“Oz.”
He stops.
“Thank you. For hiding. I know it’s—” I gesture vaguely at the space between us, the locked door, the casserole, the entirety of the situation. “I know it’s a lot to ask.”
“It’s very little to ask. The storage unit in Tucson had a wasp nest and a broken fluorescent light. This is much better.”
I laugh, and it comes out a little ragged.
Then I look at him standing there in my living room, eight feet of iridescent slime arranged into the shape of a person because that’s the shape he thinks I need him to be, and something clicks into place with the dull, obvious weight of a thing I should have noticed days ago.
He hasn’t really been outside since his shipping crate was moved from the delivery truck to my studio.
He’s been inside my house for days, moving between the studio and the kitchen and the living room couch, pressing himself against ceilings and rearranging my shelves, and I haven’t once thought about what that means for someone who spent decades in a cave and three years in a storage unit.
I brought him river stones like a souvenir from a world twelve feet past my front door.
“Oz. When was the last time you were properly outside?”
He considers the question with his whole body, a slow undulation moving from his feet upward.
“When I was being shipped, I suppose.”
“I don’t mean in the box. I mean outside. Sky above you, ground under you.”
The pause stretches.
His colors shift to something quieter, amuted indigo.
“Oh… It’s been some time. A few years, I think. After the Unveiling, I did go places. The mixers. Libraries. A few community panels. I walked through town sometimes.”
He says it carefully, like he’s measuring each word for accuracy.
“But after the woman at the mixer said what she said… that I look like a walking oil spill… I stopped going anywhere at all. That was three years ago.”
“Three years in the storage unit.”
“Yes.”
“And before all of that? Before the Unveiling, before the researchers?”
Something in him goes very still, and then very soft.
“The cave that was my home had an opening. A fissure, really. About fourteen inches wide at the broadest point. I could extend part of myself through it. Feel the air. The temperature difference between inside and outside. Rain, when it came. Twice a year, sometimes three times.”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“I could feel the stars.”
“You can feel stars?”
“Yes. The radiant energy. The differential between a clear sky and a clouded one.”
I put the casserole in the fridge because I need something to do with my hands, and because if I stand here looking at him while he describes feeling stars through a fourteen-inch crack in limestone, I’m going to probably start ugly crying.
“Okay,” I say to the inside of the refrigerator. “Tonight. After dark, when Mrs. Pritchett’s inside and Gary’s done with his ridge patrol. I’m taking you outside.”
The silence behind me has a quality to it.
