Starlight Brides

The first time I saw one of them, I was elbow-deep in a dead man's chest cavity.

Not the romantic setup you'd expect. But I'd stopped expecting romance around the same time I stopped expecting the plumbing to work in my building. Some things you just let go of.

His name was Harold Beckman, seventy-three years old, and he'd died of a heart attack two days before anyone found him. I know this because I was the one who found him, technically. The landlord called me because Harold's rent was late and the smell had started seeping into the hallway. I had a key because I was the building's unofficial everything. Super, fixer, person who checked on the old folks when their lights stayed off too long.

Harold had no family. No friends who came around. Just a cat that had already eaten most of Harold's face by the time I got there, which meant I didn't have to look at him too closely when I called it in. Small mercies.

The coroner's office took four hours to show up. By then I'd covered Harold with a sheet and sat with him because it felt wrong to leave him alone. The cat sat with me. We didn't like each other, but we had an understanding.

That was Tuesday.

By Thursday, I was at the county morgue, standing over Harold's body because the medical examiner needed someone to confirm his identity. His sister in Ohio was too sick to travel. His neighbor from 4B was too drunk to drive. So it fell to me, the woman who'd found him, to say yes, that's Harold, that's the man who used to sit on the fire escape and feed pigeons even though the building banned it.

The morgue smelled like bleach and something underneath the bleach. Copper, maybe. Or just the memory of copper. I'd been to the morgue twice before, both times for tenants who died alone. You'd think that would make it easier. It doesn't.

"Ms. Okonkwo?" The attendant was young, maybe twenty-five, with the kind of nervous energy that made me tired just watching him. "We're ready for you."

I followed him through a door that required a code, then another door that required a different code, then a hallway that smelled worse than the first. Harold was in the third room, on a table, covered with a sheet that had seen better days.

"Just his face," the attendant said. "You don't have to look at anything else."

I nodded. He pulled the sheet down.

Harold looked like Harold. Grayer, maybe. Smaller. Death does that. It shrinks people. I said yes, that's him, and the attendant covered him back up, and I was about to leave when I heard it.

A sound. Low and vibrating, like a cello string plucked underwater.

I turned. The room had six tables. Five of them held bodies. The sixth held something else.

It was shaped like a man. Arms, legs, torso, head. But the proportions were wrong. Too long in the limbs, too narrow in the chest. And the skin, if you could call it that, wasn't skin. It was gray, the gray of wet concrete, and it seemed to shift when I looked at it, like oil on water.

"Is that..." I started.

The attendant stepped between me and the table. "You should go, Ms. Okonkwo."

"What is that?"

"Please."

The thing on the table moved. Not much. Just a twitch in the fingers. But it moved, and the attendant flinched, and I knew he'd seen it too.

"Is it alive?"

"No." His voice cracked. "It's not."

The thing opened its eyes.

They were black. Not dark brown, not deep gray. Black like the space between stars, like something that had never learned to reflect light. And they were looking at me.

I don't remember leaving. I remember the hallway, the second door, the first door, the parking lot. I remember sitting in my truck for twenty minutes with my hands on the wheel, shaking. I remember thinking I should call someone. The police. The FBI. Anyone.

I didn't call anyone. Who would believe me? A dead body in the morgue that wasn't dead and wasn't human. In this city, on this block, nobody would even blink. They'd assume I was drunk or high or both. I'd been neither in six years.

So I went home. Fed Harold's cat, which I'd inherited along with Harold's keys. Made myself a sandwich I didn't eat. Sat on the fire escape and watched the sun go down over the warehouses, and tried to convince myself I'd imagined it.

I hadn't imagined it.

---

Three days later, a man knocked on my door.

He was tall. That was the first thing I noticed. Tall and broad and wearing a suit that cost more than my truck. The second thing I noticed was his eyes.

Black. Not dark. Black.

I slammed the door.

"Ms. Okonkwo." His voice came through the wood, low and even. "I'm not here to hurt you."

"Then you're the first."

A pause. "May I explain?"

"No."

Another pause. Longer this time. I leaned my forehead against the door and tried to breathe. Harold's cat, whose name was Bastard, wound around my ankles and meowed. Traitor.

"I was at the morgue," the man said. "I know what you saw."

"You were dead."

"I was unconscious. There's a difference."

"Is there?"

He didn't answer that. I heard him shift his weight, heard the floorboards creak. My building was old. Everything creaked. But I knew the sound of every creak, and this one was new. He was standing exactly where I would've stood if I were trying to be polite but ready to run.

"I need your help," he said.

"I need you to leave."

"I can't."

"Can't or won't?"

"Both."

I opened the door. Not because I believed him, but because Bastard had started scratching at the frame, and I wasn't going to let a cat dictate my life. The man was still there, still tall, still wearing that suit. Up close, he looked younger than I'd thought. Maybe thirty. Maybe not. His face had that ageless quality, like a statue that had been carved before anyone thought to write down the date.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"To come in."

"No."

"To talk, then. Here." He glanced down the hallway. Mrs. Kowalski's door was cracked open. She was eighty-nine and nosy and had probably already called her daughter to report a strange man at my door.

"Fine," I said. "Talk."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, "My name is Soren. I'm not from here."

"Here as in this building?"

"Here as in this planet."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. The sound came out sharp and ugly, and it echoed down the hallway, and Mrs. Kowalski's door clicked shut.

"You're joking."

"I'm not."

"You're telling me you're an alien."

"I'm telling you I'm not human. The word alien has connotations I'd rather avoid."

"Connotations." I crossed my arms. "You knock on my door, tell me you're from outer space, and you're worried about connotations?"

"I'm worried about a lot of things, Ms. Okonkwo. You're one of them."

That stopped me. Not the words. The way he said them. Like I was a problem he'd been trying to solve for a long time. Like he'd been standing outside my door for years, not minutes, waiting for the right moment to knock.

"Why me?" I asked.

"Because you saw me. Because you didn't run. Because you went home and fed a dead man's cat and didn't tell anyone what you saw." He tilted his head. "You're good at keeping secrets."

"I'm good at minding my own business."

"Same thing."

I hated that he was right. I hated the way he stood there, calm and patient, like he had all the time in the world. I hated his black eyes and his expensive suit and the fact that he knew my name. But most of all, I hated that I was curious. That I wanted to know what he was, why he was here, what he wanted from me.

"One cup of tea," I said. "Then you leave."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet."

I stepped aside. He walked past me into my apartment, and Bastard, the traitor, rubbed against his leg and purred.