Emergence by Ethan Harris

Once upon a light-year, I choose Earth as the destination for my three- month vacation from Neptune.

It was a strange and colorful place. The people there were at most six feet tall, although they looked even shorter as they craned up their flat white faces to stare at me. They opened their mouths and their little tongues flicked around their mouths like little budding tentacles. They waved their arms at me as if they were trying to hug all of my tentacles at once. An impossible feat, so I had to give them my grudging respect for trying.

I felt around my surroundings with my arms, tried to orient myself. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes—my sense of touch has always been very much stronger than my sight. I’ve become used to the blurriness and
distortion of the waters, so on this planet, where I breathed both easily on land and in sea, the bright light hurt my eyes, and I tried to keep them closed as much as possible.

The first thing I discovered was that these people had some sort of taboo against nakedness. I had the grace to land in front of a large department store—I later learned all the names of these queer landmarks and things—and a troop of little men wearing bright colors and waving their two tentacle-hands in fluid gestures (almost as fluid as my own) came out, warbling to each other in gentle high-pitched voices, and measured me with their gentle hands, and decked me out in something more “respectable.”

There were many things that I had to learn, and did. I quickly learned to speak Humanian and to make friends, for there are fiends in this world as there were in mind, who’d as soon as shoot you down than look at you, and I needed all the support I could have. I learned that my favorite place to sleep on land was in museum aquariums, I learned to never walk into a hairdressing salon and be the cause of an old lady’s heart attack, and I learned that Halloween was my friendliest holiday.

~Angreek87