Alien Gifts Read online

  She jolted awake just as Shallie did the same. They’d fallen asleep with their backs against the cavern wall, arms around each other to preserve the warmth their fire had lent them. It had burned down to embers now, but tendrils of smoke still wafted up toward the sky, escaping into the sunlight. The cavern had lightened again, and the dust had stopped falling; the opening high above them was a bright hole in the darkness. The roar of the storm was gone. There were only the voices.

  Beside her, Shallie jumped to her feet, shouting up to the hole. Tlik’chik joined her.

  “Here! We’re down here!” she called. Tlik’chik knew Shallie was yelling the same thing in her own language.

  Shadows appeared at the opening.

  “Tlik’chik! Are you all right?”

  “Yes! We’re fine!”

  “Shallie!”

  “We’re here!”

  “We’re lowering a rope for you!”

  A rope snaked down from above. Shallie turned to Tlik’chik with bright eyes. “Okay!” she said, pointing to the smoke rising from the embers. “We did it!”

  Tlik’chik nodded. The searchers must have seen the smoke rising from the hole and knew where to find them, even though the massive storm would have erased all traces of their footprints. She saw Shallie glance down at the remains of the fire, and their gifts to each other. She looked up and caught Tlik’chik’s eye, smiling sadly.

  “Itri-sticks,” she said. “I liked.”

  Tlik’chik nodded. “Draw-ings,” she said. “Shallie make more?”

  Shallie agreed with a smile and threw her arms around Tlik’chik in a tight hug. Tlik’chik hugged her back and smiled. The real gift was still right there.

  Thank you!

  Hello Reader! Thanks for reading “Alien Gifts: Five Short Stories”, and I hope you enjoyed the stories. I was once told by an editor (even though she rejected my story) “You do write great aliens,” and it’s true I love imagining alien species to life. If you liked these stories (or if you’d like to see something different; I do write fantasy and urban fantasy as well), please visit my website at www.sherrydramsey.com to learn more, find some free tales, and leave a review or rating; or tell your reader friends about the ebook. All of these things mean a lot to authors, especially these days! If you’d like to connect online, there are links below. Thanks again, and I appreciate your support!

  About the Author

  Sherry D. Ramsey is a speculative fiction writer, editor, publisher, creativity addict and self-confessed internet geek. When she's not writing, she makes jewelry, gardens, hones her creative procrastination skills on social media, and consumes far more coffee and chocolate than is likely good for her.

  Her books include a middle-grade fantasy, The Seventh Crow; three books in the Nearspace series, One's Aspect to the Sun, Dark Beneath the Moon, and Beyond the Sentinel Stars; the urban fantasy The Murder Prophet; and two collections of short fiction: To Unimagined Shores—Collected Stories and The Cache and Other Stories. With her partners at Third Person Press she has co-edited six anthologies of regional short fiction and a new novel. Every November she disappears into the strange realm of National Novel Writing Month and emerges gasping at the end, clutching something resembling a novel.

  A member of the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia Writer’s Council, Sherry is also a past Vice-President and Secretary-Treasurer of SF Canada, Canada's national association for Speculative Fiction Professionals.

  You can visit Sherry online at www.sherrydramsey.com, and follow her much more pithy musings and glimpse into her life on Twitter and Instagram @sdramsey.