Friday Flash Fiction: Blue Men

This is more of an anecdote about an anecdote, which reminds me of the old saying: 'Two anecdotes don't make a story.' Or was that 'Two cooks don't make the broth'?

Anyway:

Blue Men
By Gareth D Jones


Sitting in the departure lounge at Liverpool’s Saint John Lennon Spaceport, I watched as a gaggle of Blumen strode past on their way to catch a flight.

“Blumen!” I commented to nobody in particular. “That’s a particularly unimaginative name for a race of blue humanoids.”

The girl next to me at the coffee bar smiled in the way strangers do when they want to seem friendly without starting a conversation. She was maybe twenty, her black hair short and spiky.

“That’s not why they’re called Blumen,” the overweight man behind the bar said wisely, his scouse accent thick and gravelly. He put down his cloth and shuffled closer to talk to the girl and me. His chin was studded with a trio of fake diamonds. The girl smiled at him, in exactly the same way that she had at me.

“Oh?” I felt obliged to humour him as I’d raised the subject.

“Apparently the first humans to arrive on their home world of Bluz were a group of German astronauts.” He nodded as he spoke, maybe trying to imbue his words with authority. “They were met with garlands of flowers and everything the blue people had was covered in floral patterns.” He plucked a fake red flower of indeterminate species from a small vase that sat on the bar like a forgotten decoration from a cheesy café. He offered it to the girl with a flourish and she giggled but didn’t take it. “The Germans decided to call them Blumenvolk,” he went on. “That’s German for flower people.” He put the rejected flower back in its pot. “Now we just call them Blumen.”

“That’s a lovely story.” The girl spoke for the first time, her accent cultured and her voice pleasant.

I nodded politely and went back to my coffee. The three of us didn’t speak again after that, our small window of communion over. The barman went to serve other customers and the girl slipped away a few moments later.

Of course, it didn’t happen like that at all. The astronauts who landed on Bluz spoke English. The human imagination really is so dull that when they couldn’t pronounce their own name for themselves they just called them blue men.

I caught my flight a while later but the story came back to me as I relaxed on the voyage. Maybe I’ll tell the story of the Germans in future. It’s far more interesting than the truth.


The End