My intersection partner this week was muchtooarrogant. You can find his entry here: XXXXXX. It probably works best if you read mine first and then his, but either order would work.

Maybe it had been 100 years; maybe a day. First, there was the bloody mess of birth; much of those 50 hours lost to her short-term memory, due to brain fog. Then, in an elongated moment, she was holding him in her arms, admiring the perfection of his tiny body; the miracle of her body producing the perfect nutriment for him to be nurtured and grow. Then followed endless hours of quiet bonding, as she tuned out all else and focused on this one life. This life that she, somehow, had made.

The odds had not been in their favor. She hadn't even known she was still capable of reproducing. Up until this point, her adult lifespan had been a nomadic one: traveling and relocating, living minimally, existing on the outskirts of various cultures, ready always to leave. She felt she was always observing life from a distance; too cautious to embrace any particular homestead, any one lifestyle completely.

For so many years, she had enjoyed marveling at new ways of being: new cultures which inevitably built their food tastes, music, and artwork off their location. From sonorous reed flutes in water-based villages sustained by fish dishes; to bone drums and dried gourds in arid towns flanked by sage brushes and sustained by spicy meats and ground corn. And that was only here, on Earth.

Before that, she could scarcely recall the litany of places: some with atmospheres burning with iridescent gases; some with icy-blue mountain peaks. Some had been inhabited, and some had not, save herself and her traveling companion, her helpmate. They had known each other since they'd been mere offspring, jumping from star to star on their people's interstellar journey. In her youth, she had not understood why her people were running; only that generations had been fleeing from an unnamable threat. Or perhaps just unnamable to those so many ages into the flight. When history becomes myth, who can really say what they know?

She and her mate, Zygon, had volunteered when the elders had asked for bonded pairs to spread out across the galaxy. Doing so, they reasoned, would expand the possibilities of their race's survival. And her mate had relished the adventure, always tuning into interstellar chatter to gauge the safest places to travel: letting her know when the winds were shifting and they must move on.

But Zygon had not survived the last jump: some sort of molecular anomaly encountered as they'd burned through this atmosphere. Forcing her into the only functioning escape capsule, her partner had stayed with the flaming ship and met their fate in a smoking crater. And so, she had been alone here, until she discovered her miraculous secret and met her life's true love. She'd named him Galen, after an old Earth name meaning "healer" because his birth had unleashed improbable waves of hope. "I am Etherea," she told him when he'd been born. "I am your mother, and I love you very, very much."

Nothing mattered more than this small being. Now that he'd grown large enough to control his appendages, she spent hours every day teaching him the things he must know. First, and most importantly, she helped him master transmutation. For, marooned as they were in an arid landscape, they could not hope to hide forever. She had found a deserted farm to inhabit, and she could grow sustenance for them. But to do so, she had to work outside during the daytime. Even on the quiet of Alamo Road, passersby occasionally slipped by on the concrete road. She knew the rules of going unnoticed, and even a faint glimpse of something unusual could make someone put on the brakes to go back and check.

With his elastic young mind, Galen learned quickly, soon able to emulate whatever beings he found himself nearby. At first, he would miss key details, leading to mishaps like a furry rattlesnake, or a purple and yellow-spotted gecko. He once disconcerted a herd of elk by transmuting into a fair pass for a fellow but making his antlers sparkle. Each time he made such a mistake, his gurgling laughter made it hard for her to be firm. But she knew she had to be unyielding to impress upon him the gravity of his ability to blend in.

Along with her ship, she had lost her communications device. Even if she'd had the energy to monitor the transmissions as closely as Zygon had, she knew that without it, she was completely cut off from interstellar news. Not that she had missed it much. To her and Galen, time was measured by this one hot sun, anchored in the sky as if it were the only one she'd ever known.

Each evening, she would take advantage of the dimming light to walk about with her small charge. In a wheeled carriage, he could be cloaked under a blanket if he was feeling mercurial. She knew enough from her years around these inhabitants to know they would not violate that sanctity of a blanket cover if she only told them that he was resting.

One of her favorite places to visit was the Alamo Springs Cafe, with its simple foods, checked plastic tablecloths, and rock terrace. On warm evenings, she would ask for an outdoor table, rocking Galen in his carriage and sneaking him tidbits under the blanket. If she could only trust him not to commit such missteps as growing an extra appendage in the middle of a meal, he could have sat in one of the small, wooden stools with railings used here for toddlers.

If she timed it correctly, they could walk the short distance to Old Tunnel State Park to watch the winged mammalian species as they flittered in and out of the titular tunnel. She'd read that mother bats returned there to raise their pups, and she was delighted to be surrounded by others who understood her maternal drive. Much safer, too, she reasoned, than the Itty Bitty Read at the Pioneer Memorial Library in nearby Fredericksburg. Galen was unlikely to be able to control himself for that long, and she did not think the other offspring would accept a multicolored boy.

Tonight, after they shared a grilled cheese at the cafe, Etherea pushed her son down the rutted shoulder to her favorite place, just in time for the twilight bat migration. But something felt different this evening. Her time on Earth had not dimmed her perceptions; more so, she felt with an extraordinary certainty that, for the first time in Galen's lifetime, they were not alone of their kind.

Was it a stray flicker in the amber sky, hidden by a partially obscuring cloud? Or was it simply a murmur in the back of her consciousness, a tingling on her skin? She could not fathom it any more than she could figure out how to explain this feeling to the only being who mattered, the little one who had thrown his blanket aside to gaze with undisguised awe at the leather wings, fluttering by in dark clouds overhead as a ring of spinning lights grew ever closer.