Photo by Malcolm Lidbury

After finally wresting control of my blog from the grip of a ruthlessly apathetic gang of Japanese hacker dognappers, I was hoping to write a new post, and maybe even a normal one. No such luck, as I’ve recently discovered a mysterious new growth living at the uppermost point of my gums.

So as you can imagine, I’ve been too preoccupied with that to write anything new.

This new growth announced its arrival on Wednesday in a tingly manner more annoying than painful, thankfully, but as I type this the sensation has intensified and it now feels like when the dentist injects Novocain or whatever they use these days to numb your mouth. That pinch. Yeah, I know it’s a little pinch, but this thing is like the pinch that keeps on pinching. And rubbing. As in, not only is it like the syringe is up there poking around, but also one of the dentist’s rubber-gloved fingers. A non-stop poking around.

And my new growth is high enough and big enough it’s pressing against my upper lip and my left nostril, and the part of my left cheek closest to my left nostril. The whole area feels swollen and sore and puffy, as if a make-up artist visited me in the middle of the night and added a bulb of prosthetic skin to my face.

That’s how it feels, but not how it looks. Everything on the outside appears to be normal so you wouldn’t know the misery I’m in if you passed me on the street. Unless of course I stopped you and pulled my upper lip over the tip of my proboscis and revealed the terrible tiny orb inhabiting the northern border of my gums.

As I did to my wife.

My dear wife, who explored my mouth with a flashlight and her keen owl eyes, and claims my new growth is just a canker sore in a mighty inconvenient location. Who advised me to try not to think about it.

But of course I’m thinking about it. I can’t not think about it.

Because I’m not convinced it’s a canker sore.

I’m pretty certain it’s an alien organism gestating inside my mouth. Yep. And I expect it’s my left nostril that will eventually serve as the birth canal. Any day now. A furry centipedish creature with pincers for eyes, or a hard shell spidery thing with eight skeletal finger-legs, or maybe a poison-oozing worm-leech. Whatever it is it’s going to hatch out of the milky white breeding sac sitting snug against my gums and them come crawling into and then out of my nose, scuttle over my lips and maybe curl up in the cleft of my chin.

And then I’ll know why I’ve suddenly been obsessed with buying fertilizer and Chinese rice crackers. Because while the alien’s been transitioning from embryo to fetus it’s also been in control of my mind. And fertilizer and Chinese rice crackers are what this particular alien feeds on, what it needs to expand to 1,000 times its original size and take over Los Angeles. And then, eventually, the world.

You’re following the logic of this, right? So you can understand why I’m going to the proper authorities right after I finish this sentence.

Or right after I finish this sentence.

I can’t leave, see? Because of the alien controlling my mind.

Canker sore. Sheesh. My wife can be so naïve sometimes.