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You can see my past from here. Perhaps not mine, not quite yet. You can see through the stars, through the void, and into the distant life of my ancestors, their lives so tiny on the scale of the sun that their past-light is effectively invisible. As mine will be so many millennia after I am no longer here. Such is the way of it if you’re willing to fold your way through space, moving faster than you can see.

Here: it’s not so bad. And I can blend in with the locals if I don’t have to do it for too long. They’re a strange bunch of creatures, sophisticated and yet, really not. Living in this smoke-pumping, noise belching world of theirs. All their communication is loudness and colours and waves of different frequencies. And there is this thing they do called laughter, where they open their mouths wide and let out a repetitive barking, choking kind of sound. Sometimes it overcomes them so much that it seems like they are doubled over in pain or preying death. But instead this is the sound they make for enjoyment. Or a high-pitched noise that could be pain or pleasure, which can pass for either, which even their own kind seem to be unable to always distinguish.

I have tried to make these sounds. Our throats are not cut out for it, and there is a language that is typically wrapped around the noise. I’ve grasped it enough that I can manage a limited sort of communication. They mostly use it to show concern for me; one or more strangers might call out to me from amidst the stream of their strange toxic vehicles: “Hey, buddy, are you okay?”

Buddy: a term of endearment of affection, I think.

I have learnt to respond: “I’m well.” Or: “I’m safe.” “Don’t worry about me.” These all seem to be phrases of reassurance. I tilt my head down and show the furry covering I’ve allowed to grow on my head: such is some kind of a show of submission, and I am not trying to influence nor dominate. I didn’t come here with any clear goal in mind, except to fold and fold and fold my way through the galaxy, seeking and also fleeing. And so I’ve done. But I record, as much as I can – who can say how it might matter someday to someone, somewhere?

#

I have a home of sorts here. There are oceans-plentiful on this planet, and they’re a fetching shade of blue in reflection of a blue sky. There is fine sand lining these oceans, and then it flows upwards, into soil and grass, into trees and flowers, ferns, vines. Vegetation grows willingly. And the creatures who dominate this world lay structures overtop of that vegetation, while it stubbornly grows in and around these attempts, as if they’re at war with it, constantly.

Love: it doesn’t exist between animal and vegetable here. There is no sign of any intelligent intimacy. Animal dominates, vegetable is prey – helpless in its ties to the ground. Amongst animal, predator and prey have formed. So fascinating, such a world apart. That such things could be things.

And mineral isn’t food here; but nor is it recognised as sentient. I remember this: walking up that beach for the first time, drinking the sun into my true skin, and feeling the apathy of the grains: aware, certainly, but only in a dim way, of the heat and each other and the lapping salt. A song that passed through them recalled a dim sense of their past, a recurring countdown as their skin is perpetually ground away.

Salt and sand make love sometimes. It is beautiful, but only physical.

And where I live: it’s a cave, an indentation in the rockface, carpeted with sand, and with shallow, salty water. It’s dark except at the entrance, where the sun – new and yellow, falling and red-orange – touches the outer rocks and warms the outermost pools. Inside, I’m hidden, and so I can allow my true skin to swell to the surface, I can lie there in that warm, caressing salt, running my fingers along the rough edges of my scales. Most of the time I need to maintain some semblance of blending, so that I stand with two legs, with two arms (yes, two) hanging down, a head with a mane, and skin that is supple and dry, a strange kind of tan-pink, which has become quite specked beneath this world’s sun. I’m irredeemably strange in this form, at least to myself, but I sense from these creatures the hostility I’d face if I showed my true form.

#

These creatures have a degree of sophistication: that is to say they experience relationships, there is coupling tied to emotion, there are family units formed, and intimacies that exist outside those units. And they rub their skin against each others’, there’s caressing and guiding, sometimes intimidation. The language they transmit through their skin is primitive compared to what we know. But they make up for it with the sounds and colours, with flapping gestures from just their two arms.

Just two. And five digits on each. So… bizarre.

And I have a relationship of sorts here. A friendship if you will. He’s of a lower social bracket, I think, somewhat shunned, and his physical condition suggests weakness. Clearly, he’s been driven off by the stronger males of his kind. And so, he finds his way down to my cave on occasion. He sits in the sand shows me what he’s managed to scavenge over the course of his day. There is usually food – their type of food – a mix of murdered vegetable with murdered animal: shocking at first, nauseating: but I’ve come to adjust. These creatures too must eat to live.

He offers me some.

That sent shockwaves the first time. I could just barely manage to use the sounds and gestures to decline.

He talks more to himself than really to me. He says: “if she had only given me a chance. I know I wasn’t much of a man; oh, I know I had my faults. But if she’d just given me a chance to prove myself, she would have seen: I could have been good to her. I might never have made her rich, but I would have loved her, much better than any other man in this world could. And we could have had children. We could have been a proper family.

“Instead. She went off with him. Oh the ruckus that caused. Jared. He always had to have anything that was mine. Cousin-by-marriage, that’s what he is. And so now that’s what she is to me as well. I couldn’t stand that, could I? Seeing that all the time: at Christmases and funerals and other people’s weddings and all that kafuffle. Imagine having to live with that, with the sight of it, eh?

“That’s why I’m what they call it… estranged, from the lot of them. She took my family when she chose Jared. She took everyone away from me.”

The strong suitor bested the weak, he took the woman – for how could she not want the stronger – and the weaker was shunned, he was irrelevant, the runt-outcast. The shame of his family. Across light-years, separated by over a thousand folds, still I can recognise that in the laws of universe, and he – who calls himself Theo, who introduced himself with that designation when he met me – in his own world, amongst his own species, can’t seem to understand.

And yet: I have friendship with this creature. Of a sort. And so I sit with him in this borrowed form and we watch each evening the changing light, the way it changes the colour of the sky, and the colour of the sea, and the colours of the sand along with it. We watch those colours together as they go through their full, sweet cycle, until the light is slowly infused with dark, and then new kinds of lights twinkle into life from the further ashore. Only then he bids me his people’s strange farewell and goes along his way.

#

They don’t fly, these creatures.

They can move along the ground, well enough. They can move through the water if they must, but not with the efficiency of some of the other creatures here. And flight is a thing; I have seen other creatures of this world fly: it’s not done by the weightlessness created in one’s belly from heat: no, these creatures have wide, feathered appendages called wings, and they use those things to glide on air-currents: an impressive thing to watch.

The dominant species have no such appendages.

And so, when they step from a great height, they don’t rise, but only fall, only dash themselves to pieces on the ground below.

I saw it happen. A creature who got too close to the edge, who was too careless, or not sure-footed enough, whose steps got too close to the edge of a cliff, and his body hurtled down onto the sand – which was soft, and which tried to cushion him, which did its best but it couldn’t be enough.

“I knew him,” said Theo.

“The dead man?”

“Yeah. He was never right in the head. That’s how we even met – when I had that spell in the psychiatric ward. He was there. As bad for the drink as I was. But his was screwier than that. His screwiness went way, way down into his soul. Schizophrenic, I think I got told once. And he drank to drive the edges of that away. Y’know, I don’t even think he knew he was at the top of that cliff, or that he was about to fall down.”

“Until he did.”

“Nah, not even then. I think he still thought he was flying. All the way down, I think he pictured himself with big, massive, feathery angel wings. And I think he felt himself flying, and imagined he was up there in the clouds, soaring with all the other angels. I reckon he hit the ground without ever finding out differently.” He paused to take a drink of that same substance that seems to have precipitated the other man’s death, “At least, that’s the way I hope it was.”

“A friend?”

“Exactly. Like you and me are friends.”

I felt something. A warmth that rippled through my true skin. “You consider us that?”

“Well, of course I do. We share a sunset every night, and you listen to me when I talk, and you don’t judge me.”

“That’s what friendship means to you?”

“Well, hell, it’s as a good a definition as any, right?”

Here, in this place – and I have been in worse places – I think that has a lot of truth. I found myself looking at the same mangled plant-juices that had once repulsed and horrified me. What was the sensation…? I reached tentatively, “Might I have some…?”

He handed me the bottle. “Take as swig. Go easy, if you ain’t used to whiskey.”

It had a burning taste, sharp and sour, and muddily organic. The blood of wheat.”

“Well?” He asked me.

“It’s not so bad.”

We watched another sunset as it stretched across the sand, trailed by the shadows, and eventually by the night.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work