A chartreuse jellybean, the size of a small egg, sat nestled firmly within a Jack Daniels shot glass. A veiny hand, dotted with liver spots resembling ground sausage on a meat-lovers pizza, quietly slipped its bony fingers around the small glass and lifted it into the early morning air. Quickly following were a pair of feminine blue eyes whose flicker of life had been snuffed out long ago, but were known to occasionally flare to a startling intensity whenever a garage sale bargain was close at hand. Not ten seconds passed and the old woman was already reaching into her oversized pink handbag. As soon as the old lady exchanged the jellybean and shot glass for fifty cents (she bargained down from a dollar), a gold-green light swept the length of the jellybean from bottom to top and exploded into infinity, completely imperceptible to any human eye.
A few galaxies to the north, a four-fingered hand jerked involuntarily, causing a glass of mint tea to splatter across the chrome floor. It was the creature’s first uncalculated movement in a thousand years.
“Shit,” it said in an alien tongue, roughly translated of course.
____________________________