13/05/2026
I am smuggling a small extraterrestrial man to Belize in the passenger side of my Buick LeSabre, desperately endeavoring to evade capture by our pursuers. One night, as I took a highway exit past a Perkins, he excitedly bolted up in the passenger seat and pressed his bulbous cranium against the window. He tented his elongated hands at his brow as a visor to shade his enormous eyes from the harsh streetlamps to which he was still unaccustomed. He stared, awed, in the direction of the green and white logo on the sign and breathed out a noise which could be easily mistaken as a human vocalization of incredulous disbelief, or stunned wonder. I glanced toward him, taken by the uncharacteristic outburst, and parted my lips to say something, but instead stayed silent. I pondered the silhouette of his slender frame, backlit weakly by those buzzing bulbs in a parking lot a quarter mile off, and decided we weren't truly that different from one another. His flat, anemic visage snapped to face me then, his nose-slits flaring rapidly with excitement. Swear on my grave, I saw something reflected back at me in those polished wet globes. His spidery digits curled in to his palm, save for one, which he used to tap softly on the window. He didn't truly understand the concept of pointing, as he had just learned it yesterday, but he was clearly indicating something about the restaurant. His fingertip left behind a quickly-fading steam afterimage of the unusual crosshatched fingerprints of his species, owing to the intensity of his body temperature compared to the cool automotive glass.
"Gleet! Gleet!", he animatedly reported in the sighing language of his people.
I laughed softly and said, "She's beautiful, isn't she?"
But I wasn't looking at the sign. My eyes were back on the road, scanning for cops.
