Did you see Ryan Reynolds go pale in the face, and cough up pools of blood? Did you see his limp body, already dead, involuntarily jerk – it was like a tick, or a bit of fits – floating in mid-air in that space laboratory? It was a seizure, in a manner of speaking – that octopus thing from Mars was seizing his insides. God knows what it was engulfing – did you see how it enveloped the poor white mouse like a thick rubber glove? Gut, colon, liver, kidneys, even back up to lungs and heart, out the throat again. Did you see how exobiologist Hugh Derry’s glove turned inside out, wafting out of that lab box, the alien exploring its shape and material, how the glove looked like a fully formed hand? It was to say here’s pointing at you, kid. Here’s a long overdue payback for the way you’ve treated life, and everything that inhabits your shared space. It was poetic justice, until you actually started feeling an aversion to the alien aggression, the way quarantine officer Miranda North said it. She said she hated it, however irrational that response might have seemed. MOS Burger has a new tako burger. I asked the cashier what the white topping was – potato salad or mushroom sauce? – and what of the dark gravy above the patty? Is it teriyaki or their trademark demi-glaze, which I wouldn’t have gone for? I never got the answer because the query was shouted out to the kitchen, then the back room, and the manager couldn’t be found. Not that any response was required, not that it would have made much difference. It was just a question that popped, like a soap bubble barely making it out of the bubble stick, that then vanished – and it didn’t matter whether the question was ever conceived in the first place. Some questions are like that, take on that tenor. It’s a tenor that’s actually quite enviable – the tenor of does-it-really-fucking-matter. Some article said that people who don’t mind swearing in regular speech actually make for more honesty. The laying it bare, leaving it all out there, actually means there’s less of the hiding, less of the unseen motive. It’s a lovely miscegenation going on here, a kind of uncomfortable mesh-up of the vulgar and the good.