What the Small Gray Visitor Said

It isn't often that a visitor from outer space gets stranded on Earth, but it happens every so often. When it does, it's an accident. No one intends to get stranded anywhere, after all. This visitor is female, a botanist, and a telepath. The alien carries a Small Gray environmental suit with her. She is looking for plants that can be grown on her own planet's severely depleted ecosystem. The alien has just uprooted one when she finds herself stuck on Earth during a planet-wide pandemic. It is a spring day when Arielle, an author and editor-for-hire, spends her morning as she usually does: writing, editing, blogging, drinking coffee, and sitting with her cat while looking out the back windows into her yard. She gets up to stretch and takes a walk around her beautiful garden to enjoy some sunshine, smell a few iris blossoms, and survey her berries and herbs. Suddenly, she sees something under her honeysuckle bush. At first, she thinks it is discarded, plastic litter that has blown around the area, and she picks it up in disgust, only to see that it is gray, as light as a feather, and definitely not plastic. It has a face, or rather, a face-covering. She glances up to find herself face-to-face with a stranded visitor - the owner of the suit she is holding. She takes her in...after her husband, a scientist, tests them both for the virus. The tests come back negative, of course. The aliens, anticipating microbes that are not endemic to their own world, have immunized themselves against Earth's pathogens before venturing out of their ship. Find out what happens next, and what the Small Gray Visitor said while she was here.