deer throwing
not to be confused with "deer catching," the little-known state sport of oregon
She exited the emergency room with a swollen knee and a medicated fog blunting everything around her. It was early in the morning, just before dawn, and the sky was still colorless. Milo was giggling at the pathetic sight of his friend as he watched Carla, drifting on pain drugs, attempt to get to his car. She had a habit of dropping dramatic jokes that sounded flippant and half-serious, which was only made worse in her pilled state, and as she eased herself onto the hood of his car, too tired to get much farther, she muttered that she wished a deer would come and hit her and just “take her out of her misery.”
Realistically it couldn’t be a deer this time, it would need to be something stranger. The region had changed in recent years, ever since Earth’s atmosphere had begun to merge with the drifting fringe of Planet Xiros-5 after the dimensional rift incident. It left half the sky with Earth’s familiar stars, and the other half glowing with alien constellations and drifting, pulsing clouds of violet mist. Wildlife, both terrestrial and not, occasionally crossed over.
So, her joke had shifted with the times:
I wish one of those weird frog aliens would just hit me and put me out of my misery.
The night air swallowed her words. The ground hummed with distant, foreign vibrations from the rift-winds. Overhead, the violet half-sky pulsed slowly like a heartbeat.
Then something small hopped across the roadside.
It resembled a frog, but not fully. Its skin carried the metallic sheen of liquid mercury. Its limbs bent at disquieting angles. Its eyes glowed in a rhythmic pattern, three pulses, pause, two pulses, the well-known blink pattern of the S’kethri, a species from Xiros-5 sometimes called “death frogs” by locals due to their potent bioelectric fields. Harmless when calm. Devastating when frightened.
Carla leaned forward as if drawn by a string. The creature’s presence felt like a living glitch in reality; too sleek, too deliberate, too alien for a place that used to be simple forest and road. The world on this side of the rift often felt like two landscapes awkwardly stitched together: Earth’s damp soil and Xiros-5’s shimmering, crystalline moss growing side by side.
She stared at the S’kethri, caught somewhere between fascination and resignation. In her drug-softened mind, the joke resurfaced with sharper detail.
If anything were going to “take her out,” it would be one of these uncanny intruders from the half-sky.
Milo noticed her fixation. And Milo, impulsive, loyal, and catastrophically literal, decided that this was the moment to “help.”
Before she could stop him, he scooped up the S’kethri. Its skin thrummed with a warning vibration, the soft, rising whine of its defensive field activating. Milo ignored it. In his hands, it felt warm, unnervingly alive.
And with the confident stupidity of someone trying to impress a friend, he lobbed the creature toward Carla.
The alien struck her chest. A wet thud. A cry of energy. Then the S’kethri discharged.
A blinding burst of blue-white light detonated outward, the kind of brilliance that belonged more to Xiros-5 lightning storms than Earth. The crystalline moss at the roadside lit up like fire. A sharp, slicing hum tore through the trees, silencing every cricket, every rustle of leaves.
When the radiance dimmed, both Carla and the S’kethri lay still.
Milo froze. His mind dissolved into a silent, rising panic. The forest- half Earth, half alien — felt suddenly hollow. The violet clouds overhead rippled as though something vast had awakened.
Then came the hum.
Low at first, then swelling, the unmistakable frequency of a Xiros-5 retrieval craft. The sky split open along a vertical seam, revealing a ship that seemed carved from liquid silver, moving with precise, predatory grace.
A column of pale rift-light enveloped Milo before his brain caught up with his terror. It lifted him effortlessly, drawing him toward the ship’s open aperture. Inside, silhouettes moved with perfect synchrony, dozens of small forms, each shaped like the creature he had killed.
Their eyes glowed in that same rhythmic pattern:
Three pulses. Pause. Two pulses.
Recognition. Mourning. Judgment.
The beam tightened. Milo rose faster.
Within seconds, he was gone, swallowed by the craft’s interior shadows.
The seam in the sky sealed itself, the ship sliding back through the rift toward the half of the universe that humans still barely understood. The night fell silent once more, as if resetting.
Below, on the faultline between two worlds, the bodies of Carla Wren and a lone S’kethri lay side by side, casualties of a joke spoken too casually in a place where the universe listened far too well.
But moments later, the creatures stirred. First a twitch, then two more. Three pulses. A gasp. Exhale. Two more pulses.
"What?"
In Carla's morphine haze, nothing made sense. Nothing about the trio of pulses, nor the sudden awareness of what those pulses meant, the subtle modulations in their tenor that she never seen before seemed real.
"What ... happened?"
Two more pulses, yet each contained a thousand tiny cues, a symphony of dancing lights somehow contained inside the pupils of the S'kethri. Two blinks that seemed like a half crazed run-on sentence, compressed into a fraction of a second: "you're alive you're alive you're alive how are you alive thank goodness why did i go flying where did the launcher go what happened. What ... happened?"
The two sat up, Carla with a grunt of pain, the S'kethri with a motion that defied the anatomy of earthly amphibians, a fuzzy reforming of the bent and broken shape into a restored silvery form. They stared at each other, wide eyed, neither daring to utter another word. Silent under the riftlit sky.
Three more slow blinks: "What was that human thinking, throwing me, casting me from its hand without reason, without care? What fool? Did he not know that he could hurt me? That he would hurt you? That my people would see what he would do? That he would be brought before the tribunal? That he would have no chance to defend himself without the knowledge of our customs, the knowledge that he so clearly lacked? What was it thinking?"
Carla gasped.
Aloud she said, "I can understand you!"
Privately, she thanked the doctors for giving her the good drugs, but wished they would have warned her about the side effects before giving her hallucinogens.
Another two blinks, and information crashed into Carla's brain, not words exactly, but pure meaning, deposited in the instants of between eyelid flutters: "that is the typical side effect of the bioelectric field. When I was surprised my sudden evacuation from the ground into your abdomen, I released a shock."
"But how am I alive?" Carla asked, "I should have been killed by the bioelectric field."
Three blinks of the eyes which were pools of compassion: "I couldn't silence a heartbeat of another soul, not on purpose, and not on accident if I could help it. I limited the bioelectric field's intensity; not by enough to stop it entirely, not by enough to prevent the arrhythmia and the ensuing shock, but enough to keep you alive."
"But what. But why? How can I understand you?"
Two more blinks: "that tends to happen when your kind survives exposure to the field. Not every S'kethri has sufficient control, and even when everything seems right, things can go badly, so we tend to use translators. The cerebral pattern synchronization isn't fully understood, even by us, but we think it has something to do with the rift."
As Carla and the S'kethri continued to look into the darkness, the departed alien recovery ship flashed back through the rift, and as the scent of singed grass mingled with the echoing doppler of the Xiros-5 Diplomatic Response Force sirens, a brilliant beam wrapped itself around the S'kethri, and Carla knew that soon her busted knee would be the least complicated thing in her life.