Guruvir

I opened my hands and it was right there. This little glowing rock, I had picked it up out of the water and when I saw it I knew it was from outerspace. It was just glowing green like you would imagine it would be.

I brought it to the Outerspace Museum and they looked at it and oohed and aaahed and asked me how I had know that this was where it belonged. I said, look at it, it’s glowing, only things from outerspace glow like that. They nodded their heads at me. Then said, you’re right this rock is from outerspace, it’s time to make an exhibit for it.

So they set it up in its own little gallery with pamphlets and headphones and did some kind of chemical analysis and found out that it really was glowing. They had tour guides who were trained just for this rock, because a glowing rock had never made it through to the Earth before. At the entrance to the exhibit they hung a picture of the rock and me. It was in a neon green frame.

One day, while the exhibit was still going on, my hands started to glow. I thought, perfect! I went back to the museum people and showed them my hands. I said, look, I’m from outerspace. They looked and shook their heads at me. No you’re not, you’re from earth, and you weren’t always glowing like that. Go home.

I went home and tried to wash away the glowing, but the more I washed at it, the more it spread. From my hands to wrists and then all the way up my arms and down my torso to my feet, until my face was glowing so neon green that I had to walk around with a veil covering my face. I thought I could work in the circus or in Hollywood, but I really wanted to be at the museum, in that exhibit with my glowing rock. So I went back, because now that I was glowing all over, they couldn’t deny that I was from outerspace.

When I got there, they hardly recognized me until I pointed to the picture of me on their wall, and they said, oh, right, you. I said, I’m from outerspace, put me in the exhibit. They, said, this is not a zoo, you can go to the zoo, but we can’t put anything alive in here. But I said, I’m from outerspace, I glow, and I can’t go with the Earth animals, they aren’t like me. They said, there are laws against this sort of thing, it’s not allowed in museums. Go home.

I went home and tried to get some parts acting in movies, but they didn’t need me they said, they had digital animation that glowed even brighter than I did. I tried to get NASA to let me be an astronaut but they thought I had some weird disease and said I wasn’t in good enough health to go, had to be tip top, and my color looked off.

I couldn’t get any work and people that I knew stopped talking to me, because they were afraid that the glowing air that I breathed out would make them start to glow. I just kept taking showers, hoping that I could wash it off. Never worked.

One day I got a call from my agent who said that someone had written a story about me and that they were making it into a movie. They wanted me to play myself!

I took my veil off, acted, loved it, signed autographs, marched up and down Rodeo drive, was on the cover of those tabloids, vacationed in Tahiti, and ate at Spago.

After the movie, the exhibit at the museum grew and grew, until finally everyone had seen it and no one went anymore. They sent the glowing rock back to me in a little box, and I knew before I opened it because the glow seeped through the cracks.

I was so happy to see it, I slept with it under my pillow that night and when I woke up, all the glow was gone: from my rock, from my skin, from my life.

I carried the rock around with me hoping that one day it would start to glow again. It never did.

Then one day I took it from my pocket and placed it on the tombstone of someone who had just died. Someone named Diane.