by Alexandra Erin
“I don’t see why this is such a freaking controversy,” she said. “You have a species that you think is extinct, except for one male specimen. You find a female specimen. She’s fertile. She’s of breeding age. What do you do?”
by Alexandra Erin
“So where are you heading?” he asked the woman in the window seat next to him. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the window since before the plane took off.
“Home,” she said, still not looking.
“Well, so much for the old saying.”
“What?”
“You know… ‘you can’t go home again,’ and all that,” he said.
“Oh,” she said. “As far as I know, that’s true.”
“But you said you’re going home now.”
“Yes,” she said. “For the first time. It’s always for the first time. That’s why you can never do it again.”
by Alexandra Erin
“Here it is, Mrs. Smith,” the man said. He opened up the manila envelope and let the enlarged photos, all aerial reconnaissance shots of an industrial complex in the eastern bloc, slip out onto the desk. He did not touch it. “Go ahead. Look at them. Pick them up, if you want to.”
by Alexandra Erin
The day came when there were no more strange lights in the night sky, no more mutilations, and no more disappearances. The people of that small rural community rejoiced, although they always felt a sense of unease in not knowing why the phenomena had happened in the first place and why they had, with just as little warning, stopped. Unless they knew that, it seemed as though there was no way they could be sure that the ordeal was truly over, that it wouldn’t all begin again just as suddenly as before.
This was why so many people spent the rest of their lives trying to decipher the single, garbled broadcast that had been intercepted on the night the lights had vanished from the sky. They believed that knowing what those alien words meant, what that inhuman voice was saying, would bring them some peace of mind, some sense of closure.
The meaning of the broadcast was never deciphered, of course. It would be impossible to translate a single snippet of an unknown language with nothing to reference or compare it against but itself. And this was probably for the best, because the simple townsfolk would not likely have found much comfort in knowing the truth.
“No! I won’t get you any more. You barely play with the ones that you have. Well, is it my fault you can’t take better care of them? That’s it, I’m turning this thing around right now…”
by Alexandra Erin
“What’s that?” he asked her, tracing the tip of his fingernail around the scar. It was long, and pink, and surrounded with little dots, like a profusion of tiny legs.
“It’s a caterpillar,” she told him. “They implanted it in my leg when I was little so that one day I could turn into a beautiful butterfly.”
“I’d like to be there when that happens,” he said.
“I couldn’t imagine it happening any other way.”
by Alexandra Erin
The first time he saw one, it was crawling across the new tile in the kitchen. He’d gotten up from bed intent on getting a midnight snack when his tired eyes caught a glimpse of movement. The thing’s ruddy little body barely showed up against the brick-colored floor. If he hadn’t happened to cast his gaze downwards while it was just finishing up wriggling across the gap between tiles, he might have missed it.
