Stranger

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

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Source

Stranger

The intense aroma of the flowers mixed with the salty breeze coming from the sea, she sat down on one of the rocks by the sea and felt the wind in her face and her long hair, she had almost forgotten this strange sensation, just now she realized how much she missed it. For all it was a rarity that she had hair, in good part of the colonies, the usual thing was to carry a lustrous bald, first by the common thing of the early alopecia and then by the prevailing fashion, so much for men as women not to carry a hair in the head, it was what was used.

On her arrival in Eris, the first thing she noticed was the large number of generating machines in the rest area of the port space, there was no cafeteria or shop, only generators; of all kinds of things, from food and coffee, to small toys and travel souvenirs, she was surprised to enter through the door, from the descent platform of the ship and find a whole room of about five hundred square meters with all its walls upholstered by these machines.

The second thing she noticed on leaving the building was the predominance of the lilac color in the costumes of the local inhabitants, most of them dressed in this color, or at least wore some garment with it, then she found out that she had arrived in a third lilac. To his surprise, the Erisdianos used to dress each day of their week, in a different color, so they had the first green, second red, third lilac, fourth blue, fifth yellow and sixth white.

Her third and last first impression of Eris, for someone who had never left Palas, was the large number of bald heads like balls she could see on the street, very different from the long hair of both women and men she used to see on her native planet. She wondered if it was for some kind of sanitary measure, as, as she had been told, it happened in some colonies with abundance of jungle or forest vegetation, for the abundance of endoparasites that could nest between the hair; but it turns out that here it was a fashionable matter.

It was quite a challenge to get used to the tiny dormitories and common bathrooms of the room buildings, as well as to the lack of kitchens and the few shops of uncooked food. In the absence of private or rented vehicles, Eris' entire transport was public; eternal itineraries and route lists covered the monorail stations and aerobuses, at first it was a challenge to get around in the midst of such gibberish.

In general the inhabitants of Eris, received her very well, even with all the differences, cultural and physical, to be one of the few people of less than one meter eighty in the middle of a population of bald on average two meters was extremely strange, towards a real rarity, not because the Erisdianos did not know of the smallest people, but because she was one of the few who lived among them, the majority only came to visit for a few days or weeks and then returned to their world of origin, Eris was not exactly a very popular planet.

Today she visits Palas after twenty years, far from the crowded cities of Eris, from its generator rooms, from its monochrome days of the week and the complications of its public transport. In the midst of the calm of large meadows and moors, of lighted beaches and warm seas, of small towns, of clean and clear streets, of premises with fresh food, freshly cooked, with ingredients produced in fields and grajas.

In the middle of her native world, she felt like a stranger, a stranger with strange customs, with a particular taste for wearing lilac on the third days, for eating hog sandwiches, coming out of a generator and with a sudden and strange desire to shave her head, covered by a long hair.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, July 2019

Other stories from the Time and Space series

• Los Bosques de Perséfone / The Forests of Persephone
• Osiris / Osiris
• Metamorphosis
• Hastio
• Paradox
• Decay
• Under the influence of the Pleiades
• Anniversary
• Memories
• Core
• Uoke
• Cerberus
• Underwater Companions
• Ultraviolet Visions
• Obstacle Race
• Stranger

I can only thank @xpilar for allowing me to use his digital art in my publication and for motivating my creation. Thank you very much @xpilar

Thank you all for visiting my publication, I hope your comments and I appreciate your support, until next time

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