I let the children play with lions because I decided it was part of their education to examine life from another planet. This was after I ordered a box of domestic cats but many of my students, the boys in particular, didn’t know their own strength and crushed the poor animals. The lions were no good either because these boys were in their destructive stage of youth and the devious ones took revenge whenever their fingers were bitten.
Finally, I ordered a human, which didn’t come cheap because they breed so slowly. All the children laughed when I told them these tiny creatures were kings of a faraway world. They only got interested when they realised humans had fingers and a voice box, just like us, and might not have been conquered if their spaceships weren’t so much smaller than ours.
The boys and girls were determined to teach it some of our language and I was flattered when they named the human Yaarn after me, their favourite teacher. They seemed to adore the human who could be taught to perform tricks within minutes — much less stubborn than cows or pigs who struggled to learn anything at all. After a few months, a cage seemed unnecessary, and I was impressed when even the boys handled the human like their little friend.
Soon Yaarn was able to speak whole sentences in Lorovian, though it could only repeat the children. This skill made it impossible to replace when it tried to escape the classroom, one night when the lights were off, and fell from its home on the windowsill. Some of the children were crying when we buried it in the garden, and despite all the death, I still consider the lesson a success because now they handle the lions as delicately as flowers.
This story previously appeared in Everyday Fiction.
Edited by Marie Ginga
James Machell is a British writer, born in London and matured in Seoul. He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and the outreach manager for Utopia Science Fiction Magazine for which he gets to interview his favorite writers and artists, including P. Djèlí Clark, Ken Liu, and Samuel R. Delany. He is also the contest chair for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association. Find him on X @JamesRJMachell or YouTube where his channel's name is Fell Purpose.