Summer Guests

Mel Armstrong wanted only one thing from his vacation: peace and quiet in his apartment. Instead, he gets a pair of impossible guests. When he peers into a birdhouse at Sweetwater Beach, two sets of golden eyes stare back at him. The beings are tiny, winged, and unmistakably alive, one translucent green as jade, the other human-colored with wings like thin glass. They didn't ask to come to Earth. They didn't ask to crash in Mel's spare room. But now he's stuck with them, and the questions are piling up: Where did they come from? What are they doing here? And why are they afraid of something much, much worse? Schmitz crafts 1950s science fiction at its most playful, a story that knows the real magic isn't in cosmic explosions but in the moment the impossible shows up uninvited and makes itself at home.