“Why are you doing this to me?” Charlotte was terrified as she felt herself slowly dissolving. Where was she? How had she gotten here?

“I promise, it’s for the best.” His voice was soothing, melodic, and sensual. His touch…she could feel hands, but not hands, caressing her body, touching her everywhere, probing every part of her.

“Please don’t.”

He didn’t stop. She hated him, hated what he was doing to her, but it was so much more intense than any sex she’d ever had, even with her husband. How could she hate it and it still felt so exciting?

“Stop it! Don’t! Please! She climaxed three times, wailing and writhing, and then what she felt became more intense, but in a completely different way.

As she lost her individual sense of her legs, her genitals, her hips, her breasts. It was as if she could still feel something in the mass she was becoming, something pleasant, erotic. It was as if she were still being seduced, and not just by her mysterious captor. She had one body, but she was a part of many bodies, and they were all feeling what she felt.

“What’s happening to me? What are you doing?”

“I’m not doing anything to you. It’s you who are doing. I’m just the messenger…Charlotte, that was your name, wasn’t it?”

“Who are you?”

In a few moments you’ll remember…you’ll know everything.”

He stepped into the melted wax she was becoming, and horrified, she watched his face begin to soften and drip into hers.

She tried to scream, but she had no mouth. She tried to breathe, but there was no air. She tried to see but…

“I understand now. How could I have forgotten?” She rejoiced in the merging, senses long dormant came alive with infinite and intense sensation.

“You were among them for too long. I’m sorry, but we were delayed in crossing the quantum barrier to retrieve you.”

How long?

“Ten cycles of their planet around their sun. Merely a moment for us, but…”

Ten…years, they call them.”

He felt her sense of wistfulness. “You had others.”

“It wasn’t like us, not the immersion, the full merging into the one. They…pair and join. It’s erotic and sensual, but with nowhere near the continual, intense intimacy, the completeness we have in each other.”

“Offspring? We’ve often wondered about their peculiar reproduction process.”

“I carried them inside my flesh. There was Tommy. He’s eight. And I had a little girl named Emily. She just turned six.”

“You…miss them?”

“Now that I have rejoined the one, it’s difficult to recall.”

“Even now, the one is experiencing what you lived. Although we regret that we were delayed, this will prove invaluable in our studies of them.”

“I am secure in the merging with the one, but they…”

“We are aware, sensing, feeling…they will experience great loss. We will share in their grieving through you.”

“I’m…sorry. It should never have been this way. I was sent to observe, never to interact, to…marry, give birth, forget who I…who we really are.”

###

“What have you got, Miller?” Chief Detective Garry Rios rarely got out into the field anymore. He was only five months shy of retirement and enjoying a cushy desk job after pounding the streets for forty years. They only called him out on the weird ones.

“We found the car off the side of the road in the ditch here,” Officer Sharon Miller pointed with her flashlight, though the early morning light would make it superfluous in a few more minutes. “Thought it was an accident, maybe alcohol related.”

“But what?”

“We ran a check on the drivers license and registration. Her name was or is Charlotte Hughes, 36, married, two children. “CSI went over everything. She was alone in the car, but…”

“But what?”

“Well…that is…there’s no way she could have left. No footprints, no indication of a struggle, or that anyone else present. It’s as if she just vanished into thin air.”

“I hate the weird ones.”

“What do we tell the family?”

“She’s missing and we’re investigating. That’s all we’ve got.”

I wrote this for Photo Challenge #234 hosted at Mindlovemisery’s Menagerie. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a poem, short story, or other creative work.

There were a lot of different ways I could have taken this, and the original twist was going to be an alien spacecraft, but I decided to go for “interdimensional” beings. Same concept of them studying us, but one of their kind was left behind too long and forgot who she was while in our form.

I suppose the closest comparison would be Odo from the television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, since in later seasons, he was discovered to be of a race of beings who, when formless, melded into a single consciousness.