"What did you bring on our ship?"
"A specimen from the desolate planet we visited. I found it among some ruins, I think it might be one of the surviving sentient species."
"Sentient? Look how unruly it’s behaving, the thing is but an animal."
"Wait, do you see it leaking fluid from those gashes? I think it might be wounded, that would explain the odd behaviors."
"What do you expect me to do? I have not the slightest clue how these creatures work."
"Try something, we can’t let it bleed to death, especially if it might be the last of its kind."
"Fine, I’ll close the wounds, but I can’t promise anything."
The small human child laid still on the operation table. His mouth, nostrils, and eyelids had been stitched closed with such precision that he almost appeared to have a blank sheet of skin instead of a face. The alien creature looked over its work with pride.
"The specimen seems calmer now, have we saved it?"
"Only time will tell, only time will tell."
---
Everyone loves the first day of school, right? New year, new classes, new friends. It’s a day full of potential and hope, before all the dreary depressions of reality show up to ruin all the fun.
I like the first day of school for a different reason, though. You see, I have a sort of power. When I look at people, I can…sense a sort of aura around them. A colored outline based on how long that person has to live. Most everyone I meet around my age is surrounded by a solid green hue, which means they have plenty of time left.
A fair amount of them have a yellow-orangish tinge to their auras, which tends to mean a car crash or some other tragedy. Anything that takes people “before their time” as they say.
The real fun is when the auras venture into the red end of the spectrum, though. Every now and again I’ll see someone who’s basically a walking stoplight. Those are the ones who get murdered or kill themselves. It’s such a rush to see them and know their time is numbered.
With that in mind, I always get to class very early so I can scout out my classmates’ fates. The first kid who walked in was basically radiating red. I chuckled to myself. Too damn bad, bro. But as people kept walking in, they all had the same intense glow. I finally caught a glimpse of my rose-tinted reflection in the window, but I was too stunned to move. Our professor stepped in and locked the door, his aura a sickening shade of green.
---
My daughter, Katy, is 6, and has an overactive imagination. She regularly crawls into my bed at night with my husband and I, telling us about the monsters in her room. One, she said, has a black body that looks almost blob-like, with yellow skin on his face and big black eyes. It pins her to her bed and touches her roughly with black hands, sometimes choking her until she can’t breathe. The other one, with red scaly skin and yellow eyes, is really nice. It lives beneath her bed and sits with her after the black monster visits; she says it makes her feel safe again.
This morning I went to do the laundry, and found blood on Katy’s pajamas. I rushed to her room to talk to her, but instead vomited once I flicked on the light. My husband’s body lay in pieces, pools of blood taking up most of the floor. Katy curled up in her bed, her hands over her ears and her eyes squeezed shut. Next to her was the red skinned monster she spoke about. It stared at me with sad eyes, and too shocked to do anything else, I stared back. He started to move towards me and all I could do was stand still, even when it gently placed a clawed hand on my shoulder then crawled underneath the bed.
I looked down at my husband, now noticing his black dressing gown that was torn to shreds, and the rest of the pieces of the mask he was wearing, small yellow pieces.
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