Story about a Space Creature that Grows from a Tiny Speck
By: R. Renée Bembry
Beaming lights sparkled from rotating disco balls spraying florescent colors around the dimly lit room. Women in heels and men in dress shoes pounded floor tiles to beats of booming drums, whipping guitars, and erotic piano tunes. A blissful wind whistled through the door caressing dancing legs till subsiding near a table in the back of the room.
Without a second of hesitation, a speck, as if a moving piece of dust, slithered away from the wind-stopping wall and climbed up the table where he spotted two crystal containers fizzing with frothy red effervescence. Each container looked as cool and inviting as the other. Their contents fresh. Their icy cubes plump. Condensation freckling their curvaceous crystalline walls.
Vying not to waste a single moment, and determined not to be seen, the speck chose the container closest to the table rim to slip into. Without pause, and under the most discreet of fashion, his microscopic body slithered up the crystal stem, up and around its smooth curvaceous walls, and down into its cool red effervescent contents. Of course, none of this sneakiness really mattered in human terms for no human’s eyes were likely to spot the speck anyway; him being a mere dust size and all. Falling to earth from another planet, however, the speck did not know this.
As far as the speck was concerned, he needed to do everything in his power to fulfill the mission of sustaining his life. After all, he had not expected growing up to transpire in this way. Nothing in his genetic makeup had suggested he would travel trillions of light years through time to land in a darkened room filled with two-legged creatures prior to commencing the next stage of his life. No experienced speck ever told him anything regarding the circumstances in which he found himself. Fortunately for him, he had only a few cilia to cool in this early life stage; and he had ascertained correctly, prior to climbing into the transparent crystal, that the icy cubes would completely chill each of his cilia immediately upon his diving entrance.
Comforting his stomach, despite its diminutive size, would require more effort than soothing his cilia, however. As with infants of most species viewing self-nourishment as a primary life objective, the speck, feeling no different, after traveling such a great distance from his planet to earth, felt exceptionally desperate to nourish. It seemed eons had passed since last he’d partaken. And now that he had settled himself amidst the large, cooling, icy rocks, his suction cup lips hastily suckled red pigment from the beverage and swallowed it into his famished body.
Although the contents in the glass quickly mutated from dark red to light pink, Alyssa, once reunited with her cocktail, overlooked the change. It seemed she, as humans tend to do, accepted the fact that melting ice indubitably turns drinks pale. For this reason, she naturally attributed her cocktail’s paling to its mixing with water from the melted ice. To that end, she lifted the cocktail glass and poured the beverage, along with the speck, down her throat.
What a wild ride for an alien speck!
If only he had not separated from his swarm!
If this was, in fact, the natural order of things, an experienced speck would have warned him about the hollowing journey from mouth to esophagus to human stomach. But if this was the natural order of things, the speck still did not know. All he could do now was to go with the flow.
The wonderment mattered not for long, however, since the voyage ended quickly. Plus, in addition to relief the speck enjoyed from completing the tunneling ride, his destination presented him a bonanza of red stuff to eat! Red stuff here! Red stuff there! Red stuff floated everywhere! The elated Speck could not wink an eye without seeing red stuff!
Now… about that red stuff….
Might have forgotten to make things clear regarding the speck’s infatuation with red stuff and about why Alyssa’s drink went from bright red to pale pink in nanoseconds simply because the speck, a dot of an alien, suckled it.
Loveliness found in the color red as well as red’s placement above all other colors that matter in an awe-inspiring rainbow were but two small reasons why the speck loved red so much. Then there was the seductiveness of red and the intimacies he had observed (from his interplanetary telescope) between humans when a woman smeared sticky red paste across her lips. Mostly, however, there was sweetness in red, such as the sweet delicious apple he’d heard about.
Yes, red was a great color indeed, the only color worthy of extracting from foodstuff, although some may see it as unfortunate the way alien creatures leave red foodstuff byproducts looking less appetizing than they appeared before detraction of their coloring.
In moving on to the most important reason the dot could not get enough scarlet tint, red was the only color capable of keeping the speck species alive. Red things being what a speck must eat while still a young tike, his body, as all bodies in the speck species, traveling the world by way of natural selection, had an uncanny ability to super-compress all things eaten and then to snooze and grow like a bear.
Gorged after his gluttonous gulping, after his tiny belly nearly bursted from strawberries, cherries, radishes, peppers, and other things red abundantly available in Alyssa’s stomach, Speck sunk deeply into a long overdue slumber. Never knew for how long he slept, only that once he awakened, he no longer fit the name or the description of a speck.
All things red had done the speck great service – allowed him to evolve – to transform – to mutate. Noticing extensions protruding from eight masses atop his, once, dot of a body, the invader began thrashing the limbs against Alyssa’s stomach.
Like Medusa’s snakes, his newly grown limbs arched and stretched from his head. Despite their coverage in digestive assimilation, the limbs waved with grace and dignity. Although his limbs bore no glaring eyes or slithering tongues and his face lacked the ability to turn a man to stone, his instinct provided him a promise of power. Knowledge of his authority beamed in each protruding appendage.
Still caught up in virginal excitement over his magnificent extending power, the speck, having transformed into a growing creature, was boastfully waving his ligatures about when Alyssa began shifting erratically in her bed. Sporadically flipping from one side to another, the girl tossed and turned and moaned and groaned. And then, to the wonderment of the creature’s growing limbs, she screamed, “I’m gonna be sick!”
Jerking from infantile to horizontal posture, Alyssa caused the parasite within to lose control of its limbs. It nearly tumbled over as convulsive spasms began agitating the girl’s stomach. Alas! The creature found himself on yet another journey – an unexpected, more spirited expedition than the one he’d taken to arrive in this beautiful stomach.
Before he could find a vein, a vessel, or any gutty abdominal component to hold on to for dear life, Alyssa’s insides ejected him in a manner that barely allowed him to pull in his limbs. He dropped onto a soft cottony surface that he only knew was soft and cottony because he could see blades of fabric in surrounding areas – areas in which Alyssa’s stomach contents did not splatter.
The creature knew not what to make of this strange well-lit place. So unlike the discotheque was it – lacking loud melodies and booming basses. Instead of flat tables supporting containers filled with red and other colorful liquids, there stood a small deep basin, a longer deeper basin, and most curious of all, a basin over which Alyssa buckled while weeping and moaning into the basin’s mouth.
The creature summoned his limbs to carry him across the cottony blades to where Alyssa’s feet bared soles that stretched and twisted as her toes widened and stiffened. Observing Alyssa’s feet proved enjoyable entertainment for the little creature, however, curiosity lent him to crawling up one of her toes, on to her foot, her ankle, her calf, her thigh, and eventually across her naked hips, bare back, and rounded shoulders to spy what was going on in the oddest of odd looking basins.
No sooner than he reached the peak of her shoulder, and leaned forward to investigate did chyme spew from between her lips and splatter about the water-yielding basin. It occurred to the creature that this most definitely was an unusual kind of container. He had no time to dwell on that thought, however, since before he knew what was happening, he had to press his limb needles – all eight of them – into Alyssa’s shoulder.
Alyssa had suddenly extended one of ‘her’ limbs while reaching for a shiny gray wiggly thing that connected horizontally to the upper end of the strange basin. Her uplifting, stretching, darting shoulder would have sent the creature crashing into the strange giant cup hole had his spikes not instinctively pierced her shoulder. How glad was he – of the shoulder piercing – once he realized the basin was even more unusual than he could ever imagine.
As the creature watched, all contents in the basin began swirling, spiraling, and coiling downward into a shadow of an opening and then disappeared. The creature did not know how, but he felt certain that this activity, as well as a sudden reappearance of clear liquid in the basin bottom, had something to do with Alyssa’s small appendages slapping that gray thingy downward. The creature could only be grateful his spikes knew what to do and kept him from tumbling into the abyss.
A few grunts, growls, and stomach heaves later, Alyssa slapped the gray thingy once again. By then, The creature had become quite accustomed to, as well as content with, needling Alyssa’s shoulder by way of his limbs. To his unexpected pleasure, his limbs had inadvertently latched onto yet another source of delectable red nourishment. In adhering to his pattern of gorging and sleeping off his victuals, by time Alyssa squirted a line of toothpaste across her toothbrush to clean her foul tasting chyme breath, the creature, no longer a speck, had gorged himself, and fallen blissfully to sleep.