.
I plan to ask George about it, a friend and physics professor in Monterey.
Right now, the sound my ears registered was a phone ping of an incoming text message.
“Is now a good time to call??? Trying to schedule pedicures!!! (3 smiley face emoji)”
Mom. A no longer five-foot-two octogenarian who made up for her lack of vertical stature by heightened use of punctuation—and emoji.
“Getting ready to head out. Pedicure good anytime except Sat morning when I’m taking test. (frowny face emoji)”
My parents were joining me on Monterey Bay. Dad’s a golfer with medically verified hearing loss. Mom’s chief appointment and dinner reservation scheduler.
Another ping as I scooped the litter box. A crucial step before leaving, as Lucas’s modus operandi was wait until just before I return to dump and replace it with half a box of fresh kitty litter. No telling how many “tootsie roll” treats the dog consumed until then.
“Your horoscope says special challenges on horizon!!! Cloudy here. (frowny face emoji) How is weather there??? Drive safe!!! (3 kissy faces, 3 hearts, 3 kissing lips emoji)”
The emoji thing was new, as was phone texting. Mom moved on from email with fierceness doing justice to her zodiac sign of Leo. My sister Gwynne and her husband Phil also get weather reports from Mom, despite living a few blocks from our folks.
I kissed Morris and Bodie goodbye but not Lucas, who’s off on a beer and canned chili run as he’d be holed up looking after the critters and job searching.
Departing Yearntown, the vast landscape was a stark difference from past lives. No irritating stoplights and stressed out commuters. I went from the smell of road rage to the scent of sagebrush on whispering winds aloft lonely roads.
Because the wind does whisper here. When it isn’t howling.
The Milky Way is visible more often than not, but when clouds dot the landscape, we get peculiar phenomenon shaped like flying saucers.
I mentioned this to a former boyfriend, also former CIA, who assured me such clouds were government weather experiments. His idea of astrophysicist humor, but Klingon cloaking device seems a stronger case to make these days.
Timing’s not always my strong suit, but I’d stopped to consider how I happened to live due northwest of Area 51 when the news broke about aliens among us. It was on this road I witnessed my second UFO months after moving here.
Some of us have our own personal proof.
Copyright © 2020 Lauryne Wright
ISBN: 978-1-64718-222-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Published by BookLocker.com, Inc., St. Petersburg, Florida.
Printed on acid-free paper.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
BookLocker.com, Inc.
2020
First Edition