In a World Reading Club story, young Kuroda walks home from school into a fenced court where a green merman shoots a woman named Andromeda.
By UniquilibriuM, LLC
Published November 6, 2026
AI illustration
Kuroda was a young boy in elementary school in Queens, New York, a student at P.S. 45, when it happened on his walk home. The encounter took place inside an enclosure that looked like a basketball court. High chain-link fences closed it in, but there were no markings on the ground and no baskets anywhere.
A woman stood to his left, the two of them facing each other. She was blond and pale, with green eyes, and scantily clad like Wonder Woman or an Amazonian warrior: gold bracelets around her arms, gold gauntlets, perhaps a small tiara. She did not speak. She sent him a single word, telepathically: Andromeda. He took it for her name, though she might have been referring to the galaxy.
No sooner had the word reached him than a craft came down out of the sky, from the left of where she stood. It was nearly the same green as the figure inside it and inlaid with gold. That figure was green and reptilian, a merman like the ones in the He-Man cartoons, dressed much like the woman, with gold adornments of his own. He came down and shot her. The blast struck her in the sternum and left a burn hole in her chest.
Then Kuroda was in his bed. He had been on the walk home from school; he woke up in his own bedroom.
The scene is the first encounter in a fictional universe that author Hakeem Ali-Bocas Alexander is building for his World Reading Club website, part of what he calls an integrated universe of stories. He describes three characters: the boy, the woman and the merman. “It was just a very interesting dynamic of these two creatures encountering this boy on his way home from school,” he said.
It was just a very interesting dynamic of these two creatures encountering this boy on his way home from school
Hakeem Ali-Bocas Alexander
What stayed with the boy who woke in his bed was the wish to go back inside that fenced court and help her. He fantasized that he could save her life. It never happened.
