Reba the Lizard Queen
Fiction by Quinten Sager –
Memories of red beaches swirled through Reba’s head as she slept under her custom sized heat lamp. Her tail hung off the end of a queen-sized bed, with just one too many pillows. She was used to the luxury of her palace back on Mars, but those days were far behind her now.
An iPhone on the nightstand beside her began to chirp and rouse Reba from her sleep. She reached over in an attempt to silence the phone, but the touch screen had difficulty reading her movements through her scaly hide. After some struggle, she managed to silence her phone and looked at all the notifications she received overnight. Twitter rant, twitter rant, twitter rant, five likes on her new instagram post, and a few daily reminders. Everything was normal.
With a heavy yawn, she rolled out of bed and rubbed her eyes. Reba let out a sharp hiss as her feet hit the floor, a nasty habit that she developed over eons of life. She took her claw and picked out the last remnants of last night’s hunt. The town none the wiser about her making a feast out of the local pets. Thanks to her Martian technology she could glamour herself into any form she wished which prevented her from ever getting caught.
At the moment, however, she was pushing back her annoyance at a certain Reba sharing her name. Luckily for the country singer, Reba Reptillia, Queen of Mars was more focused on eating than claiming revenge.
Reba made her way to the closet and pulled out one of her many camoflauge devices. She slid a sterling silver necklace with a comically large turquoise gem at the center. With a few twists of the stone, Reba went from her regular dilophosaurus features to a kindly old woman vaguely resembling Elizabeth the Second.
With a jaunty whistle, the lone Martian made her way downtown to grab her morning coffee before the weekly Alien Support Group. Today happened to be Reba’s turn to pick up the coffee and donuts for the group, a task she did so with great care. Shmebulon had nine different stomachs–four of which required Turquoisedifferent types of donuts, and the other five enjoyed different varieties of tea, Norvinalexa, on the other hand, only wanted black coffee gently flavoured with the tears of an orphan, and Ooblek was just an amorphous blob so no one really knew what he craved.
Reba entered the Tim Horton’s, shuffling awkwardly to the counter. Her hands were close to her chest like a mantis’ before they strike their prey.
“Hi, what can I get for you?” asked a young girl with a ponytail pulled ever so slightly too tight.
“I would like, five small assorted teas, a medium black coffee, a medium hazelnut iced coffee with cream, a dozen donuts of any kind, and a twenty pack of Timbits.” Reba’s eyes stared in two different directions, one at the cashier and the other down at the pin pad. The girl instructed Reba to insert her card while trying to decide which orb to make eye contact with. She chose correctly.
“Thank you, and your order will be right up!”
Reba’s pin pad eye re-centered onto the girl and she gave a content nod, “Give me one second dearie! I have a hard candy somewhere in here.”
“Oh. You really don’t have to do that.”
“Of course, of course I do! You’re such a sweet girl, and when the reptiles take over you shall be made ruler of any sector you wish,” With that, Reba fished out a rather old looking hard candy from an oddly shaped handbag and gave it to the confused cashier. Who, in stunned silence looked at the candy and then back to the old lizard waddling to the pick up lane.