Harriet's homework - a short story for M

Harriet had taken a human name when her race had discovered that humans didn't have enough tentacles to be able to speak properly.  It was a little awkward, because they'd clearly wanted very, very much to be able to communicate with the Qziflll'm.  Now it was all the rage, having a human name, and almost all of Harriet's friends had one.  Harriet had chosen hers because the first letter looked a little like the fronds on her favourite popstar's front suckers.

Of course, scientists had quickly worked out how to speak human: that was easy. Anybody could speak human: even babies were being taught it now.  The thing about humans was how many of them there were, which meant that there were loads to study.  Lots and lots of them, and more kept coming to visit.  How easy their language was had been one of the things that Harriet had carefully etched on her homework metal.  There were lots of questions you had to answer, and Harriet wanted to get a really good mark this time round.  The previous time, she'd got meteors, meteorites and asteroids all mixed up, and got told off by her teacher.  She frowned as she remembered it, and looked back at the questions.

"How many tentacles do humans have?"  An easy one: 4, with 5 sub-tentacles each, but they weren't very useful for talking.

"What's your favourite type of human, and why?"  That was more difficult, and she had to think quite hard about it.  In the end, she wrote "the bald ones, because I like the way the blue sunlight bounces off their heads."  She wondered about changing that answer, because it almost looked as if she thought that some humans had more than one head, like any normal species, but decided against it.  She had drawn a really good picture of one at the top of the page, and had been careful only to give it one.  She'd given it hair as well, because it was fun to draw, but she hoped her teacher might give her extra marks for knowing that some of them didn't have any.

"Can humans fly?" Ah, she knew this one.  The answer was "not without machines," and had been discovered by scientists after several rather unfortunate incidents which had also provided the information that humans couldn't bounce.  Things had been awkward for a while after that between the races, but they seemed to have come to some sort of arrangement since.

The last question was: "Describe how you feel about humans in one word."  Now, that was difficult, even given how long some words were in proper language, using all your 13 tentacles, face scrunches and farts.  Harriet sat for a while in thought, and then glanced to her left, at the little building where her humans lived.  She reached out a tentacle and picked one up, gently so as not to damage it.  It squirmed and wriggled, and was making little noises, so she put it on an outstretched palm so it could calm down.

It stood, its little eyes looked straight at her, while it frantically waved it top tentacles at her, failing miserably, it seemed to her, to tell her something in her own language.  She shrugged, raised it to her 3rd head, and popped it into her beak.  She chewed.  "Crunchy", she wrote.  That was it: "crunchy."  And with the last question answered, burped, wrapped up her homework and slithered out to play.