When the sky cracked open over the sleepy town of Ridgehill, nobody noticed—except Sam.

He was closing up the bookstore when the air shimmered like heat rising from asphalt. A flash lit up the forested ridge behind the town, and something, or someone, fell through. Sam grabbed his jacket and flashlight and made his way into the woods.

He didn’t expect to find her.

She stood barefoot in the clearing, wearing a flowing garment that shimmered like starlight, with symbols etched into it that seemed to shift when he looked away. Her eyes were silver, and her skin had a faint iridescence like moonlit water. She was… not from here.

She looked at Sam with quiet curiosity. “What… is this place?”

He blinked. “Earth. Uh… you’re on Earth.”

“I have not heard of this… Earth.”

That was the beginning.

⸻

Her name, she said, was Sehri. Her voice had a melodic cadence, as if she was used to speaking in music rather than words. She didn’t know how she got here—only that the “veil between realms ruptured” as she was passing through a corridor of energy in her own universe. Everything after that was a blur.

Sam, both terrified and intrigued, took her home.

Teaching Sehri how to blend in was not easy.

First, clothes: she wore her otherworldly gown like armor, but it sparkled too much under streetlights. Sam gave her jeans and a hoodie. She was appalled.

“They are… coarse. Restrictive. Why do your people endure this?”

“You get used to it,” Sam said with a smile.

Then came food. Sehri tried coffee and immediately became obsessed. “It is like… fire trapped in liquid,” she said, jittering as she tried to clean the entire kitchen in ten minutes.

Her appearance—ethereal, with hair that shifted from blue to silver depending on the light—was harder to explain. Sam told people she was a performance artist. It worked surprisingly well in Ridgehill.

But it was her understanding of human norms that needed the most work.

“Why do people smile when they are sad?” she asked once, watching someone at a funeral.

Sam looked at her. “Sometimes it helps people feel less broken.”

Sehri paused, then nodded slowly. “You are strange… but kind.”

⸻

Over weeks, they grew closer. She learned how to use a phone (with some frustration), binge-watched entire seasons of old shows to understand human emotions, and even got a job at the bookstore, where she memorized entire shelves by touch.

But there were moments when her origins slipped through.

Once, she stopped a falling ladder in midair—without touching it. Another time, she whispered to a dying plant and it bloomed the next morning.

Sam confronted her gently.

“You’re… not human, are you?”

“I was never meant to be here,” she said quietly. “But this world… it calls to me. Maybe I can become something new.”

Sam smiled. “You don’t have to become anything. Just be you. That’s enough.”

⸻

Then, one night, the sky cracked open again.

A rift appeared over the ridge—bright, swirling, and beckoning. Sehri stood beneath it, eyes full of conflict.

“It’s my way back,” she whispered. “To everything I knew.”

Sam’s throat tightened. “Do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I don’t belong here. But… I don’t think I belong there anymore either.”

He took her hand. “You belong where you’re loved. Where you choose to stay.”

She looked at him—and for the first time, didn’t seem alien at all.

The rift closed, unnoticed by the world.

And Sehri stayed.

Not because she had to.

But because Earth, strange as it was, had become her home.

And Sam? Her anchor in this beautiful, bewildering world.