The Tourist

‘I’ve got a present for you,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Put your work down and let’s unbox it together.’

‘What is it this time?’ she asked, somewhat irritated, because he kept spending every minute on things they didn’t need.

‘A jigsaw puzzle,’ she said in surprise answering her own question as she stared into the box full of tiny pieces; this was the last thing she needed in the dimly lit room. Evolution still hadn’t enabled them to see any better in the dark, after all these years of living without electricity or light. Even the light of the sun and the moon was no longer present, and all this under the pretence of protecting the youth.

‘I just happened to come across it,’ he said. ‘Who knows, maybe it fell off a lorry or washed ashore after a ship sank a few hundred years ago. You know the sort of stories, don’t you? We’re in luck today.’

He observed the box closely, but he didn’t notice that luck didn't lay at their feet.

It’s hard to say how long it took them to piece all the fragments together. It was impossible to spread the entire contents across the floor and sort them, and the hours when a little twilight filtered in were limited.
And there he stood; at first glance, he bore a striking resemblance to them.
For a few brief minutes, the eyes lit up and letters were projected onto the wall.

‘Even more to puzzle over,’ he exclaimed cheerfully.

‘It’s not a puzzle,’ she replied, ‘it says: “I am the tourist; haven’t you missed me after all these centuries?”’

He stared at her in disbelief. He’d never known she could read. ‘The tourist,’ he muttered, ‘isn’t that the alien creature that the world suffered at the hands of back then…’

The bulging eyes no longer glowed, and the words on the floor had vanished; the stranger stood there dimmed and not timid at all, the horns on his head started to grow slowly.

‘It’s not our lucky day,’ she thought, ‘we’ve just let the alien into our home, ready to destroy what little civilisation we have left.’
And although there wasn’t much left of the world built up by their ancestors, she had learnt one lesson from them: never trust a stranger, no matter how sweet the talk, no matter how much their eyes shine like pearls; it was just like with rats. If you don’t fight them, the damage will be incalculable.

‘The tourist is never alone,’ she said, 'he is not different from the plague', taking a step closer. And before he could say a word, she had pierced both his eyes and slit his throat with a few swift movements.
Both didn’t bat an eyelid as the tourist turned to dust before their very eyes.

‘What a shame about the present,’ he said, ‘but at least we’ve had a bit of a diversion and seen something new. Off we go for another few years of darkness until a couple more little gems turn up on the beach.’

_{The photo was taken by me at the exhibition of Museum Arnhem - The Netherlands
21-8-2026}