Love Story #4 (A Space Odyssey)

Some General Rules
If you are going, be sure to take a sandwich.  Those nights in the desert can be lonely.
You will have to make an offering.  A free round of applause is given to the tenth caller. Early on you discover a room filled with blue light is located under your living room floor.  You don’t know how to get in.  It is very small. Your happiness is mandatory and will be enforced.  

The Players
Jaime is lonely and beautiful and hides the day away in her room counting the reasons why she can’t leave.  If you look out the window you will see a cat watching a man piss in the alley, perhaps there is a rat somewhere, but from your vantage point you can’t see one. However you feel as though there should be one, and you place one behind some garbage cans.  Henry doesn’t like to dance, he stands in the corner.  One beautiful lady will approach him.  He will hide behind the gym mats

The Plot
Later on the spaceships land and everyone lines up single file for a tour.   The aliens have their own spokes-model who is handsome and smiles as she shows off the advanced features of this particular model of flying saucer. Jamie and Henry meet on line to see the spaceship.  Jamie drops her ticket at the feet of Henry.  Henry picks it up and returns it to her and offers a comment that we can’t hear, but that Jamie hears and laughs, and there is a certain look that is exchanged between the two.  Inside the spaceship, as the spokes model is explaining the advanced hyper something-- that allows the ship to pass beyond the speed of light, Henry slips his hand into Jaime’s and they both smile and blush. Henry notices that the floor is glowing with a blue light; he notices a trapdoor framed in an intense blue glow. A voice announces over the loudspeaker the various capabilities of the flying ship, its seating capacity and top speed.   The aliens look like wasps, except they have human bodies, no antennae and where the wings would be they had brightly colored flags which are decorated with slogans in an unreadable language.  Jaime knows immediately that she loves Henry. Henry wants to hide, but the smooth white of the interior of the spacecraft offers no gym mats to hide behind.  Instead he inhales his apprehension and tries to avoid looking Jaime directly in the eyes.  The alien captain stands outside the cockpit smiling and shaking the hands of the tourist.  Henry peeks into the cockpit and notices that the TV is playing re-runs of The Twilight Zone.  The aliens must have an understanding of irony, Henry thinks, and he smiles and mumbles something inaudible as he shakes the hand of the captain.  Jaime smiles and defers to Henry, who she now plans to marry once they exit the craft. As they exit the ship the spokes-model touches each of them lightly on the shoulder and kisses each of them gently on the cheek.  It all seems quite normal.
After the wedding Henry places gym-mates all along the walls of their home, and Jaime has a poster size print of the spaceship framed and placed over the fireplace.  It is a compromise of sorts.

Future History
Soon after the aliens leave the empire is founded-- it is a bloodless founding-- everyone simply agrees that it needs to exist.  Henry gets a job in the monuments department, designing future monuments to be built all throughout the new empire.  Jamie stays at home knitting handbags for sale over the internet, and composing sonnets that speak to the virtues of handholding.
After many years have passed Jamie and Henry look back on their early days, the spaceship days they affectionately refer to them as, and form them into a coherent narrative that they will offer, at a discounted price, to the tenth caller.