Happy October! Time for free stories from around the world.
Truth Speaker
The man who had watched her from across the room since the party began finally approached and said with great portent, “You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.” The words hung heavy in the air, and half the room turned as if they could see them, while the other half turned as if they wanted to.
Helena let the words fall around her, waved her drink, and said the words that continued along a path no one had foreseen. “Join me?”
She’d been warned aliens were attending this party and she was supposed to be a good company representative—and human representative—but she hadn’t seen any aliens yet, and her favorite co-workers had abandoned her for shots at the bar, and—most of all—her husband, who was supposed to come with her, had refused to attend “yet another stupid work party.” Their relationship was already stretched tight and thin, and another man looking at her the way this stranger did, the way her husband hadn’t for years, plucked fiercely at it.
So the man who wasn’t a man at all sat with her and admired her and after too many drinks, slept with her, and left her with two impossible things.
*
“I’m pregnant,” Helena told her husband. Three months since the party, three months of resentment and suspicions on both their parts.
“But we haven’t—”
“No.”
For a moment, he looked as if he might stay, but Helena read pity in his gaze and used her words as weapons, “I don’t need you. We don’t need you.”
Those words fell weighty into the room, almost as heavy as the words the man who wasn’t a man had spoken to her months ago, and somehow, in that fall, they became true.
So Helena’s husband left her to their small apartment, and left the space station too, unable to stay, and under the various gazes of her coworkers and neighbors, Helena grew the first alien-human child in her body.
As she’d said she didn’t need him, and her words were heartfelt and true at the time, she gave birth to the child, and named her Lara and raised her alone for seven long years. Helena loved Lara more than anything and told her so, and it was true. Lara looked like her mother more and more every day, but sometimes she cocked her head as if listening to words no one else could hear.
And then, just after Lara’s seventh birthday, the girl was performing her gymnastics routine in front of her class and their parents, when Helena spotted the man who wasn’t a man—who she hadn’t seen since That Night—on one side of the room, and the man who had been her husband on the other side of the room, and they both looked at the girl like they wanted her, and more than she could give.
For the first time in a very long time, Helena spoke hasty words she felt in the moment—“I wish I’d never slept with him.” The words fell from her lips with all the weight of the world.
Everything stopped.
Started again.
Wrong.
*
Unlike the stories she’d read, Helena and everyone else remembered exactly what had happened before her words.
And they all remembered the other version of what had happened after.
The years had still passed, her marriage had still broken, but she had no little girl to show for it. Instead she stood in the back of the gymnastics performance watching her neighbor’s child. Her ex-husband watched his new family. And the man who wasn’t a man watched Helena.
She grabbed him by the arm and towed him into the hall and spluttered, “What--? Why--?”
The man who was not a man choked like his heart had broken inside his chest. When he regained a semblance of normal breath, he straightened and said, “Your leaders called us liars because we look human and are not, but my people call you liars because you say things you mean but then you stop meaning what you said. Without her, without our daughter, will we ever be able to understand each other?”
“She is truly gone?”
“She is.”
The pain of it swallowed Helena whole. When she surfaced enough to gasp a breath, the man who was not a man touched a tear, lifted it from her cheek.
“Perhaps,” he said, “in our heartbreak, we can become allies after all.”
Bereft of the child she’d loved so deeply and lost via her own words, Helena intertwined her fingers in his and nodded.
