People Watching
“That Taylor is a character,” said the woman from the table on Audrey’s left. She was an indie author with purple hair and a happy outlook.
They’d had a few friendly exchanges in the lulls between customers and had even traded a book about a teenage girl with psychic travel abilities for a pair of fingerless dragon-scale gloves.
“Is he ever at his own booth?” Audrey asked.
They’d often seen Taylor mingling at other tables and were now watching him chat with a mermaid cosplayer in a wheelchair decorated with seaweed streamers.
“His son and daughter usually man the booth while he drums up business on the floor. In a minute, he’ll pull some sample tea bags out of his vest pocket for the girl to smell. Then he’ll give her a business card with his booth number printed in the corner.”
She’d barely finished speaking when Taylor reached into his vest and pulled the tea samples out with a flourish. Audrey laughed and said she was surprised he hadn’t shown them to her that morning.
“Just wait, he’ll get back over here soon. Oh, and there’s Ashlee with two EEs, the alien tracker wearing a kitten vest and sensible shoes.”
Moving her gaze to Taylor’s right, Audrey easily found Ashlee in the crowd. In fact, it was hard to miss her hand-knit vest, featuring kittens and yarn balls. Audrey narrowed in on the vest, hoping Ashlee would come over to buy something from her.
“I saw her earlier,” she told her neighbor, sighing as Ashlee turned the corner and headed away from them. “She told you she’s tracking aliens?”
“Basically,” the author shrugged. “She said she’s a field agent for some secret group. It was an acronym… What was it? Oh, I know! SETLOE. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life on Earth. Apparently, aliens use small cons like these to meet in plain sight.”
They laughed together, but Audrey remembered the story later. As she studied the project she was crocheting, watching her hook slip through the yarn and pull up loops in a steady rhythm, she considered how often she had seen the hotel lights flicker in what could be a repeating pattern.
It was never all the lights in the hotel, just a few in one area or another. It had seemed odd, and Audrey laughed at the idea of it being a secret alien code. Maybe, she imagined, it was a form of alien life that disrupted the power system just by being there. Or a government plot to draw aliens out into the open.
Still chuckling, Audrey put down her project to help two little girls in princess costumes pick out crocheted flower crowns. She smiled at their fancy dresses, thinking that the people-watching at Geekify Greenville was a lot more fun than it was at the Fairfield Fiber Fair!
- If you like the idea of visiting aliens, buy the full book here
- If you’d rather see who else turns up at Audrey’s table, click here to keep reading online
You’re reading Audrey & Esther Geekify Greenville, A Twist Your Fiction Storybook online! If you enjoy these sample pages, you can buy the full book here.
With 3 genres, 22 possible endings, and even a time loop, Audrey & Esther Geekify Greenville will lead you through wacky journeys again and again!