Come second sunrise on Gunsmoke, Greta trudged out to her family's nearby barn to feed the animals. She began breathing through her mouth, prepared for the stink. You could always smell the stink of the pigs. If it weren't for the thieves, maybe they could've built the barn further from their home, and downwind.

Humming to herself, she unlocked the barn door and entered to begin her chores. Effort used to heave heavy bags of feed into troughs caused interruptions in her somber tune. Greta hummed something, she barely noticed what. But something felt odd.

There was an echo. The barn was too full and insulated to echo. She stood, leaning against a toma stable, craning her head round, waiting in silence. Finally shrugging it off, she tucked a loose strand of brown hair behind her ear and tightened the ribbon securing her ponytail. Resuming to hum, she could swear there was an echo as she lifted the slop bucket to the squealing delight of the pigs. The slop hit the low trough within the pig enclosure with a wet slap.

Greta gasped, nearly falling over.

"Jesus Mary 'n' Joseph!" she cried out, clutching at her chest. "How'd you get in here?"

The bundled form in the corner was silent, its only response to clutch at itself in the same way. Thin, dirty legs and arms were the only parts visible from the edges of cloth that used to white, and used to be a sheet.

"My God, child, you scared me near to death! And what a MESS you are!"

It lifted its dirty fingers up into the hood of the cloth, touching its face as it began to hoarsely hum the tune it'd just learned from Greta. Mimicking the notes, it crawled the few feet over to the edge of the pig trough and reached through the wire fencing to grab for some food. The bits and oozy gook came back to its mouth and Greta sighed to realize it was eating the slop.

On this desert planet, this unforgiving wasteland, life was not possible outside of the cities and towns, and these were suited for life only thanks to plants. There was a single, small plant at the edge of this town, Haven, where Greta's family resided. Seeing pitiful castaways like this one would break her heart, were it not so common.

Folk on Gunsmoke couldn't afford charity; not much anyway. Greta could hardly offer this poor soul a home or a meal, let alone spare enough water to clean up. This one, this one was obviously touched, God bless it, couldn't talk or wear clothes, it seemed.

"Alright, then, you know I ought to kick you out, little one," Greta insisted, assuming a booming tone. "How old are you, now, 12, 10 years old?"

The huddled mass continued to suck down the smelly stuff, but held one gunk-coated hand out, holding up one finger. One.

Sighing aloud, Greta shook her head. Wow, this one was a dim lamp. "There's a shovel here," she noted, grabbing one nearby and giving it a shake. "You see this. Now, you take this here and shovel the poop and messy dirt out the trap there," she added, bending to point at a hinged flap built into the wall. "When I come by, I unlock this door and I let you out so you can take the shovel and bury the poop pile. Got it? You do this and I'll let you stay."

She got no response.

Greta made for the door, key in hand. "If'n there's any poo in the barn when I come by for the evening roam, I'll be having to kick you out, dear. And by God, if you do a thing to the livestock…" she muttered as she locked up the barn secure for the day.

OXO

She didn't think it heard her, but it did. It sucked down all the sustenance it could and then went to lift the heavy shovel. Its thin, weak, little arms couldn't but lift it enough to lean atop a shoulder, then slowly scoop up some feces here and there. Breathing heavily, it labored to do as the lady'd asked, to get the stuff out the hatch. The animals would poop on the cleaned floor, so it stopped scooping when it couldn't shovel anymore and rested upon the straw. It'd have to wake up to finish with the poop later.

The journey through the desert had been harsh and exhausting, but it was over. The food and the bed weren't as good, but everything else would be better.

It didn't like to live in the bulb; it was hot and heavy and it made its body do weird things. When it got out of the bulb it got to be in a room with the people it saw from the bulb, but the people only talked to each other and only smiled to each other. The people played music for themselves and left books near her that they were reading, and they didn't mean it to know them, but it did and it liked them. When its eyes adjusted to the light and its body let it move on the floor, it liked the world it was in well enough. And it saw how beautiful the insides of things were, the insides of the people, of frogs, of cats, because the pages in the books showed it was so. The people were standing outside its room but it heard them, heard them say they wanted to see her insides. Sure, it's own insides were maybe very pretty, too, but the books said that you can only see the inside when the thing is dead, and it wasn't really wanting to die yet. It thought maybe it should go, but it couldn't say so to the people because its teeth cut its tongue so it didn't talk. It wrote a note to tell them, but it hadn't written before so the note wasn't as pretty to read as the words in the books. It slipped out when the people were away, and it wanted to take the books but they were heavy, so it took a sheet from its bed because it was soft. It walked into the desert that didn't look like it ended and it came upon this town and it crawled through a broken board to get in this barn.

Smiling and humming, it held its hands up to cover its mouth so its teeth wouldn't be scary. It saw its reflection before and it was pretty sure that the things about it that made it a lot different than the people were the things that made the people not smile at it, not talk to it. So it hid its things under the sheet, the things that were different. And it worked! This lady, she was scared at first, but then she was talking to it like it was one of the people! And music came from her, music that it made come from it, too. If it could be one of the people, and all it had to do was smell the dirty things and scoop the excrement from the animals and eat the animal food and sleep on scratchy straw, it would be better than being beautiful and dead.