You are tucked in the middle of grass and weeds inside your Uncle Rick's cabin, alone in the rural wilderness. On vacation in solitude, your small cabin has running water and plenty of electricity. You spend most of your quiet hours isolated from your rural neighbors. Tonight you shall be visited, but not as expected. From the cold October air outside your home, a long eerie whine pierces the silence of your somber room.
"What is that?" you whisper, lifting the shade from a small window. "Oh my God. Oh my God."
A round metallic object glistening in the moonlight churns up dirt and grass as it plunges across your lawn and crashes against
your house. A split second later you are pinned under a small chandelier broken loose from the ceiling.
Broken chandelier fragments slice through your hands. You acted too hastily. You should never have handled broken glass. Now you're losing blood faster than life itself.
You slither out from under the glass splinters and fragments, standing up and stumbling into the kitchen. Here you detect a whooshing something, faint like an echo, coming from outside the walls.
The gradual whisper heightens in volume. "Earthling," it intones from a distance unknown. "Earthling. Earthling. The meat is cold. The meat is cold."
"God help me!" you cry to yourself. Your trembling hand snatches up your cell phone and punches in 911. When the operator comes on, you scream your address into the receiver. Suddenly the instrument goes dead, and the object falls from your grasp.
"Earthling," you hear again. "Earthling. The meat is cold, Human. The meat is cold."
Suddenly you sniff smoke from the electrical wiring of the fallen chandelier. The sparkling circuits have caught fire. It is time to escape.
You hurtle up the flight of stairs, but there's no place left to turn. The smoke from the first floor has surged upward, blocking your path to the landing's exit. Trapped by the thickening clouds, you succumb to suffocation and death.
You stumble out of the cabin, losing all direction and running in darkness across the lawn.
Forgetting to see ahead, you almost trip into the metallic structure crashed upon the ground. It is the spaceship...a fallen object from the sky. Leaning next to it, there's an alien life form.
Earthling. You hear it again, suddenly. But it's not a voice, it's a message, like a thought...inside your mind. Earthling, it pipes, like a whisper inside your head. The meat is rotting. The meat is cold. The meat is rotting. The meat is cold.
The alien is dead. You killed it. Earth's first visitor has been slain by your fear. No longer pleading for protection from the killing cold, it has found the chill in your heart to be the coldest cut of all.
You stare at the extra-terrestrial...its short, thick frame hunkered next to its spacecraft -- the bulkhead split in half and nestled upon your lawn. A dense odor, reeking and unpalatable, exudes from the sprawled and almost naked body. The eyes, protruding like a mantis's, scowl and peer into your own.
The meat is rotting, Earthling. The meat is rotting and cold.
Slowly it starts to arise, its hairless grey torso arching towards you.
You shudder, a wave of nausea gripping you, as you...
Later, when you finally return (leading police) to the crash spot, you discover the alien to be dead...killed by the crisp, frigid air. Neglected and misunderstood (by you), the hurt and fragile creature (Earth's first space visitor) has perished from hypothermia.
You nudge your warm human body against the cold, leathery skin of the beast. The trembling thing becomes warmer as it absorbs your exchanging body heat. You can feel it getting stronger. The frosty Autumn air is fended against. The weakened explorer breathes easier.
Your ears prick up at the sound of distant sirens. Soon the police will arrive, then the firefighters. Your cabin's fire will be extinguished. But the fire of this life, its fragile body held tightly against your own, shall blaze again.
