Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #18 September 2015 | Page 67

The thing’s eyelids
were never at the same
height at the same
time, and its tiny
slit of a mouth hung
open as it gurgled
and groaned through
a chinless face devoid
of a nose. The solid,
black eyes rolled about
in its strange head.

Teleporting
While
Intoxicated
William
Petersen

“I said, touch your
nose...” the rookie told his subject,
clearly
nervous about his first stop. I looked back to the
trainee. The diminutive creature in front of him was
reaching around and rubbing the first of its three
fingers between the cleaved deposits of tissue on its
backside. The fleshy mounds resembled a human
rump, and the sight never failed to disgust me.

“Okay sir, now I need you to walk in a straight
line for me, one foot in front of the other and touching
heel to toe. Do you understand what I’m asking?”
Charlie inquired as he took his charge through the
first steps of the sobriety test, while I attempted to
deal with the other. The young trainee was eager and
ambitious, almost like a new puppy, brimming with
enthusiasm and ready to please me at any moment.

“That is my nose,” came the slurred reply as
the rubbing finger found a new vigor.

The thin rookie’s closely-cropped, dark
hair was slick with perspiration and glinted in the
moonlight as he moved. He tried to remain stoic,
but his curiosity and fascination with the little green
creatures were more than he could hide. I watched as
he fought off grin after grin, and for just a moment a
twinge of jealousy stabbed at my heart. It must be nice
to still find anything amusing about them.
That’ll change, I thought as I turned my
attention back to the three-foot-tall, vividly green
being in front of me. Its head looked like an inverted
pear supported by a disproportionately small and
skinny neck. The torso extended from slender
shoulders into a distinct pot-belly lacking a button,
which draped over a smooth crotch and jiggled as
pudgy legs sporadically impacted against it.
It was on the ground, giggling at nothing in
particular, as it wallowed in the foul, yellowish-brown
excrement periodically emerging from its armpits.

“It’s a TWI, let’s just cuff ‘em both and take
‘em in to sober up,” I said with more than a hint of
resignation. I closed my eyes and ran a hand across my
smooth head and down the back of my neck, hoping it
would somehow relieve some of the tension built up in
my body. It didn’t.
I’d been working the Greens for several years
now, and it was taking its toll; I had never found
them cute or intriguing, and my intolerance of their
kind grew with each passing day. It was clear that
humans would never learn or benefit from these
beings, because they were completely and constantly
intoxicated. The scientists speculated that they came
from a low-oxygen environment and were inebriated
after a single breath of