Escape Pod 769: Deal
Deal By Eris Young Beulah wonders what it would be like to touch the Visitor. Oil-slick iridescent, it is tennis ball-sized and scaled with an animated crystalline skin—or shell—or carapace. It floats, stationary, a foot above the rug in the corner of the living room. Its surface changes by the second, rippling back and forth as if stroked by an invisible hand. If she were to run her fingers—gently, gently—over its surface, would it be keratinous, like an iguana? Or feathery? Would it be warm…
Content warnings 3
illness-and-pandemicself-harmtransphobia
Quasar links out; the story lives on Escape Pod, where the author gets the click.