Metamorphosis
by Ray Cullis
I blinked.
What were those people staring at? Did I have
food on my face? No, it was something more
drastic than that, because the people staring at
me began to react violently. Some simply turned
pale. Others threw up. Some turned and fled
screaming. Most got bug-eyed, then passed out.
I'm not the
most handsome man in the world by far, but to
cause the reactions people were having as they
ogled at me was a mystery. A mystery that would
have easily been solved if I'd had a mirror, but
I didn't.
This took
place in a matter of seconds. I was with a tour
group at Stonehenge. We'd just gotten off the bus,
and I--eager to view my favorite ancient ruins--didn't
wait for the group, but instead, hustled off
toward the huge stones. I stopped and looked back
at the group when I heard their loud talking,
shouts, and several screams. They were all
staring at me. Ordinary me.
"What?"
I said innocently. "Whatsamatter wid you
people? Ain't you never seen no Merican before?"
I spoke
lightly, trying my best to murder the English
language with only a touch of sarcasm. I was
being a smart ass. The whole group of us was in
fact, Americans. Except that I wasn't really an
American.
"You're
turning into..." one of them, a retired
astronomy teacher, started to say, before bending
over and throwing up.
My skin began
to itch. My eyes watered. My hair stood on end.
My clothes began to not fit anymore. They were
suddenly all several sizes too big. My pants
defied my belt and fell down around my ankles, my
shirt and coat dwarfed my torso and now covered
my upper body down to my knees. What was
happening to me? I asked myself with as much
humor as I could muster, which at this point was
minimal.
The tour bus
driver, an Englishwoman, who had entertained us
enroute with her dry humor, leaned out of the bus
and called in my direction. "Holy, shit, you're
an alien." And with that, she slammed the
bus doors shut and sped off, tires screeching,
leaving the twenty seven American tourists behind.
Well, I guess
that pretty much blows my cover, I thought. I
wasn't supposed to revert to my true nature until
after dark, which was only a couple hours away.
But I'd simply forgotten that in the last twenty-four
hours we had traveled through several time zones
and I hadn't reset my watch.
The mother
ship--so high overhead that it was out of sight
and sound--began to beam me up, and I began to
dissemble before the very eyes of the tour group.
You should have seen their faces as I levitated,
then shot straight up into space and out of sight.
I laughingly
hollered back down at the dumbfounded tour group,
"Beam me up, Scotty!"
Humans are a
funny species, I thought as I evaporated.
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