A Blarthgarrr's Best Friend

All Edwin remembered was pulling his car into a services off of the M6 at Salford, a bright light, and then finding himself inside a large cage.

It was Monntarq's hatchday and his progenitor took him to the showroom to get his first ever pet.
After looking at the more docile creatures - the cuddlefish, the octopig and the howling terror puppy - Monntarq became enamoured with the blokes. There were five of them all in the cage, but one inparticular ran immediately up to Monntarq waving its appendages in a delightful display of affection. Monntarq ticked its hairy chin through the mesh and turned to his progenitor.
"I want this one!" he insisted.
"Now Monntarq," came the considered reply, "it's a big responsibility looking after a bloke. Wouldn't you prefer a horstritch instead? Or what about a nice cute ginchilla?"
"No," he inflated his vocal sac in a strop, "I want this one!"
HIs progenitor looked carefully into Monntarq's glistening eye, nodded and conceded.
"Ok, but you've got to be extra good at looking after it."
Monntarq jiggled up and down with excitement, they called over a clerk who hoisted the bloke out of the cage and took it over to the counter for the sale.

When they got back to their dwelling, Monntarq was very eager to play with his new pet. His progenitor carried the portable case from the conveyance into the dwelling, closed the door to the main room, and carefully lifted the access panel.
Nervously, tentatively, the bloke stepped forwards, a sort of worried look on its little face.
"Come on," Monntarq cooed, "don't be shy."
Pressing its bare foot onto the ground, wiggling its toes, the bloke got a comfortable footing, let its hands leave the safety of the case and stepped, naked and alone, into the middle of the room.
Monntarq giggled excitedly, "It's so adorable! Look at it."
With joy Monntarq rushed forward and the bloke let out a yelp and retreated back into the case.
"Easy Monntarq, slowly," his progenitor said with a calm, soothing tone, mainly for the benefit of the trembling bloke.
Monntarq reached into a carrier bag from the showroom, removed a hard crispy orb and held it out, waving it towards the bloke.
"Here you are, it's yummy, come and have a bite."
Again the bloke made cautious progress, checking both Monntarq and his progenitor before leaving the case and stepping towards this out-stretched snack.
Uncertain of what exactly was being offered, the bloke sniffed at the maroon dusty shape, and then pressed its tongue against the side, licking it a little. Smacking its lips to contemplate the flavour, the bloke then took the orb from its owner and proceeded to noisly, and messily, crunch at the biscuit until it was all gone.

They decided to name it Flopsy, and Monntarq was good to his word. He took Flopsy out for a walk twice a day, though Flopsy did require some discipline at first. He fed Flopsy himself and washed him when necessary.
They took Flopsy to the vet to get neutered and chipped, and a lifelong friendship was formed.
Flopsy went everywhere with Monntarq and lived to the age of 8. After that Monntarq got an octopig.

Edwin had found himself placed in a cage with four other men, all naked, shivering and screaming in terror. Two were Chinese, one was Mexican and the other was from Wales, so it was only the latter than Edwin could understand.
"Where are we?"
"I don't know, but there are monsters out there... Monsters!" the Welsh man stammered, his eyes wide with fear.
"How long have you been here?"
"Not sure, it seems like a few days, but look..." The Welsh man held up a wrinkled, veiny hand. "I'm only twenty six, I don't know what's happening to me!?"
Suddenly the other three men all cowered into  a corner, the Welsh Man - looking over Edwin's shoulder - did likewise.
Edwin turned and saw a huge cycloptic creature looming towards their cage, it's one yellow eye staring intently.
Desperately, confused, Edwin rushed forward waving his arms; "Please, you must help me! I don't know what you want from me, from us, but I have nothing. I'm just a bank clerk."
In a booming voice it began howling gibberish and nonsense.
Edwin smiled earnestly, hoping it had understood and then a humongous wriggling tendril pushed through the wire and slapped him across the chin rapidly, leaving gloop and slime matted into his beard.
Another beast, this one twice the size, towering taller than a skyscraper, began bellowing at the first creature. Finally the small monster let out a piercing wail which seemed to bring about a conclusion to the discussion, and over Edwin's head a trap door was opened.

A Coupling

"It'll just give rise to people marrying their pets or farm animals!" cried Harold Wiest MP, flapping unrelated papers that he clutched in his chubby fist.

This was when social media went into an expected frenzy, people posting memes of a hastily cut-n-pasted Wiest as the groom in various bestial weddings.

Crol held hir brain pod in hir suckers and despaired. This is what shhe had feared this debate would become once it finally reached the parliaments of Earth.

For all their perceived progress, hir progenitor had told hir, humans are unflinchingly irrational. Shhe was resilient, believing that most people are good. Besides, shhe had fallen in love with one of them.

Love, for hir kind, was a - no pun intended - alien concept. Crol had come to Earth to study philosophy, shhe enjoyed the dilemmas that Earth thinkers would pose for themselves and it opened hir mind to analysing hir own kind in a different light. Though, at first, they had felt superior in the regard of being a species that lacked gender, and therefore lacked any inequality between sexes, they soon discovered that they shared many similiar forms of exclusion and repression familiar to humans and, in instances where the two species were incompatible, new and unique forms of division.

Crol experienced this at a young age, with certain regard to hir fascination and obsession with humans. They used to call hir a dirty gene pool, taunted hir with lurid gestures and doodles of what hir mutant offspring would look like and hir ugly, hairy partner.

If anything this ultimately made Crol reluctant, to the extent that shhe began to try and suppress and deny hir feelings as shhe found hirself falling for one of hir fellow students. Shhe was ashamed, shhe thought he would undoubtedly be repulsed by hir because of who shhe had lead hirself to believe shhe was. Made incapable of looking beyond the torment of cruel, narrow attitudes.

He didn't reciprocate hir feelings, though he spoke so eloquently in class and seemed so reasonable and understanding he was also unable to transcend the superficial differences that had been created between the species.

We, humanity, had thought we were such an understanding and enlightened species, having fought for centuries to eliminate racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, discrimination of all forms. It became obvious to those who had been blissfully ignorant that many of these are battles never truly won, that blinkered tolerance is not the same as true unconscious equality. These beings that came to our planet reawakened a wealth of dormant prejudices that embarrassed us as a species.

People would hold up examples of protest from our seemingly distant past, people picketing against integration, against mixed race couples, against same sex couples, and they would say; "Look how foolish and short-sighted these people seem now." As if that were enough to crumble the foundations of hard-wired bigotry.

It had been someone reaching out to hir in the end. Shhe had retreated, feeling admonished by his rejection, as if he were confirming hir worst expectations, what humans had shouted at hir in the street; "There's no place for your kind here."

When he was questioned about it by his friends they always, with a telling lack of sensitivity, leapt towards the most lurid of questions; "Yeah, but how do you do it?" Tact soon left him and he told his friends to "just fuck off", and this seemed to help them understand.

He had rubbish thrown at him as he walked down the street, names shouted from strangers, threatening letters sent to his home and his family, once somebody posted a dead squid through his letterbox with a note saying, in angry scrawl, 'Why don't you marry it?'

It was in part because they had become the figureheads of the campaign to legalise inter-species marriage, and it was on this subject that Harold Wiest MP was harrumphing like a stuck pig. Those people who bleated the rhetoric of marrying pets seemed to wilfully overlook the issue of mutual compliance and how "Meow", "Moo", "Baa" or "Quack" is no subsitute for "I do".

It wasn't even that he and Crol wanted to get married, they just wanted equality, we cannot live in a world where there's one rule for some and another rule for everyone else. We cannot put in caveats to the detriment, exclusion and alienation of others. It would drive them both insane that people seemed to be afraid of an unknown corrupting force, one that would make them - against their will - change who they are, becoming a prisoner of some imposed way of life that they fundamentally disagreed with. Oh, the irony, that others might be forced to live lives - against their will - that strangulate and confine them, make them behave the way people expect and want them to, to wear masks, to deny their right to be themselves.

"Do you ever stop to think," Crol said, looking towards Harold Wiest MP, who could not hold hir gaze, "what it would be like to not be the dominant kind?"

That's all shhe wanted to say, because shhe didn't enjoy confrontation and despite how much it hurt hir, how shhe trembled inside as shhe saw people trying to prevent hir from being hirself, shhe could never bring hirself to want to dismantle someone else's beliefs. Shhe just wanted them to afford others the same courtesy that shhe gave them.

Shhe wished shhe was a more aggressive type, then shhe'd snatch Harold Wiest MP from his bed and take him back to another planet, one intolerant - unlike hir's - of humankind. He'd be put on show, ridiculed, made to feel exactly how shhe feels when he talks - with no regard for anyone but himself - about putting restrictions on the freedom of others.

And other planets, other species, did hate humankind. They were amused, though wearied, by our enduring intolerance. It was outsiders who brought us interstellar travel, who brought us technology beyond our comprehension, things they were capable of because they had - long ago - moved beyond petty bickering over, what they considered, trivial matters. The ethnicity, the sexuality, the beliefs of others were almost irrelevant to what a unified planet could achieve. Whilst arguments will never cease it is at least more noble to argue for something worthwhile other than the constructed and perceived inferiority of one race or class or gender or persuasion to another.

Other planets thought us petulant, stroppy toddlers, and maybe it's because we're a young planet? A young species. But, still, these differences never really occured to many of them amongst themselves.

Shhe wanted to prove them wrong, he wanted to prove them wrong, they turned their love over as a willing symbol, an act of public defiance and whilst the voice of fear and hatred is often louder and more startling, the voice of hope and reason and love - though shy - is larger, and ultimately stronger. It just needs to push. It just needs to break through.

They held one another close, and waited for the votes to be counted, and waited for the voices to be heard.