[Very Short] The Flames of Outer Space

My Mind's This Cave

I dip my fingers into the shallow stone bowl and paint a red sun onto the wall. It is a regular night alone in my cave. I cannot sleep, so I paint until my eyelids become heavy. My mind is this cave. No moon, no stars. No sound, just my art.

Until I get a foreign visitor.

What do I mean? A creature that is not human nor animal. A creature from somewhere beyond the stars. Creatures that fly and burn my eyes. Sometimes, they speak in my mind.

Sometimes they are edible and make a fine meal for me. Other times, they fight back against their hunter. These beings, 'aliens' I like to call them, are either harmless or very dangerous. There is no inbetween from what I have seen.

A blinding flash of reddish-orange light from outside interrupts my thoughts.

Smoke pours into my cave. A crash landing has never happened this close to my shelter before.

I step outside to find that a massive rock from the sky has left a crater in my lawn. It is covered in holes of varying sizes, all of them glowing bright red. Heavy smoke rises from it. I slowly move my hand towards it but pull away. It burns without me even touching it.

I gasp and throw myself out of the way as a big crack appears right down the middle of the meteorite. The space boulder cracks open, revealing a creature that is encased in something. It is not moving, is it still alive? How and why is it in a meteorite?

It twitches. Once. Twice. It is alive. I step back further as it gets up. It opens the massive wings it was covering itself with. The undersides of the wings have dark red eyes with slitted pupils. For a moment I thought they were real eyes but no, just unsettling markings. It reminds me of the eyespots some butterflies and moths have.

The alien stands up and stretches. She yawns, revealing a mouth full of terrifyingly sharp teeth. I have already decided not to provoke this one. One of her wings nearly knocks me off my feet as she claps her wings together. In an instant, flames engulf the top of her head down to her back and along the top of her wings and tail. I barely managed to stop myself from shrieking. She takes off, nearly burning my eyes in the process.