A Thorn for Moonbeam

Esme is old. Quite old, if you must know. Old enough to know that her certainty of where she is and why is fraught with deep pot holes in her memory.

So when she finds herself in a room with no idea how she got there, she is rather unsurprised.

When Zod, alien life form, speaks to her out of nowhere, she's a bit more surprised.

But it's when he tells her what he wants from her that her surprise tops out: he wants her to speak for all of Humanity.

When she can barely speak for herself?

Excerpt:

A Thorn for Moonbeam
by Sonia Orin Lyris

Esme swayed a little on her feet from side to side.

Or was it front to back? Maybe round and round. So hard to tell.

Nothing new there. No news, either, in the struggle to stay upright, or unexpected stabbing pains in knees and hips.

Just part of getting old, her doctors told her. Better than the alternative. As if they knew.

Esme grunted and looked around. Pale yellow walls and a ceiling, featureless, not a light fixture to be found. The fourth wall was a window, floor-to-ceiling, with a view very far down onto a mountain range so white with snow that Esme surmised the glass must be tinted.

Esme shuffled closer to the window, stopping a few steps short. Down at the foot of the mountains was distant fuzzy ground or maybe the haze of pollution. She grunted again.

Where was she?

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She turned back to the room. A long beige couch and similarly toned plush comfy chair surrounded an open space that might have held a coffee table but didn't. Other than that, the room was bare. Not even a door.

That was odd, right?

Looking down at herself, she saw her slippers and nightgown. How had she gotten here?

A too-familiar thought. Since her ninetieth birthday--a fussy affair with her three remaining children, their offspring, and an uncountable scattering of damp, loud greats and great-greats--Esme had often found herself mystified about where she was. And why.

"Oh, to be seventy-five again!" she had quipped around the cake in her mouth. Had anyone laughed? She couldn't recall.

Bridge, which she used to enjoy very much, was literally off the table. There was no chair for a player who could not even remember the rules.

Esme could barely recall her children's names and often referred to them by the monikers she had wanted to give them, as unlike those on their birth certificates as could be.

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