So be it

Green skies

Opening my eyes was a real struggle. It took me a moment to realise that there was no warm duvet covering me, no soft bed beneath me. My eyes immediately snapped open as I sat up in a panic. The view in front of me made me blink. I closed my eyes and shook my head. This must be a dream of some sort. It would not be the first time. Slowly I opened my eyes again, willing the vista to change.

Yet nothing had changed. The ground all around me and as far as I could see from my semi-prone position was littered with bodies. I blinked again and again as I sluggishly pinched my thigh. This cannot be real. It cannot be!

Yet all my tried and trusted methods failed to wake me from the nightmare. It looked like this nightmare was not merely a night's wild imagining or some demented figment of my imagination. This nightmare was real.

With a quick sigh, I started to get up only to rather frighteningly find that my legs felt like water. As I sat back down heavily, I wondered what was wrong with me. Movement from somewhere near made me look around in apprehension.

I saw small movements in the bodies around me and a woman stumbling upright a few meters away from me. I shook my head, trying to clear it. Maybe if I lay back down and closed my eyes, I would sleep again and when I woke up I would be back in my bed, in my house, in my world.

Because this was not it. The greenish skies with the red-tinged clouds belonged to no sky I had ever seen or imagined outside of science fiction movies. The grass I was lying on was white with an odd bluish tinge, even the trees seemed white to my eyes with leaves in a million colours of blue. My mind wandered for a moment. Would the seas of this place be green then?

I squinted as I looked towards the sun. My heart thudded in fear at this last testament of the oddity of this place, the strangeness of it, as the sun shone pure white. I closed my eyes willing it all to go away.

"What the fuck?"

The strangled cry from beside me made me turn and open my eyes in an almost dizzying motion. The red-headed woman that had come to her knees in front of me was looking around with wide eyes filled with fright. I could understand. My heart still thudded in my chest and I had to clench my legs together in fear that I would piss myself.

I took a breath, deep and cleansing. The air smelled fragrant and it brought a slight smile on my lips. Inner city living did not make for fragrant air, not unless one counted exhaust fumes and garbage smells as fragrant. Some people did I guess.

The sudden pain as the redhead grasped my leg, just above the knee, brought me out of my scattered thoughts.

"What is going on?" she asked me hoarsely, even as her hand opened and closed convulsively on the flesh of my thigh.

I tried to be gentle as I pried her fingers off my leg. My legs felt weak but the pain registered just fine in my brain. I could not keep the harshness out of my voice however. 

"I don't know. What do I look to you, the Pythia?"

Her wide eyes and quick breathing that almost slid into hyperventilation made me cringe inside. I really should have taken those anger management classes.

"Are you an... alien?" she stuttered, even as she tried to crawl away from me.

I looked at my hands. They were their usual white, no fleck of green in sight. I carefully felt my face. As far as memory served there was nothing unusual about it. Pudgy cheeks, prominent nose, a couple of spots, nothing particularly alien about it. Certainly no horns, antennas or overlarge acid-dripping teeth.

It took a moment before the analytical part of my brain, that for some reason always seemed to work in the background, kicked in and replayed my stroppy answer to the poor woman. I shook my head, more to myself than to the redhead that still looked at me as if I were Satan personified. It would be just like me to revert to my native language, all those years on foreign soil counting for nothing.