Aubrey still remembered the day that a youth pastor came to visit Our Cousins’ Homeless Shelter in Chicago. He described Heaven as a beautiful place up in the sky, glowing with luscious green and brimming with new life. Aubrey still wasn’t sure if she believed in Heaven, but she liked to imagine that her garden was her little slice of it. It fit the pastor’s description to a tee: bright, well-manicured grass orbited her little blue house; everything from carrots to corn to potato stalks sprouted up in neat squares wherever she could find the space for them; even her russell terriers, Hunter and Rosebud, made the garden all the more lively whether they were chasing each other or sleeping in a furry pile on the grass. Aubrey could never have imagined that she’d manage to get the sky part as well, but the Roddenberry Project made sure of it.
She admired it all as she strolled between the rows of vegetables, thanking them with water from the can she’d brought all the way from Chicago. Every inch of it was perfect; her slice of Heaven after years spent in her own Hell. The only problem was the thing writhing on the grass. It snuck up on her when she wasn’t looking; sometimes it was hidden between the cornstalks or sprawled in plain sight on the porch steps, but it always appeared when she let her mind wander too long. Its limbs trembled in their locked, rigid posture. Its mouth spewed an endless fountain of thick gray foam. It looked up at Aubrey with pleading eyes the same deep shade of blue as hers.
Aubrey forced herself to look at it for a few seconds, then walked away from it as she’d done so many times in the years separating Roddenberry from Missouri.
She remembered a helpful trick from her neighbor; she shut her eyes and sang softly to herself.
“Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are…”
She could already tell that the thing was gone, replaced with the dusty smell of a cardboard donation box full of aged CDs. Her first smell of real freedom.
“Objects in the rear view mirror may appear—”
“Ah! Hey! Hunter, Rosebud, down!”
Aubrey’s eyes snapped open to find her dogs leaping to greet the very neighbor she’d been thinking of. She was happy to see Louis standing his ground better than before. She remembered his earliest visits, when he sheepishly his behind her garden fence until she came to usher the dogs away.Louis wasn’t alone this time. As Aubrey suspected, Roddenberry’s recent red-scaled newcomer stood alongside him, his head at her shoulder’s height. She’d secretly been dreading the sight of Terra. She was sure she’d make some kind of involuntary flinch or gasp, at the absolute least, at the sight of a reptilian monster at her gate. But Aubrey didn’t see a monster; what sort of monster wore baggy hoodies and track pants from a clothing donation bin? The clothes combined with the dogs sniffing curiously at her made it difficult for Aubrey to do anything but smile.
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“Hey there, you two,” she called to them, setting down her watering can to greet Louis with a hug. She approached him with open arms, letting him come in on his own.“Stew’s been simmerin’ for ya. Just a minute and I’ll dish some up.”
She glanced again at Terra, who seemed to be trying to stretch herself upwards away from Hunter and Rosebud’s curious noses.
“Oh, darlin’, you can just tell them to—”
Terra reached down, scooping the dogs up under their bellies, one on each arm, then set them down at the other end of the garden.
“Okay…” Aubrey said, feeling her heart stop for a moment. “That’ll do just as well, I guess… Anyway, how ‘bout that stew, huh?”
As they shared their meal in their rocking chairs on the porch, Aubrey struggled to focus on her usual chat with Louis. She felt less guilty realizing they both seemed equally as distracted by Terra. Even the way she simply sat and ate from her bowl of stew was curious. She discarded her spoon to the bowl after a single use, preferring to pick up the sauce-coated vegetables one-by-one with her claws. As she chewed, she stared at Hunter and Bubba at the other end of the garden, where they reflected her intense, curious, and animalistic gaze back at her.
Aubrey tried to pry her gaze away, tried to dream up some comforting, inconsequential subject to ask Louis about. She hated how hard it was to stop staring, not just because it was rude, but because it was hypocritical. She remembered the long, cold days and nights spent on her knees, filthy with dirt and rainwater, scavenging for as much as she could find for even a morsel of food or, if she got desperate enough, a bus ticket. She remembered how much easier it got to reach into the deeper, dirtier places once her hands went numb from the cold. She remembered how people used to stare at her as she emerged from alleyways and around street corners, suddenly looking straight ahead if they never noticed her looking back. They hadn’t hurt back then; she had other things to worry about. They only hurt when she remembered their willfully ignorant eyes.
Aubrey supposed she had been their alien.
“So where are you from, Terra?” Aubrey finally asked.
Terra’s intense gaze shifted her way and her blood went cold. “Nowhere you’ll have heard of,” she said in a blunt growl.
“Right,” Aubrey muttered. “Then what did you do for work?”
Terra delayed her answer. “Lots of different things.”
“So you were some kind of freelancer?”
“Why does it matter to you?”
Aubrey froze. It took a few moments for her to find the right words to thaw herself out. “Because I want to know more about you. I want us to be friends.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Aubrey saw Terra’s green eyes narrow at that before returning to staring at Hunter and Rosebud. Aubrey found enough bravery to reach across and rest her hand gently on Terra’s forearm. She could feel her coarse, leathery scales through the baggy fabric of her hoodie.Aubrey remembered the first new clothes she got after finding herself at Our Cousins’. She remembered how coarse her arms had once felt beneath her second-hand sleeves.
“And… Because I know what it’s like to be all alone in a place you don’t recognize.”
Terra looked down at Aubrey’s hand, but she didn’t seem anxious to be rid of it. If anything, she seemed to relax into her rocking chair a little more. She looked up at Aubrey, her vast reptilian maw hovering, searching for something to say.
“Thank you for the stew,” she finally said.
“You’re very welcome,” Aubrey said. It wasn’t the response she hoped for, but it was a first step, and she’d learned a long time ago, in the most agonizing way possible, that everything started with the smallest first steps.