You live peacefully by yourself in the middle of a large country estate, bequeathed to you by your grandfather. Your small wooden cabin contains all the amenities -- running water, electricity, food supplies, etc. But, except for the occasional visitor, you spend most of your time isolated from your rural neighbors. (Often, it seems, you find yourself wistfully yearning for the spark of human companionship.)
Tonight you shall be visited, but your guest is not exactly Company. From the frosty Autumn night outside your cabin lair, you suddenly hear a long, eerie whine piercing the pale silence of your somber study.
"What is that?" you whisper, lifting the shade from a small window. "Oh my God. Oh my God."
A round metallic object glistening in the moonlight churns up dirt and grass as it plunges in a wheeling fashion across your front lawn and crashes into
your wall. A split second later you are suddenly pinned under a small chandelier broken loose from the ceiling.
There's a sharp sting as the broken glass of the chandelier cuts your hands. You acted too hastily. You should never have handled broken glass. Now you're losing blood faster than life itself.
You feel small jabs alongside your back as you painstakingly worm your body out from under the deadly shards of dismembered fragments. Standing up in your slippers and stumbling out into the kitchen, you faintly detect an odd sound emanating from beyond the den's cracked wall and broken window.
"Earthling," an eerie-sounding pitch intones. "Earthling. Come your body. The meat is cold."
"God help me!" you cry to yourself. Your trembling hand picks up a cell phone and punches in 911. When the operator comes on, you shout your address into the receiver. But then the instrument goes dead, and the object falls from your grasp.
"Earthling," you hear again. "Earthling. The meat is cold, Human. The meat is cold."
Suddenly you sniff smoke from the battered cords and electrical wiring of the fallen chandelier. The den has caught fire. It is time to escape.
You hurtle up the flight of stairs, soon discovering there's no place left to run. The smoke from the downstairs area has quickly caught up, blocking your path to the first floor exit. Trapped by the thickening carbon clouds, you succumb to suffocation and death.
You stumble wildly out of the cabin, losing your sense of direction as you swagger in panic across the weeds and grass through the darkness of your small backyard.
Before you realize what has happened, you almost trip into a large, collapsed ebony structure. A crushed sculpture, oblong and metallic. The fallen object from the sky.
Earthling. You hear it again, suddenly. But it's not a voice, apparently. It's a message, like a thought...inside your mind. Earthling, it drones, like a false echo inside your head. The meat is rotting. The meat is cold. Body for the meat. Body for the cold.
The alien is dead. You killed it. Earth's first visitor has been slain by your fear. Now it is no longer pleading for protection from the killing cold. It has found the chill in your heart to be the coldest cut of all.
You stare at the extra-terrestrial...its short, thick frame hunkered next to its spacecraft - the latter split in half and nestled upon your lawn. A dense odor, reeking and unpalatable, exudes from the sprawled and almost naked body. The eyes, protruding like a mantis's, scowl and peer into your own.
The meat is rotting, Earthling. The meat is rotting and cold.
Slowly it starts to arise, its hairless grey torso arching towards you.
You shudder, a wave of nausea gripping you, as you...
Later, when you finally return (leading police) to the crash spot, you discover the alien to be dead...killed by the crisp, frosty air. Neglected and misunderstood (by you), the hurt and fragile creature (Earth's first space visitor) has perished from hypothermia.
You move your warm body against the cold, leathery skin of this grotesque creature. The trembling skin of the thing becomes warmer as it absorbs your exchanging body heat. You can feel it getting stronger. The frosty Autumn air is fended against. The weakened explorer breathes easier.
Your ears prick up at the sound of distant sirens. Soon the police will arrive, then the firefighters. Your cabin's fire will be extinguished. But the flame of this life, its fragile form clutched against your own, shall blaze again.
