New Book? Let's Keep it at "Story", Perhaps.

I've started a new "book" (you know those things that naive writers call "novels" or "books" and they try to finish them?) and I'm...6 pages, or 2,364 words into it. Oh joy. Anyways, I'm posting it in segments on ficlets, but I thought I might as well do it here too, where I don't have as much of a character limit.

So, Page 1 of...well, I have yet to name it, but for now I'll call it Bastion.

...........

Adam

Anthony Petrov was not human.

I knew it upon first sight of him, when he looked up with iridescent green eyes. Even in the way he sat, with his knees folded up against his chest at all times. However, he could hold more human conversation than any human I had met. He could walk like a human, and talk like a human. In fact, I was the only one who knew he wasn’t.

And now, as he sat across the picnic table, bare feet poking out through jeans, he looked less human than ever. It was his eyes, like before. An emerald flame seemed to be alive in the irises.

“Adam, do I creep you out?” he asked, suddenly and frankly.

“…No,” I replied truthfully.

“Mm.” He tucked in his legs a little more. “Do I creep other people out?”

“Well, probably. Everyone creeps someone else out. No one is happy with everyone.”

“True.”

Silence pervaded the grassy area for a little while, until he broke it again. “But do I attract attention? Do other people notice what I do? I know I don’t do everything exactly like other people.”

I sighed. He still didn’t know of my deduction, and I had a feeling this was a way for him to ask about it without arousing my suspicion. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m not other people.”

As Anthony shifted in his position, the water in the lake behind plinked up for no apparent reason. His eyes burned green simultaneously.

“It’s funny,” he started, “how the ways of the world work. I don’t understand it. In fact, what makes it funnier is that barely anyone else seems to understand it either. How there can be so much pain and death, and yet a balance of hope and life. Does this mean there’s a God who controls it all?”

“Some people believe so. I do. It’s an explanation for the impossible-to-understand.”

“Explanations,” he snorted. “They’re only elaborations on pre-formed judgments. I do better without them.” And he did. He was part of the unexplainable.

No, Anthony Petrov was not human. What he was, I had yet to find out. Maybe I never would.