Typewriter Emergencies May 2017

True Feast
Mary E. Lowd
5
Argelnox hunched her shoulders inside
her mechanical shell. The metal casing
chaffed against her soft, wrinkly green
skin. She'd been traveling for months,
solo-zipping from one planet to the
next, skimming only deep enough into
each planet's atmosphere to replenish
her oxygen and basic nutrients, soaking
them into her suit's mechanical gills before
sling-shotting towards the next.
The purple-blue world beneath her
was the last planet in this star-system.
Once she left it behind, she'd fall into
deep hibernation, solo-zipping through
the deep space between here and the
next star. The next palette of worlds to
tickle her taste buds and tempt her. She
shouldn't stop here; it would only slow
her down, and she'd fallen far enough
behind the migration.
Yet, the sun glowed orange over the
purple rocky mountains in the distance,
and her determination faltered. She
dropped the power of her jets, letting
herself fall into a descending orbit. Argelnox
spiraled downward, the atmosphere
burning against her metal shell.
Wind whistled and roared against the
clear dome shielding her oblong head;
it was a glorious noise after months of
only her own breathing echoed in her
auditory canals.
Argelnox landed lightly on one of the
purple mountaintops and descended the
clear dome over her head backward into
her mechanical shell, allowing the alien
air and golden sunlight to bathe the naked
green skin of her face. Her inner eyelids
closed, slowly, luxuriously, as if she
preparing for a hundred year nap— the
kind of nap that had left her behind the
rest of the migration in the first place—
but she didn't fall into hibernation this
time.
She needed respite, but she needed to
keep it short. Only a few days for searching
out and collecting creepy crawlies
among the purple rocks; a few more
days to shed her mechanical shell and
swim through the blue ocean, catching
fish and jellies; then a week to say the
prayers and perform the rites before finally
settling down to a true feast.
She savored every bite taken with her
chitinous beak—crunching the insects,
chewing the jellies, and rolling the flaky
fish over her tongue. It was all so much
more revitalizing than a thin soup of
gases absorbed through her mechanical
shell. That could keep her alive, but this
would keep her going.
When the feast was done, Argelnox
ignited her rockets, blasted back
through the atmosphere, and fell into
the numbing rhythm of flying through
space. She would catch up to her people
eventually.