Mary out O' the Earth — John Stchur

Mary Out O' the Earth is the story of a forty-year-old widower named David Rigert who falls in love with a woman who is not at all who -- or what -- he believes her to be. She is, in fact, only half human. It is a story that hopefully captures the awful essence of what it must be like to wake up in dawn's early light, turn to the spouse or lover lying next to you . . . and just catch, peripherally, a fleeting glance of a really wicked set of three-inch fangs receding back into your beloved's gums. But Mary doesn't know that she is half beast or that she has a half-alien mind and possesses enormous physical strength beneath her porcelain curves and red-hair beauty. She doesn't know she is programmed to kill -- and worse, to love -- so that the imperatives of an alien world might be fulfilled. Or that her "other" self can quash her good half at will -- down, down . . . until all that remains when she awakens are its malevolent ghostly footprints on her soul. She doesn't know, but she will learn. And that is when the internal screams begin.