The creature, if you could call it that, was very nearly transparent. It floated through the sky like a giant condom filled with a now cloudy and then clear, undulating fluid. There were no structures visible within it’s external membrane, nothing that a modern biologist would recognize anyway. Inside, it was a total mystery, but outside, across it’s skin, it was covered with a slick, shimmering layer of hydrofloric acid at such an amped up concentration so that it would eat through living flesh almost instantly.

Rick never saw it descend. He did not even feel it slap against the right side of his head, with the diffuse force of a wet t-shirt. And he did not feel it when the slurry it left all over his face and neck ate through his skin and hair and dissolved blood, flesh and muscle in a half a second. He did feel a warm, dull pain as the boiling acid began to eat through his skull, but mercifully, by this time he was gone, lying limply in the street beside his lawn mower.

Rick spent the first third of his life flunking through grade school, working odd jobs, meeting his loving wife. He spent the next third of his life welding for the Santa Fe Railroad and siring four unremarkable children. He spent the last few minutes of his life gasping through two new holes in his neck until he stopped breathing altogether; his head had all but disappeared, transforming into a black and dark crimson boiling plasma.

Pauline heard a loud thud outside the kitchen door. She looked up from her newspaper, saw nothing of interest through the door’s curtained window, and turned back to the editorial about the corrupting power of money in politics. The sound thumped again, this time twice as loud. She frowned, folded the paper and placed it beside her half-eaten piece of toast, slipped on her houseshoes and shuffled towards the door. She peeked through the window and saw nothing at all.

Pauline opened the kitchen door with mild disgust. If that stupid mutt from across the street was digging in her azaleas again, this time she might grab a shovel and, God help her, she might just do something about it. She might just brain the bastard. But she saw nothing remarkable across her sideyard nor in her neighbor’s yard. Then she looked down. She saw something that immediately struck her with disgust and revulsion so shocking that she nearly lost her breakfast that very moment. Sitting atop the doormat was a truly ugly sight. When she was a child, she vividly remembered seeing a large dead dog sitting between two lanes on the interstate, with most of his skin torn off, surrounded by a cacaphony of gorging flies. This thing was easily more disgusting than that poor dog.

The creature rose up and lept in the air. It landed across Pauline’s chest in a ‘whump!’, knocking her off her feet and into her kitchen. She was dead before she hit the floor.

Chad saw the creature on Ms Pauline’s kitchen stoop. He was sitting on his behind in a soft patch of dirt, digging roads through the soil with his Hotwheels cars and making a boisterous ‘vrroom!’ sound as the cars sped by. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the glimmer of the creature sitting on the doormat. Then he saw it rise up and slam against the kitchen door. He was at once, both fascinated and scared. He gathered up his Hotwheels and put them in the front pocket of his bib overalls, and rose to a kneeling position, never once taking his eyes off the creature. It crashed against the door again, and he rose to his feet.

Then the kitchen door opened and Pauline stepped out. Chad screamed in horror as the creature flew at Ms Pauline, knocking her backward into the kitchen. He stood in shock as the door stood open. He did not breathe, He stood frozen and numb. Then the creature came out of the door again, floating in mid air. Chad dove as fast as he could behind a boxwood shrub and peered out, shaking from head to toe. The creature flew the other way, and Chad finally exhaled.