You're probably imagining a bunch of Mexicans in my house. Come on now, admit it. I said illegal aliens in my house, on my beds and in my chairs and curled up snoring in the bath tubs and you pictured brown people in dirty jeans and western wear, sweaty bandanas tied around their necks, cowboys hats, sad but peaceful expressions on their wind-worn faces as they sleep fitfully and lightly on the carpet in the den. Well who can blame you. That's what the TVs portray for you when they want express the concept of an illegal alien, so it's not your fault that that's what you would think of.

But that’s not the case with the illegal aliens in my house at this point. These dozens and dozens of illegal aliens are from countries all over the world, covering almost every square inch of habitable space except for this hallway. Why? I don't know. How did they get here? Are they here to stay? Do they know each other? Do they speak English? Am I going to get in trouble for this? Who the hell do I think I am, Harriet freaking Tubman? I can’t really answer some of those question. I do know who some of them are, though.

Let me start with Juan Gomez. From Juarez. I am pretty sure Juarez is the name of a real place in Mexico. The name Juan Gomez for an illegal alien is almost cliché, but I swear to you that’s his name. He walked all the way here from Juarez, and he never speaks. I don’t know how the others know that he walked all the way here, since he never speaks, but I believe it. Juan was the first one to arrive, just walked into my back yard, grabbed a tent, set it up, and crawled inside. And not the middle, either—he made room for two more people.

Then there’s Eve Edgewick. Eve may be French, or German. She speaks with a thick accent and insists on making eggs for everyone every morning. I have no idea where all these eggs are coming from. But they’re really good. Salty without being too salty, like when salt acts as a flavor enhancer, not a flavor itself. Fluffy—they’re scrambled. I tentatively asked her one morning if she could do over easy. I was nervous because, you know, she made the eggs without asking. But I figure, my house, right? Doesn’t hurt to ask? But she just laughed. I don’t know if she laughed because the request was absurd, she didn’t know how, or if she just didn’t understand me.

That’s actually kind of a problem with most of these illegal aliens. Most of them don’t understand a word I say. I base this on the fact that I have no idea what they are talking about. But I do know enough to know when they’re talking to each other and the languages don’t match. Marcus Estonian will be speaking Portuguese to Myra Vietnam, who herself is speaking Korean. Those are weird names, I know, but I’ve memorized all their names. We use name tags.

We have learned to enjoy cold showers, since there’s no way to keep the water warm with that many people bathing. When you get used to it--- hang on a second. Jeremy Wolfgang has emerged from my guest room, needs to use the toilet, and so the Japanese twins are coming out to let him have some privacy. They’re sitting next to me in the hallway for a few moments. I can see them by the light under the bathroom door, and they look a little anxious, like the don’t want to encroach on my personal space here in the hallway. I am trying to write more quietly since they seem to be drifting off. Poor things are very tired. Every morning they go for a run, I don’t know how far, but they’re usually gone for an hour. They ask some of the other illegal aliens to go with them, and sometimes a few do. I think they do this to give me some space, if only for a few moments. The problems is, when they leave, other illegal aliens show up to take their place. Then they come back, and someone else leaves.

I think that’s called synergy. Okay, there’s the flush… the sink… Jeremy is back in the room with Tony, Esmerelda, Quimby-Lee, Saffron, and Falling Bear, and the twins are back in the bathroom. Where was I? Oh, right, cold showers—when you get used to them, cold showers are actually very refreshing. Not that the weather here has been too hot. Still, it’s not easy sleeping in a cramped house, so refreshing is nice. Oh, and as for Falling Bear—yes, he’s an Indian, but he’s from Canada, so that counts.

There was a pause there. You can’t tell because you’re probably reading straight through. But that short sentence was the last sentence for a while. Because I am trying to think, and I just don’t know what else we’ve eaten for the past three weeks except eggs. We must be eating something else. Surely. But I am concentrating with all my might and all I can remember is eggs. How can eggs still taste good if that’s all we’re eating.

I was sort of in a bad place. My ex girlfriend had died. It was one of those deals where we had been dating for a while, not really serious, but more than just friends. A certain level of expectation. Then she got diagnosed, told me, broke up with me. I told her she didn’t have to protect me like that, that I would be there for her right up to the end. But she said no, knowing she was going to die gave her the courage to do something she had wanted to do for a while. Then she died. Her dad tweeted it. That sounds callous and absurd, I know, but it’s really sad in a way. She and I never lived together, and we were broken up for a few months before she died, but after that tweet, the house felt really empty.

And I thought about suicide but not in a serious kind of way. It occurred to me. Like it might occur to me to go have ice cream. Ice cream! I haven’t had ice cream in months! I considered it an option. Sort of like, technically, you have the option to not pay your water bill. They can’t force you to pay it; they can shut off your water. They can take you to court. They might even find a way to put you in jail, although I doubt it, this is not Dickens’ England.

On a lark I looked up gun stores online. I was amazed at how many there are. I checked to see what the latest was on waiting lists. Then I had a thought—a suicide would only need to buy one bullet, right? But even if a gun store was so evil as to sell one bullet at a time, why would the suicider bother, since he didn’t really need to save money anyway? Wouldn’t even need a cheap gun. I guess you’d want to pay for easy to use and reliable. A Beretta 92FS or Heckler and Koch USP 45 oughta do the trick.

Then Juan showed up. I didn’t even know I had tents in my back yard. Then Hedley from Warsaw, the first to take the guest room. Then Malcom Otanabi, from Africa. Somewhere in Africa, not sure where. He chose the garage, liked sleeping in the backseat of my car. Alexi and Sulvania, Bryce, Teeny, Olson, Hiro Z, Hiro T, a guy everyone calls Moses even though he looks nothing like Charleton Heston. Richard, Oreema, N!gcolo, the Japanese twins Yuuko and Kane, Jeremy of course. Eve Edgewick. There’s more but I don’t want to bore you even further.

Oh and they’re good at hiding! My ex girl friend’s dad came over one day, to see if she had left anything here. Wanted a clean slate, fresh start, nothing lingering to haunt him, he said. I was hesitant to invite him in, wished he had called first so I could warn the illegal aliens on my front porch. But they’d run around to the back yard by the time he rang the bell. And he sort of invited himself in, which is rude, but not out of character for him. I winced, but no one was in the living room. I could hear movement from the crawlspace, and some footsteps upstairs, but the living room was empty.

I offered him some water, and he said yes—the kitchen was empty. I have one of those houses where you could do laps running from the living room through the dining room into the kitchen, back to the foyer and back to the living room again. So they must have been shuffling around in a circle. Then the guy lifted the blinds to my back yard, said I need to stop being mopey. I guess the illegal aliens anticipated that because they had moved, tents and all.

I tried to tell him I didn’t have anything of his daughters, since she never stayed over, hardly ever came here, mostly it was just me dropping by her place in the mornings for eggs to make plans for the evening and then off to work. He insisted I show him my bedroom. I wanted to put my foot down, but you see where she got her stubborn nature from. Up we went, all the illegal aliens crammed into one of the bathrooms I guess, him opening my bedside table to look for a forgotten hairbrush or old package of birth control pills. But he found nothing.

Then me and my big mouth. He was just sort of staring at me, making me uncomfortable, so I blurted out the only thing I had of her was a few pictures on my digital camera. And he insisted I give those to him! What do you mean give them to you, I asked him. Give me the memory card, he said. I said no. Look, you little runt, he said, and started walking towards me. He backed me out of the bedroom, and then at the top of the stairs, my illegal aliens came out of the woodwork.

They pushed him down the stairs, shouting and screaming the whole time. At the bottom he tried to get up and they pushed him down, towards the front door. They overwhelmed him. Pushing and pulling his arms hollering and making so much noise. Finally he got the door open, and they just kept yelling in all those different foreign languages. They were waiting from him outside, too, shoving him into the grass as he went for his car. He got in and tore out of there at top speed, even though there’s a sign on my street that clearly says to go slow because we have a deaf child in the neighborhood.

My illegal aliens came back inside, some of them out of breath, but everyone quite. Some of them looked at me. Some of them smiled. Genevieve put her hand on my shoulder and Andre patted me on the head. Then Eve went into the kitchen to make eggs and Hammond brought me a glass of water and that was that. About 10 minutes later, my ex girlfriend’s dad tweeted: “just got attacked by my daughter’s ex boyfriend. Or should I say ex stalker. Not sure they ever dated.” What a jerk.

That was a few days ago. Not much else has happened since then. We’ve kinda fallen into a nice little routine. Basically I have eggs in the morning, maybe read the paper, do the crossword puzzle with a bunch of the illegal aliens gathered around me. The applaud if I can finish the whole thing. Then I sit in my hallway for a while, listening to the buzz and chatter of everyone moving around the house. When its my turn, I take a shower. Play with my cell phone, which died when I forgot to charge it up. Haven’t really bothered to look for my charger. Sometimes an Illegal alien brings me a glass of water. Sometimes I write in my journal. Eventually I fall asleep in my hallway.

Not the life I expected for myself, but not so bad, all things considered. I don’t know why they’re here or what we’re going to do, but for the time being, I think I’m going to stop writing and go to sleep.