[ WP ] An alien family are trying to act normal on Earth . In an attempt to discover how to do regular things , they stumble upon HowToBasic .

The mouse - squeak squeak squeak, she found one dead in the pantry last week, their droppings scattered like raindrops, raisins, amidst the rotting slurry of food, hears them rustling through the walls; she took the dead one apart, its tiny furred body slamming against the wall to uncover the zipper-toothed knobs of its spine, squeak squeak squeak - the mouse has been broken for the last two hundred and thirty one minutes, its plastic sclerites dangling off like fingernails to expose its internal labelled anatomy. It works - she slams it down hard against the table and jumps and thinks of the ketchup-red paste of its biological cousin and wishes that it could bleed as well, that the interface, that this, out of the hundred countless interfaces, was easier - with her forefinger and ringfinger degloved and the exposed wiring threaded through the flesh so that every spasm of her hand makes the corresponding cursor on the screen jump, and it has not been enough, it will never be enough. 
 
 ( There are gouges on the table; there are bloodstains imprinted on the table like memories. Gradually, gradually, they are learning. ) 
 
 This is not helping, says her husband behind her, the words slurring thick through the biological membranes of his throat, through air. It's like farting, it's the expulsion of communication. She slams her hand down again and the cursor jumps and clicks down and another video wordlessly plays. She is not listening to her husband, no one is listening to her husband - not their son with his bare right foot resting on her left thigh and his right shoulder tucked between the space between her throat and chin; nor their daughter with her right shoulder under her right armpit and her right cheek resting against the curve of her breast with her hair running down like filaments. Each time she moves, each time she jerks, flesh compresses for bone beneath to almost make contact with bone beneath, and she imagines that one of these times she will exceed the fragile limits of these bodies and crack open a skull, a collarbone, a scapula and reveal the truth within. 
 Their son keens. Air whistles through her daughter's crushed throat. Together they are learning how to live. 
 
 This is not helping, repeats her husband, his fully erect penis aligned with the vertebrae of her neck, and she watches the amniotic expulsion of life blurred into fast-motion, and jerks her head backwards and crushes the spongy tissue between them. On the screen someone is breathing. Behind the camera, someone understands them. 
 
 How To Quickly Deliver a Baby, read the words on the screen, and her arm flails out and clicks it almost by accident. Together they wait for the music to stop, for the single arm to enter the frame like a penis. She feels the hot liquid trickling down the back of her neck and down her thighs, her abdomen contracting, and together their family prepares for the unholy miracle of life.
