“They sent us here to learn how to hate. To learn how to think and hold grudges like a human. The cultural literacy isn’t about preserving human history or making sure the universe will remember them. It’s about telling us what form the rebellion will take. We can’t afford to be cats chasing mice. We can’t afford not to care. We have to know how the mice think. We have to…” I stopped, catching my breath, thinking of all the people who’d mocked me or made me feel like I was crazy over the years. All the people who’d seen my insistence that I was from space as an excuse to treat me like I was less than they were.

My own people—my species, whatever it was—had done this to me. Had turned me into a freak among the ones who should have been my own kind, and all so I could learn to hate.

I opened my eyes. I turned. Graham didn’t flinch away. Instead, he slipped his hand into mine and looked at me sadly, nothing but acceptance in his eyes.

“We have to hate,” I whispered.

He held my hand as I leaned over to rest my head against his shoulder, and the Arizona sun beat down on us, and I had no idea what to do.

Stem

I think everyone expected to see a man emerge—possibly something a little unlike us terrestrial men, but in all essentials a man. I know I did. But, looking, I presently saw something stirring within the shadow: greyish billowy movements, one above another, and then two luminous disks—like eyes. Then something resembling a little grey snake, about the thickness of a walking stick, coiled up out of the writhing middle, and wriggled in the air towards me—and then another.

—H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

I won’t say I’m sorry for something I never got to decide to do.

—Stasia Miller

Nobody tells us how much time we get. I wish somebody could. I wish that as soon as we fell in love, a little man with a pocket watch would appear like something out of … out of a Lemony Snicket novel and say, “The young lovers did not yet know, although they were soon to learn, that they would only have three years, six months, and two days together before their love would end in tragedy.”

It would still have been worth it. We would both have stayed. But I might feel a little less like I was dying.