Remnant Population

The next morning, Ofelia woke with the sensation that she had been fuzzy-headed for days, missing things she should have seen. Aliens, yes. Intelligent aliens, yes. And they hadn’t killed her yet. They had… studied her. They had arrived before the storm, how long before she could not know. The houses she had found open, the things she had found moved… they had moved them. They were not thinking of her as prey, or as an enemy, but as something interesting.

She did not have to fear the chase, the long knives.

Unless they were like some people she had known.

She could not know that. She could not know anything, unless she studied them as well. She had no idea how to do that, but she could try, as she had tried to understand Sara’s third child, who had been born without the gift of speech, who had mewed and screamed.

They did not scream. When she went out into her garden, one of them was there, carefully looking among her plants. She suspected it wanted more slimerods, but it would not find them among the maize rows. She found one under the tomatoes, a favorite haunt, and called to the creature. “Here’s one.” It looked around; she pointed to the slimerod. It came, picked it up deftly, and flipped it into its mouth. Ofelia managed not to shudder. “We call them slimerods,” Ofelia said. She realized that she had not really looked at the creatures more than she had to. She had resisted thinking of those taloned digits as fingers… of the collection of them as hands. Yet they functioned as her hands functioned. Now she looked. Four digits, not five. One, as in her own hand, broader and thicker, angled to oppose the others. This made the hand look longer and narrower than it really was. The wrist too was different, though she could not define it. Did the creature have two bones in its lower arm, or only one? One bone in the upper arm, or more? Were the bones bones

or something else?

Four fingers, she told herself. Four-fingered hands. She watched, as the creature turned over more tomato leaves itself. The long, hard talons didn’t interfere with precise, delicate movement. It didn’t tear the leaves; it didn’t miss turning any of them.

She looked down at the creature’s feet. All she had seen at first were long feet with splayed toes. Now she noticed four toes, three almost parallel and one angled aside, all with heavy dark toenails blunted at the tips. No… the angled one had a narrow front, almost spike-like. This creature, placidly squatting in her garden and turning up leaves, had its feet flat on the soil, but the tracks she had seen didn’t show the heel. How, then, did it walk? On its toes? She turned away and looked over the lane fence. There were two of them far down the lane; she couldn’t tell.

She wasn’t a… whatever it was that studied animals or aliens. She didn’t know how to do this. It grunted, and she turned back to it. It held a ripening tomato in the pincer of its digits; it had not bruised the tomato nor broken the stem.

“It’s not ripe yet” Ofelia said, shaking her head. Gesture might be easier than words; certainly she had learned none of their words yet. Assuming the grunts and squawks were words, and she had to assume that now. She spotted a ripe tomato on another plant and touched it. “This one is ready. Ripe.” She nodded, then pulled it off. The creature looked at her a long moment, then let go of the one it had touched. Ofelia put the tomato in the basket and then picked a handful of beans. The creature touched the beans, then the tomato. Different. Of course they were different, beans and tomatoes. Green beans, orange tomato. Long skinny beans, fat round tomato. “Beans,” Ofelia said, touching the beans. “Beans.” Then the tomato. “Tomato.”

The creature grunted, making no attempt to say the words.

“Beans,” Ofelia said again. “These are beans. Tomato.”

A series of grunts, none resembling the words she had spoken. Why should she expect words? They were aliens; they might not be able to make the same sounds. Terran animals couldn’t. Besides, she had more work to do. She picked more beans, aware of the creature watching her closely. When she had as much as she wanted, she stood, grunting. Did the creatures think her involuntary grunts and groans were attempts at speech? She couldn’t tell. This one had not reacted in any way she could detect to the noise she made. It followed her to the door of the house, but did not come in. She rubbed her feet on the doorstone, scraping off the bits of mulch that clung to them. The creature watched that, head tilted. She did not shut the door, but she glanced that way often. She put the beans in the drawer of the cooler; she would cook them in the evening. The tomatoes went in a bowl on the table.