By Bronze Sparks
Romeo stared at Juliet, eyes twinkling with love as his ears wiggled in worry. There was no way his family would ever accept her, after all, she was in immigrant in their eyes. He knew that their culture was strange, and their appearance was stranger, but the new and unknown was drawing him closer to her. The longer he spent with her, the more he fell in love. It was getting harder to
defend her people to his family and harder still to get out to see her without being caught, everyone in the village knew everyone and it was obvious to them when he was hanging out with the immigrants due to their appearance and he did not need his family finding out about his relationship with her. He was hiding in the basement of her house, but little did he know that suspicion was growing back home.
“I bet he’s just hanging out with his friends.” His ever-hopeful younger sister commented. His bed was found empty last night, and he hadn’t been back since and it was well into the next evening. He had been known to go out for a while, but never for this long before and never without permission.
“I think he’s up to no good. The community has really suffered since those filthy immigrants came here!” His mum hissed in frustration and disgust. Everything had been perfect before they moved into the community, most of them hadn’t bothered to learn their language and they spent most of their time stealing and being a menace to their society. She knew that she was supposed to refer to them as refugees, but she didn’t understand why she should, they ruined their place and now they were coming to destroy her family’s home.
“What if he’s spending time with them! Think about it, he’s never snuck out before!” She continued, shuddering in disgust.
“You can’t think like that, Mary!” said Joseph, Romeo’s father.
The door opened as Romeo walked in and everyone turned to stare at him, but he was in a world of his own, grinning to himself. As he walked into the living room, his smile dropped as he noticed his family staring.
“Why is everyone staring at me?” he asked curiously. They all turned around, pretending that they hadn’t been staring at him, looking around the room, finding the furniture and decorations strangely interesting. He shrugged it off, he was too old to be dealing with this kind of behaviour, especially from his family who was too old to be acting like this in the first place. He went to his room and went to sleep, hearing hushed whispers from the living room.
The next day everything had returned to normal, until Romeo was about to leave.
“Where are you going Romeo?” His mother asked, suddenly appearing, popping her head around the corner from the front door.
“Out,” he responded, confused and irritated by the sudden shift in behaviour from his family. He left and slammed the door behind him. “Maria!” His mother yelled, summoning his little sister from the living room. “Follow Romeo for me please my darling, he is changing, and I want to know that he is being safe but obviously he isn’t in the mood for talking.” His sister turned around and grabbed her keys before walking out of their house. She followed him from a
distance, making sure that he couldn’t see her. He continued walking around in circles for a while, occasionally checking whether he was being followed.
He ended up going to the shabbier part of town which was littered with rubbish and covered in graffiti. Her face screwed up in disgust at how ruined her community had become since the refugee crisis. She began to wonder whether the refugees in other communities had been so disrespectful to their environment and started to question whether her mother was right about them. She continued to follow Romeo deeper into this part of town before walking out the other side, still looking shady as if he was guilty of something. Maria muffled a whimper at the sight of her favourite town having been devastated by the refugees, with trees being chopped down and the river, which was once clear as crystal, now a murky brown. He continued around the forest until he reached a cave, Maria had to duck behind a bush quickly as he turned around, making sure nobody was around before he entered the cave. Maria waited for a while before following him into the cave. Once she was in, she was shocked to see Romeo with one of the refugees – kissing her!
She slowly backed out of the cave and walked out of the refugee part of town before running back to her house and explaining to her mother what she had just seen. What Maria didn’t know was that Romeo had known she was there. But he didn’t care anymore, if his family didn’t accept Juliet, he would leave. Nothing mattered more to him than being with her. He asked Juliet to come to his house with him, warning her what she could expect when she got there. He answered her questions, and she answered his for hours before they left, not caring about people finding out anymore. They walked to his house hand in hand not bothered by the stares or comments from the townspeople. He walked into his house and found his family waiting in the hallway with his mother staring at him angrily, his dad looking at him pitifully and his sister looking at him with a mixture of hurt and disgust.
“How dare you sneak out, lie to me and start kissing a filthy immigrant!” His mum yelled making everyone flinch.
“A refugee, mum,” Romeo stated calmly, watching her start to turn red.
“They ruined their own planet and decided to come to ours and ruin that too! Look what they’ve done to their part of town!” She continued to yell. Maria added quietly “And my forest.” Before she looked down sadly again.
“They don’t bother to learn our language; they leave their rubbish everywhere and ruin everything that we built! The fountain in the square was built by your father 50 years ago to commemorate my pregnancy with you and they’ve ruined it! How could you care so little about your family and your culture!” His mum continued yelling.
But then it was Juliet’s turn to speak up. “Some of us have taken the time to learn the language, and not all of us act like that! If you made a better attempt to welcome us as one of your own and
taught us your language maybe we’d learn your language! As for the damage to your community, I understand that this is upsetting and I do not condone their actions, however, I am working on a way to educate my people about this and show them that their behaviour towards Earth was similar and look how it ended up, along with the fact that we would now be having to relocate two planets worth of people and to be more considerate!” Juliet had said before her voice rose as she became more passionate. Mary was surprised by Juliet’s behaviour.
“Ok, I will help you work on this. I will admit, I was wrong, and I shouldn’t have judged you so badly.” Mary said apologetically, gesturing to Juliet to hug her. Juliet was sceptical of the offer but cautiously accepted, after a few moments, she gestured for Romeo to join in the hug which he happily accepted. Mary had given her blessing for them to be together and had started working on plans to educate the other humans with Juliet. Things were improving between the two races, and everyone was more friendly to each other. Romeo and Juliet continued dating and became the first couple to be an inter-race couple before marrying and eventually having children, bringing in a new era of co-existence and peace.
Photo by Gáspár Ferenc on Pexels.com
