Page 19 of Sky Song
Paloma wiggled her finger at Cricket. “Only the dead are excused. My brother is coming to pick me up.”
The drapes in Mr. Sulys’ window undulated, and an ugly little muzzle appeared.
“Look! Hipper’s there.”
“Oh, the ugly monster.” Paloma slid off the top stair and came to stand on the sidewalk in front of the window. “It was yowling like a disturbed spirit last night. I could hear him through two walls. Sulys needs to watch him, or our management company will get wind of it.”
Cricket cocked her head. “I hear him too, sometimes. I think he reacts to strangers.”
“What strangers?”
Too late, Cricket realized her blunder. Paloma was looking at her expectantly, never the one to miss a thing.
“What strangers?” she repeated with a curious edge to her tone.
“Strangers, you know. People who don’t live on our street.”
Paloma’s startling eyes deepened to almost black, shaded by long thick lashes. Those eyes pinned Cricket like twin probing rods. “Did you see anyone here… again?”
“I saw a man walking down the street,” Cricked admitted, reluctant to go into the whole alien story. “That was a week ago, and Hipper was being noisy.”
“A man?”
“A man, for sure.” He certainly wasn’t a woman.
“Emma.”
“What?”
“Was it the same man?”
She couldn't lie worth a damn. And there wasn’t a reason to, was there? “Yes.”
“An alien man?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you see what he was?”
“No. I tried to chase him but he saw me and ran away.”
Paloma’s purple peepers formed two huge round discs. “Youchasedhim?”
“Well, yeah. He seemed sketchy.”
“What were you going to do if you caught him?”
Good question. “I just wanted to see for myself that he was… real.” Cricket chewed her lip. “Do you think I should’ve reported him?”
Paloma gave her a sideways glance. “Doyouthink you should have?”
The young man Cricket had seen was walking on the street. Only that. And though she was certain he was some kind of an alien, he looked a lot like a human man. What if she was mistaken, not about the man, but about the alien part?
He disappeared too quickly to be a man.
Still, Cricket hesitated to run to the peacekeepers with her pre-dusk sightings of a young alien man who did nothing wrong.
“I’ll consider it if I see him again,” she conceded.
