Submitted for the July 2025 prompt: Aliens Among Us

Clem never planned to stay. He’d come to clear out his aunt’s cabin — box up the quilts, sell the iron stove, maybe keep one of her honey jars for memory’s sake. The land was too still for him. Too much hush in the trees.

 

But the stone out back said otherwise.

 

He found it on the second morning, nestled under the old persimmon tree like it had been waiting. Oval, pale gray, with a hole clean through its center. Not carved, but smoothed. Grown. It vibrated faintly in his hand, and when he held it near his ear, he heard something like a breath. Then a word.

 

"Velora."

 

He didn’t know what it meant. But the name stuck to him. Made his teeth ache. His fillings buzzed like tuning forks.

 

That night, he dreamed in threes. One part memory, one part static, one part something else. Huge and gentle and watching. He woke up before sunrise with dirt under his fingernails and the stone on his chest, warm as skin.

 

The next day, the truck wouldn’t start. The power blinked. The clocks reset. His phone screen froze, then flickered with a symbol he didn’t recognize: a circle bisected by a humming line.

 

That night, the knock came.

 

Three taps. Measured. Not demanding, but not quite human.

 

Clem opened the door slowly.

 

It was his aunt.

 

Or something wearing her.

 

She looked the same. Blue coat, gray braid, crow's feet softening her eyes. But her voice was richer now. It vibrated with layers. When she spoke, Clem’s senses ignited. He heard starfields and smelled the scent of rosemary.

 

"You’re awake," she said. "Finally."

 

He backed up, heart hammering. "You’re dead."

 

Her smile was sad. "The dead part passed. But she left a place for me."

 

She stepped inside. The wood beneath her feet didn’t creak.

 

Over coffee, she told him everything.

 

They weren’t invaders, she said. Not anymore. They had come long ago. Accident, curiosity, and what they described as a calling. Some returned. Some stayed. To guide, soften, and give.

 

"We don’t come in ships. We come in stone and story."

 

His aunt, now called Velora, had been part of a slow movement of watchers, embedding where people overlooked. Hospice nurses. Weather station clerks. Pastors in dwindling churches. They carried no weapons. Only gifts. Empathy enhancers. Neural harmonics. Emotional calibration techniques. Music and memory. Ways of remembering beyond the body.

 

Clem didn’t understand it all. But he believed her.

 

She took him outside. The air shimmered with frost and meaning. Beneath the dying persimmon tree, she pressed the stone to his temple. He saw—

 

— Pastor John in Mars Hill, sitting at his desk, rewriting Sunday’s sermon without knowing why. Scratching out judgment and writing compassion. He read it aloud and wept. Then laughed. Then stood up and danced alone in the church office.

 

— A lonely boy in Marshall picking up a rock at recess and feeling, for the first time in his short life, that he mattered.

 

— An artist in Asheville who’d never painted anything but fruit bowls, now suddenly sketching vivid dreamscapes she couldn’t explain.

 

"They’re gifts," Velora said. "Carried quietly. Seeded gently."

 

"And I’m like you now?"

 

She touched his chest, just above his heartbeat. "You’re human. But you’re awake."

 

Back inside, they laughed. Tears filled Clem’s eyes, no longer tired with the burden of life.

 

Then, another knock.

 

This one gentler, but it still made his breath catch. He opened the door to a man with burnished skin and copper eyes, carrying a satchel of hand-bound notebooks. He bowed slightly.

 

"This one’s name is Alder."

 

Velora smiled. "My counterpart."

 

They sat at the kitchen table. Talked until dawn.

 

The next day, Clem woke up and saw the land differently. Not just the hills and hollers. The people. Their pain. Their potential.

 

He and Alder began to walk the mountain roads, visiting the quiet places. Whispering names into old stones. Leaving messages in birdsong and ripple patterns on creek water. They didn’t fix everything. That wasn’t the point.

 

The point was helping humanity remember who they could be.

 

Some don’t come to conquer; they come to cultivate. And some, like Clem, are now ready to help them do it.