by Sierra July
Mason pricked his finger on a rose and fell onto his back, panting. He was certain he’d enter into a coma like Sleeping Beauty. When sleep didn’t come, he studied his finger. Instead of a red blood pearl at its tip, there was a blue substance.
Without thinking, he licked it. Blackness fell.
It was Chloro who went in to dinner, sat with Mason’s parents, and chatted.
Mason’s parents had never seen their son so talkative and imaginative.
“What were you up to before dinner?” his mother asked. “I saw you playing in the garden.”
“I wasn’t up to anything. As soon as I arrived, I came inside to learn about humans. I’ve only seen your species from a distance.”
Mason’s father laughed. “Still in the middle of a game, huh? Sounds like you’re set for an Earth invasion.”
Chloro nodded and went on talking.
The parents laughed as he described dinosaurs and other extinct animals he’d seen since his birth. Detailed how he lived on soil, sun, and water. How he’d waited for a chance meeting with an organism with legs. The parents laughed on, not suspecting a thing.
Sierra July is a University of Florida graduate, writer, and poet. Her fiction has appeared in Robot and Raygun, T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog, and SpeckLit, among other places, and is forthcoming in Belladonna Publishing’s Strange Little Girls anthology. She blogs at talestotellinpassing.blogspot.com.