Art Prompt Writing Contest #4 -- "The 81st to Arrive"

Art Prompt Writing Contest #4

Thanks to @gmuxx for sponsoring this contest
and @tinypaleokitchen for providing the photograph
and @thinknzombie for making his generous donation!

Below is my entry.

The 81st to Arrive

An orb hovered above the water. Short rays of light flexed and snapped back in a pulsing rhythm.

The stream stilled. Naked trees lining its bank creaked, their skins of bark vibrating at a low, humming frequency.

Contracting its pulse, the ball of light fired a sudden wave of heat.

The waters below it began to expand and swirl, then bubble. The nearest trees loosened their limbs and budded. A leaf grew and unfurled. Then it reddened and died, turning to paper.

The orb drifted upstream and down-regulated its energy to a steady-state warmth. A fish swam into the now-warmer waters, its mouth nibbling flecks floating in the murk. Insects hatched.

The small star lingered, tiny sparks crackling off its corona.

An old, stoic tree, the one called OosniChun by the early tribes, refused to alter its season in response to this tiny sun. But an egg sac nestled in its bark thawed, gelled, and began to squirm. The tree's roots clasped the soil like the talons of an eagle while the worm tore at its sac. Once freed, segmented skin moved on a film of slime to the shadowed side of the trunk.

The orb followed and enveloped the worm in its brilliance. Flesh arched, absorbing the light, and glowed a pale pink.

The enlightened worm fell from the bark of the tree and landed on a bed of brittle leaf. It swelled, now lit white from within, and the dead leaves underneath it plumped and moistened, releasing a slow steem upward. The skin of the leaves turned a deep, chloro-filled green.

Mouth gaping and clumsy, the worm munched on a leaf edge. Internal chemicals combined and wormflesh lengthened, growing upward alongside the trunk of the tree. Limbs extended out in four directions and the creature balanced itself.

It took a step, and stopped.

A fly, attracted to its rising calefaction, landed on its hand and the creature's mouth again opened, this time with more skilled intent. As it chewed the fly, two large black membranes formed eyes on the bulging head, now crowning atop its thin body. The creature focused each compound lens and raised its head.

As he ambled forward, his emotions came online. Touch receptors and hearing were next. His identity was still tangled in the download, but by the time he reached the gravel path, he'd remembered who he was.

The Nayel adjusted his brain waves up to the correct frequency and broadcast a thought. “Body spawned, The Nayel implanted and restored, checking in at 43.2 tares from rendezvous point.”

He looked around. Past the fence in front of him stretched the badlands, where so many coming before had been spotted, or worse, caught. Surely there was a closer spawning pool to the rendezvous point? The thought leaked onto the frequency channel and an immediate answer came back. “Negative.”

His ears detected the scrape of cricket legs. A horn blared somewhere and the vocal chords of four human males pressed together into audible laughter. The Nayel's thin, green foot blew a terrain sensor and stumbled into a puddle, pores cinching up tight. He ambled on, eyeing fireflies and shaking mud from his gangly toes until he saw headlights. “Almost there,” he thought. “Contact spotted.”

A girl with long, black hair and a woolen poncho stained ocher and indigo sat in the driver's seat of an idling minivan. A rear window sticker boasted a stick family of six. New Mexico plates read “RAVEN” in red letters. A Hillary bumper sticker (that someone had tried to peel off) remained. The Nayel opened the rear hatch and angled his form inside.

“Welcome to Earth,” the girl said.

The Nayel exhaled a quiet, pleasant scream and she shifted the van into drive.

“It's over an hour to Mescalero,” she said loudly. As she shifted into fifth, she started to sing with the radio. In her mind, she could hear the alien singing, too, and realized his download must've completed.

“My people and your people,” she thought in his direction, “are anxious for our arrival.”

“I appreciate the transport, mud woman.”

“My name is Sandra MotherWind.” She smiled. “What do I call you?”

“The 81st to arrive.”

“Well, the alkaloid is evolving, 81st.”

“I'm aware.” The Nayel calculated ever-lower frequencies of thought to match her slower neural responses.

“Your thoughts are easier to hear than theirs. The first 80, I mean.”

“My frequencies now modulate down to delta,” his mind told her. “The peyote is evolving to down-modulate with them, just low enough to override the nervous system. Limb movements might take a little longer, but thought control should be immediate.”

Sandra MotherWind smiled. Finally, a Nayel peyote that didn't just warp and distort, but controlled.

Just imagining the button on her tongue, her vision swirled. A molecular flashback fired, laxing her muscles as her hands slipped from the wheel. The minivan sped over the shoulder and off the road, into one of the stoic trees named for the maza, the metalwork of her ancestors.

Blackness stopped all thought. Nothing moved but the bugs fluttering around the minivan's headlights.

When Sandra MotherWind opened her eyes, a flashlight was shining on the bulbous head of The dying Nayel. The sheriff holding it turned and saw the girl.

“You all right, little lady?” he asked, squatting low.

The Nayel listened to the sheriff's heartbeat to find a potential sync in the rhythm and before his reptilian breathing stopped, he intentioned a burst of thought toward the sheriff's frontal lobe.

After a brief pain in his temple and a flash of light in his left retina, the sheriff scooped Sandra MotherWind into his arms. “We'll proceed to the 80 in this police vehicle,” the sheriff said.

Sandra MotherWind responded with wide eyes.

He could now see her in full-spectrum color. “I am still the 81st to arrive.”