began to kick and flail his arms. It did nothing to weaken the woman's hold on him. He tried rolling away, but somehow she managed to pin him against the wall. My god, she was strong. He felt himself losing consciousness, blacking out. He reached out with one free hand and found the strap of his canteen.
The Cuban held up his hand. Everyone fell silent.
"Did you hear that?" he asked.
The wind blew. They covered their eyes and held their mouths shut tight to keep out the dust it stirred.
"I didn't hear anything," one of the men said once the wind died down.
"Over here," the Cuban said. Drawing his pistol, he ran down a narrow way littered with the debris of crumbling buildings. The others followed behind him. When he had gone about fifty meters, he stopped and knelt down on one knee. The others came running up behind him. He picked up a canteen lying on the ground and held it up for the others to see. Those with flashlights shined them on it. The initials "M. R." were etched into its side.
"It is Manuel's" one of the men said.
There was a set of stairs leading up to a dark doorway.
"I'm going up," the Cuban said, "Pako, Miguel stay here. The rest of you follow me." He ran up the stairs and rushed into the dark doorway. Others with flashlights followed close behind.
"What do you see?" Pako shouted up from the street below.
A man stuck his head out of the doorway, "He's here!" he shouted.
In a few minutes they carried him down the stairs. Pako shined a light on his friend's face. He gasped. Manuel was deathly pale. He looked as if he had been dragged fresh from the grave. There were red scratches on his neck where blood was drying. Manuel's eyes flickered and opened.
"Where is she?" he asked.
"Where is who?" the Cuban asked, pushing the flashlight out of his face.
"The woman," he said, "There was a woman who was taking care of me. But she turned against me when I heard you calling."
"There was no woman," one of the others said, "you were alone."
"No," Manuel said, his eyes darting left and right, "I was thirsty and she filled my canteen. I was cold, and she brought me a blanket."
"There was no blanket," the Cuban said, "you had some straw over you. That is all."
He looked at the others who had gone into the room with him. They all nodded in agreement.
"Here," Miguel said. Everyone turned to look at him. He unscrewed the cap on Manuel's canteen. When he tipped it upside down, sand ran out from it.
"There was a woman," Manuel said, "She talked to me. She touched me. Her hands were cold, so very cold."
He shivered. Some of the men crossed themselves.
"Well, she's not here now," the Cuban said. He turned to the others. "Let's get him out of here.”
She watched them lift her visitor on their shoulders and leave. In the distance there was a low rumbling. At first she mistook it for a wall somewhere in her beloved city, weary of its years, buckling and collapsing to the ground. But a rapid succession of smaller popping sounds followed the rumbling. With her new memories to draw on, she recognized the sounds of war. Men were wielding their new powerful weapons, fighting a war over this land.
She stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight. It would be day soon, but night would return. There would be others. The war would bring her more visitors, more memories. She was sure of it. Some of them might not have friends to come looking for them. Then she would feast.
If intergalactic space travel was possible at this time, I think the most challenging thing for man would be to learn to communicate with and understand alien races. I have lived in other countries. I know how difficult it can be to learn a language and become invested in another culture. The idea for this story came to me when I imagined a human living among an alien race that looked like something out of an old horror movie, a human who was a little too proud of his ability to speak their language and understand them.
Mother-in-Law
Copyright 2006 by S. Thomas Kaza
Jack leaned over the edge of the building over sixty stories up. The lights of the city flickered below. The wind gusted and blew into his face. He head began to spin. He tried to swallow. Instead, he gasped for air like a fish tossed up onto the bank of a river.
“Have you jumped before?” the Tarantellan attendant handing out chutes asked.
“Yes,” Jack said and turned away from the edge of the building. He snatched up the silk chute offered him and began to furiously tie off its lines to the rings on the body harness he wore. He wanted to show everyone he wasn’t just some bumpkin fresh off the tourist rocket. He knew what he was doing.
There were six lines in all and four different knots to use. A Tarantellan with nine eyes and eight appendages that served as both arms and legs could tie three different knots at one time. Jack struggled with the last knot while the others lined up to jump.
The attendant approached him. “Are you ready, sir?” he asked, “They want you to go first.”
Jack looked over at the others waiting in line. They were mostly young male Tarantellans, clerks and bean counters that worked in the offices downtown. One large bull, nearly twice the size of the others, was probably a construction worker. Jack noticed he shivered as he waited.
“Chee kra te koh,” Jack clicked, “the cold doesn’t bother me.” He pointed to the bull. “Let him go first,” he added.
Since the sun slipped below the horizon, the temperature had dropped ten degrees. While he taught his last English class of the day, it had dropped another ten degrees. It would drop another five degrees in the next hour. A visitor from Earth would say it was getting chilly. A cold-blood Tarentallen needed to head home or risk losing an appendage to frostbite.
By the time Jack finished tying his last knot, the attendant was starting to shiver. He quickly looked over Jack’s knots.
“It’s not my best work,” Jack clicked.
“Good enough,” the attendant said, patting Jack on the back and gently pushing him to the edge of the building at the same time.
The well-lit boulevard he wanted to land on gleamed over on his right. Jack took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and threw himself off the tower.
“Ka kru kir tah!” the attendant shouted after him, “Don’t forget your mother-in-law!”
For a moment Jack felt as if he was not falling. Perhaps the winds whipping around the tower gave him the sensation of hanging in mid-air, somewhere between heavan and Tarentella. He opened his eyes and looked up at the night sky filled with thousands of stars. Somewhere out there was Earth, home sweet home. He pictured his mother and father sitting in their living room and staring at the glare of their television. He pictured his sister on the phone and his brother in the garage working on his car. His heart reached out.
“They’re only a rocket away,” he told himself, “only a rocket away.” But gazing up into the vast firmament that night, he felt the light years between them.
The sound of rushing air distracted him from his thoughts. Jack looked down and saw the lights of the street below flying up to meet him. Then he remembered he was falling.
“Good lord,” he thought, “I forgot to count!”
His hand reached up to pull the cord. A few seconds later he felt a tug on his harness as his chute burst open above him, its rippling silk material filling with air. Jack breathed a sigh of relief. His free fall slowed now, and he floated down. Shifting his weight, he banked away from the jump tower until his flight path lined up with a broad, lighted boulevard that ran north from the city center.
What had he been thinking? How could he let himself get so distracted? Jack shook his head.
In another hour, the boulevard and the main streets of the city would be deserted. But at this hour, they were swarming with Tarantellans, each hurrying to get home before it became any colder. Jack smiled. The scene below reminded him of a mass of insects crawling over the ground back on Earth. Crowds on Tarantella did not flow the way a street crow
ded with two-legged humans did. Each eight-legged Tarantellan moved first in one direction, then in another, zigzagging their way through the masses.
But if you tried not to focus on one spot, if you took a broader view of the spectacle and let your eyes drift out as if you could see in two directions at once like a chameleon hunting for prey while at the same time trying to avoid becoming prey, then you would see it as a nine-eyed Tarantellan did. They called it “the living street”, a ribbon of colors stretching from one horizon to the next and crisscrossing at several places in the middle. Jack thought it looked more like a stretch of canvas that had come alive, with each individual drop of paint deciding to get up and run in different directions.
He found himself thinking of the attendant back up on the jump tower. The Nine-Eyes shouted something to him. What was it? Yes, he had told him to watch out for his mother-in-law. In the Tarantellan language among males the expression meant “be careful”. But it had other connotations as well. Historically, the first meeting with one’s mother-in-law caused great anxiety for a male Tarantellan. If a mother-in-law didn’t approve of her new son-in-law, she could kill him by decapitation. She administered the blow herself, since full-grown females tended to be several sizes larger than even bull males. But this normally happened only after the couple produced their first offspring.
For a moment Jack played with the idea that the attendant knew he was actually on his way to meet his mother-in-law for the first