Play Pretend
by Alex Sobel
"Hands up or I'll vaporize all of you," Dan says. He doesn't intend to, but years of pretend play with his friends takes over and he puts up his right hand in a fake gun shape, thumb pointed upward, one finger out, the five remaining fingers curled into his palms.
"Can you try it again, but this time maybe... give us more?" says one of the three men behind the desk. Is he the casting director? They all look the same. "You hate this man, really sell it to us."
What he means is that he wants more accent. They don't want Dan to give them something real, they want a caricature of an evil Goolan invader. This isn't the first time. He tells himself that this is what acting is, that better roles will come, that he's paying his dues.
Dan slips his long tongue back toward his throat, thinks of his grandma, the way she used to yell at him for making a mess of his toys. She'd hate what he's about to do.
"Hands up or I'll vaporize you," he says again, throwing in an unnatural amount of Goolan clicks and coughs, replacing all of his Ps with Ks like they do on a home world he's never been to, one he'll never see.
This time, the man smiles. This is exactly what he's looking for.
Dan wants to write a rom-com about an Earth-born Goolan in love with an aristocratic, Goola-born woman. Or an action movie about a sympathetic Goolan assassin who only kills in order to pay for his daughter's medical care.
Sometimes he starts typing these ideas out, but never gets far. What's the point? It'll never get made. Plus, his fingers swell when he types, his joints growing brown with pain. There isn't an English language typing-keyboard that's made to accommodate stringy Goolan hands.
One more thing he wishes existed, but doesn't.
When Dan arrives on set for his first day, the guard at the entrance scrutinizes his ID. He pushes up his sunglasses until they sit above his forehead, looks at the picture on the card, then at Dan, then the card, then Dan again.
"You're good," the guard says after a few minutes.
He does the same routine the next day, like he's never seen Dan before in his life
During lunch, one of the human extras tells Dan that his grandpa was an actor and a second-generation German immigrant.
"He wanted to be, like, a super hero or something," he says, chewing craft service ham on wheat, "but with even that little bit of an accent? Guy was only ever a Nazi. He played a damn good Nazi, though, I swear."
Dan regrets telling his mom about the part.
"Just be grateful for the work," she says.
"Doesn't this stuff bother you?" Dan says.
His mom gently shakes her middle-most head. "Worrying about this kind of thing is a luxury. Your grandma had to worry about whether or not Congress was going to make murdering a Goolan illegal. I could have been killed as a baby without any legal repercussions. You get to play pretend for money and you're upset about the voice you have to do? Count your blessings, boob-ba."
Dan sighs. "I see what you mean, mooma-ma," he says. But he doesn't see, doesn't understand at all.
