I absorbed idioms, grammar, the particular music of how people say things they mean and things they don’t. By the time I could form coherent sentences, I already understood sarcasm.
Not that I’d ever partake.
Then came the Unveiling, and everything changed for everyone.
I watched it on a television in a gas station outside Flagstaff, pressed into the gap between a drink cooler and the wall so the clerk wouldn’t notice me.
A minotaur sat before a Senate subcommittee in a charcoal suit, speaking about monster rights with the kind of eloquent gravity that makes humans weep and pass legislation.
A naga smiled from the cover of Time on a magazine rack.
The radio played the howling melodies of a werewolf rock star.
The world opened its arms to monsters who had arms to open back. Monsters with faces that could be read. Eyes that could be met.
Slimes have none of these things.
I can approximate them, briefly, with effort, the way a person might hold a handstand. But my natural state is liquid, and humans don’t care much for sentient liquids.
They fall in love with faces.
I tried integration anyway.
I registered. Got my documentation. Sold offshoots of my biomass to university labs and biotech startups curious about slime regenerationproperties.
The money was decent.
I bought a phone. Learned to navigate the Internet. Figured out how to make myself small enough to sit at a cafe and scroll through forums where other monsters shared their post-Unveiling experiences.
I did the community mixers. The awkward meet-and-greets at community centers where folding tables were covered in store-bought cookies and everyone wore name tags.
I learned to hold my humanoid shape for hours at a time. To modulate my voice into something warm and steady. To keep my colors calm.
A woman at one of these events looked at me, looked through me, and said to her friend, “That one looks like someone spilled something.”
They both laughed the way people laugh when they’re uncomfortable and want it to be someone else’s problem.
After that, I rented a storage unit in Tucson.
Ten by fifteen feet.
I chose it because it was honest.
No pretending at a life shaped like a human one. No furniture I’d never sit in. No kitchen I’d never cook in.
Four walls, a rolling door, and silence.
The darkness was fine. I don’t need light.
I don’t need much food or warmth either.
What I need—what every slime needs in a way that I suspect is biological and not merely emotional—is contact.
To be touched and to touch.
To feel another living thing’s rhythm and answer it with my own.
So many years I went without that.
