I thought about the abandoned/neglected September Novel and what I can do to get it restarted for October! Also, tomorrow is the 1st of Inktober… I saw a tee-shirt today and decided to write about a bearish alien buying a surf-board in a surf-shop in Maui. The bearish alien is a crewman on a visiting starship and this is a 20 minutes in the future setting where we have made first contact and are sorting things out. I suspect the world will more or less take it in stride, a little more crazy, a little cleaner, hopefully, and a little more hopeful.

A bear walked into my surf shop this afternoon.

He was a quarter tonne of alien muscle… and claws, and teeth. I mean, I know who he was, he’d been taking shore leave locally for half a week and everybody was talking about him, but damn. There he stood sharing the wet dog smell and three rows of alarming serrated teeth with me and my customers. Like a land-shark, which, come to think of it, was the new slang term for his kind.

I closed my mouth, swallowed and finally asked, “What can I do you for, Mr. Teeth?”

The big guy sort of barked, sort of laughed and the voder around his massive left arm translated his slithery speech into English. “I like that. I think I’ll use that from now on, if you don’t mind?”

“Be my guest, it’s a free… planet.”

“That it is. That it most definitely is,” he agreed and bark-laughed again. It sort of grows on you, like bad booze.

Mr. Teeth needs the narrator/POV character to make him a new surfboard, an Earther board to replace the one he lost in a tangle with some local color.