Elisabeth R. Lewis 16 min read

It began with a dead cat on the fire escape and ended with a green monster in the incinerator chute, though it wouldn't be quite fair to blame it all on the shabby Tenderloin neighborhood.

Elisabeth R. Lewis's 1953 story spins a wry first-contact tale from the oddities of a rundown apartment house. Sharp, funny golden-age SF. Read it for a genial story where a young woman's unsavory building turns out to harbor a neighbor stranger than any she feared.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

16 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Tom Beecham