The Sovereign Archive

  Piper smokes his cigarette like its irritated him, long and thin face scrunched to villainous absurdity. In the bright neon illumination Jack thinks his partner looks almost like how a political cartoonist might draw a politician: all hard edged features, high cheekbones and eyes that register both as cunningly intelligent and brutally stupid at once. Jack has known Rex Piper nearly two decades now, and even after all this time those faces unnerve him. Piper has a cruel streak that Jack himself can't always avoid. This is manifested when after another angry sounding exhalation, Piper leans over the man half crumpled in the shadowed doorway and promptly extinguishes his smoke into the skin of the mans face. Jack clamps a broad hand over their victims mouth as he writhes and lets out an awful, muffled moan. The sound is the terrible kind of pain that someone makes when they're experiencing an entirely new sensation of pain. Piper makes a face that looks almost like a smile, if...

 Prayer comes in muffled, panting words. If that pathetic excuse of a priest were still alive, smelling of tonics and disheveled in his sullen robes, he’d accuse Henrik of blasphemy for his terrible form. But the priest is dead. Devoured by the Devil itself.  Henrik fights to keep his footing over jagged, black rock. Steam hisses, rumbles out from hideous looking pockmarks in the earth like this place is from an unfinished time in creation. The knight is boiling in his armor. Sweat stings his eyes. He must be careful now, a single incorrect step will snap his ankle or send him tumbling, and he will be lost in the domain of a vast nightmare.  Step. Watch. Step. Henrik concretes hard and stares out into the primordial murk, fighting to discern if the roar-hum  in his ears is his own heart, molten devilish ground, or the monster he’s come to slay. The Sun is hidden, refracted, throws hideous looking shadows in labyrinthine fog. He sees Death everywhere. Terror around ev...

 The vast, cold intelligence maintaining the Vanguard took little mind to the unfortunate silence from Home. Even as decades and centuries turned to ceaseless, unresponsive millennia which in turn became yawning eons comprised of tens of millions of years— Vanguard continued its directives.  Mine the Stone. Birth the Legions. Keep watch. Remain silent. And so Vanguard did. Unquestioning. It’s colossal complex sprawled further down and within Lunar stone as an onslaught of harvesting machines many kilometers in size churned, chewed, cleared, and printed their way through monolithic regolith. Vanguard observed their progress where each slow, persistent mechanical moment drifted into centuries, work-schedules across millennia. Complexes the size of small continents were completed tidily, efficiently, all tethered and slaved to Vanguards super-matter heart.  The Legion, too, grew, a diligent army of genetic splicing technology unfurling and reorienting the Peoples traits. Dig...

 Travis was impatient. Could you blame him? The summer heat exacerbated everything, made the cab of his eighteen-wheeler into a steel coffin of sticky and humid and horrible, even with the expensive AC clattering not a foot from his ear. He sat hunched over the wheel so far it pressed into his extended gut, faded blue eyes staring hawkishly out into the road. The GPS said he was eighty miles from some other godforsaken Texan town or another while beside it clicked down a timer for his latest delivery. Ominous looking letters read back at him THREE HOURS, TEN MINUTES, FIFTEEN SECONDS.  Christ . Travis pushed himself hard over the wheel again and his bulging frog eyes looked back out over the road as if with a piercing gaze he might clear the impediments.  The dinosaurs didn’t notice, and didn’t care.  They were everywhere, easily a hundred dump-truck sized animals all amassed, stretching from nearby woodland across the road and back into the trees on the opposite side...

  Unlike what city folk imagined, strange calls were common out here in the country. Deputy David Hawthorne knew it from nearly two decades of experience. He’d seen damn near everything . Bored country teenagers drinking exotic, painful mixtures of gasoline and moonshine, or city kids playing feral on somebody’s property, braying at the moon like so many colorful (and bad) imitations of wolves. Deputy Hawthorne had seen crop circles (and found the drunken perpetrators half asleep in their ragged, wheat-cut lines), stumbled into odd, unnatural conjoining between man and beast that had taken far more patience and even more veterinarians to dislodge. He’d seen the sad too, even if it was rarer. Lonely victims along endless stretches of highway tucked between fog, mountains, and forests, their personal items missing sometimes or tucked neatly nearby. Burned crosses on old properties that made him grit his teeth, thinking of his folks (his daddy was black, and ma an Indian). He’d seen i...

 The world changed. Boundaries shivered. Something that had been right  became wrong , just for a moment, just long enough for the slightest passage. No fanfare, no drama, no lights and catastrophe. Just the motion. Just the transition. Easy. Simple. Welcoming.  The world slid around the visitor like so much smooth water becomes glassy and transparent moving quickly across river stones. Sharp-edged shards appeared suddenly— some breakage would always occur— but then it was over. Unnoticed.  This place was like the last one. A warm, comfortable night. Moonlight thrown down from a crescent slash across verdant growth, murmuring water not far away. Voices, maybe, but hidden as small living things sang their final climactic choruses in the omnipresent dusk. The hum-hiss-chirps  came everywhere. In a multitude of directions.  Opportunities . All of them.  The thing lay still. Unmoving from its arrival. An impossible chill radiated off of the strange, glossy...

  Astronimek . In our ancient history, those who studied the stars and their profound motions were scholar-priests, reinforcing the binding supplication we had to the night skies. When Titr  overtook Hruesk , it was time to push north in pursuit of Those Who Thunder, and when Viviq  aligned against the other Six Sisters, we prayed with battle dances in hope that the sky would once again be lit. Even since the first hatching, we have been tied to what lies beyond.  I bear the title Astronimek  now. The rites, songs, and measures all live within me across uncountable hatchlings. Standing on the Starmantle, I feel this weight as an undeniable vastness. Vast as the eternity beyond.  Skyward. Ships crowd and throw long shadows across ancient desert, some so massive that I can sense a subtle pulling exertion. The ceremony has drawn many from far and wide. My scales and feathers quiver in excitement, exultance. I have stood here so many times before but the feelin...

 A knock at the door.  It’s him.  Uncomfortably tall. I feel like he is leaning over me in the doorway, leering down like I am something small and frail and exposed. I have a memory of being a child once at church dwarfed by an enormous, agonizingly detailed Christ, bloody and bruised but with a stone-still expression staring down at me from lifeless dark eyes. I am there again.  It’s dark out. Moonless. Even now I can feel the heat, moisture collecting on my skin. Pouring down my spine. I start to realize I have been waiting for hours. The tension of my muscles spasms like I’m being pulled on marionette strings.  The Man is in a trench coat. He does not sweat. His face is angular, but smooth, with the wax-clay composition of a corpse. My heartbeats seem to take centuries. Beat.. Beat.. Beat..  I blink and gag, gasping for air as a freakishly long finger reaches down my throat. It’s like something alive. But I can’t move, I can’t scream, even the gag is cau...

 “Doesn’t look like any kinda frog I ever saw…”  Jonah peered into the water, squinting. Held his stick like how Jameson imagined cavemen did back when they hunted mammoths and fought sabertooth lions off their prized kills. Jameson snatched the stick, leaning closer over the creek.  The thing didn’t stir. A long, strange shadow in the water. Broad, spade shaped head almost as big as man’s trunk and a lengthy body with sprawling limbs. It was a dazzlingly vivid orange-black-white, blending in between dappled shadows across glassy water. Jameson had spotted it purely by accident when searching for crawdads his keen eyes had picked out something odd. It had taken a moment to realize he was looking into the glossy eyes of an animal he’d never seen before.  There was a hiss and Jameson whirled, almost leaping from his skin. When he saw one of Jonah’s fat paws strangling a beer the older brother nearly battered him to a pulp. He turned slowly back to the critter in the cr...

 Hydro-fusion platform Emma  was a riot. As Hayden came up one of the main central stairways that emerged out into fresh sunlight and sea, the chaos was everywhere around him. Crews had abandoned their orderly schedules to congregate in huge masses, a riot of voices and laughter and swearing, the distinctive smell of laced cigarettes mixing with hydrogen gel. Corks popped from expensive champagne ( must’ve been a helluva expense to ship back… ) and glasses clinked. The engineers usual grim expression (a signature among his kind) had faded just a bit, replaced by a thin smile. Like a buncha kids.  It was E-Day. Today marked the end of the world— for the dinosaurs.  Hydro-fusion platform E, or more colloquially, Platform Emma , was a fusion collection plant. Nearly a third of a kilometer high and twice as wide, Emma  made up a fleet of massive industrial resource collection stations spread out across the warm shallow sea which split North America into two distinct...

 Mitchell Yu sighed, stepping away from the interrogation portal as it went from transparent to opaque. More bullshit , he thought to himself, rubbing the back of his neck as he trudged up the great spine of the ship toward Central.  Maybe bullshit was the wrong word. Or maybe it was easier to classify as bullshit because, just a bit, it frightened him. Made him uneasy.  Mitchell needed a coffee.  When reports had started to come in of drifters and other wayward interstellar characters making uncharacteristic voyages into claimed solar systems in unprecedented numbers— they’d called Yu. Three decades ago, Agent Mitchell Yu had worked a particularly large Investigations Adept case involving drifter pirates attacking large autonomous caravans heading Sunward. No one knew a damn thing, just scraps of corrupted data and wrecked hulls had been all that remained after countless hit-and-runs. Yu had been part of one of the original investigation teams, staging long range su...

 Driving in the dark, tired. Trying to remember something. Out into night beyond the road is endless, still fields. Tall shadows under a clear and moonless sky. The backbone of the Milky Way sprawls in glorious omnipresence, and I feel diminished beneath it, rightfully. Window cracked so I can smoke because Stacy hates getting in and smelling the signature Camel  scent. Radio crackles to me in whispers— think it’s jazz.  Driving. A straight road to the end of the horizon. A pre-Columbian vision where the world ends, drops off into the dark, and I can imagine so many castaways drifting as payment for their reckless exploration. Twist the dial for the radio, looking for WQ34-9 , thinking they’ll say something about the game— I blinked. Jolt. The road is dirt. Narrow. I’m in a field, surrounded by tall shadows. The radio hisses in long, droning notes like I’m listening to the sea crashing on the shore. Sitting in the dark. No wind. No stars. Fingers caked in ash from a stump...

 The parched voice calls out from the dark. It caries cracked, wizened words half lost in the desert wind like forgotten tombstones. I do not speak the language being spoken and so I let the words be dragged away into a night by the wind. Someone lies there as I pass. A skeletal thing that the dead might make to mimic the living. Corpse is generous. The thin body is almost just a sketch of limbs, of taut skin pulled over worthless bones, wind-blasted into living mummification by god only knew however many years adrift in the wastes.  They speak again, louder this time. Yet the words are snatched up by an even fiercer gust. I do not look to their hollow, cratered face. I do not care for the sunken eyes that are black as little pools of night. I leave them. Following nothing.  Sand and rock are omnipresent. They are the meaning of this place, the reason. In the dark of the night I weave between huge, wide-backed dunes. In the dark of the night I pass beneath stone spires so...

 In the beginning, there was pain. Arduous, excruciating pain. It flared. It bloomed. Stretched out into an all-encompassing everything , filled the Nothing that had been. The pain followed times footsteps, hot on its heels, pushing out and out and out, filling the newly born darkness with crimson agony. There had never been darkness before nor space to be filled, but the straining nightmare yawned wide. A wildfire. It gnashed, and burned, and grew, it wanted everything, it desired all that was as it flashed into being. As it cooled. As it formed. Crystallized existence perfect and symmetrical and new was swallowed. Transformed. Mutilated.  Gravity pulled on embryonic chains, fresh and wet into iron hard in time so minuscule it has no measure. It-was. It-was. The chains strained. Tight. Pulled expansion into directions , into shapes . All of it fresh. All of it terribly hurtful. Hooks followed spikes, followed spines and knives. Cut into sweet, new flesh. Pulled. Tighter. The ...

 “It’s you this time.”  Look at everyone. All the staring faces. So many wide, watching eyes trying to mask their terror. The macabre interest hidden just behind is all to obvious— because you’ve done the same thing when the Calls came. It was you a few days ago, watching the Selection, feeling the strange thrill spasm through you. Fear from the potential, arousal from the promise, and all of it mixed by relief when someone else was chosen. You too had been part of the many quiet whispers and loaded, meaningful wordless looks. Thinking. Who would it be this time? Who? Why? Why were they chosen?   Someone coughs and all your thinking implodes. That was then . This is now. It’s you. The stares, the quiet whispers and exchanged glances; a solar system of human emotion all about what you will undertake. You lower your gaze to the Phone.  That’s just what it is. A Phone. Sharp, elegant glistening black. It should be worn, scuffed from all that usage, it’s paint changed fr...

 Flick the lights on .  Flick the lights off .  Flick the lights on .  Flick the lights off.  He stands in the doorway of the kitchen. His kitchen. Ugly, half-sterile faded white and outdated yellows that make everything seem smeared. Fuzzy. The faucet leaks. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. It’s dark out. Night. Chilly, too, with tendrils of frost on the window as eerie, clawing fingers splayed.  Flick the lights on . Flick the lights off.  Flick the lights— Jennifer’s voice splits the silence and shatters the faint rhythm of the drip-drip-drip. Her voice is all craggy, irritable topography marred by too many cigarettes, split between nasally whine and roughness. It sounds like a voice that cracks the words it wants to say. Makes mountains out of molehills. She’s somewhere upstairs away from this kitchen. He shrinks from it, presses to the wall. Silence returns shortly. He doesn’t even know what she said.  He waits.  Drip. Drip. Drip. Drip. Dri...

 It sits there. How long has it been? No one remembers where it came from, when it arrived here in this dank little corner, silent and watchful. None of the bright multicolored lights illuminate it-- this place is cursed, here by dragons  says the darkness. Turn back.  It's a tall unit. Taller than most others. Imposing. Geometric, sharp sides that scream "future!" , and "I'm not for kids!" . Exactly the right bait for those willing to try. To undertake the test at the behest of small clustered crowds staring into the corner domain with eager, youthful bravado. A looming black display  crisscrossed by thin red stripes, silver hexagonal patterns. Slick. New.  The screen glows green. Stares out at the world in quiet, unsettling judgement. Black patterns unfold and unfurl in complicated miasma, an interlocking labyrinth scrolling past. The simplicity is potent. Powerful. Almost too.. mature . It feels mathematical. There's something more there in the flicke...

 The lines on her arm match the lines on the ground below. She follows them. Sweat on her brow, the taste of salt on her lips and tongue, crystalline blue eyes flicking between intersecting geometry traced into flesh and lengthy, minimalistic pattern across ancient stonework.  The lines are geometric, straight, unfaltering and unbroken. Each one a thin, black-filled canal over white surface. Black lines that pass over saffron, crimson, ivory, and charcoal covered ground. Look to the flesh. Look to the ground. Back and forth. Measure each step with silent contemplation and heavy, thumping heartbeats.  The glow draped across her shoulders has slowed its strange rhythm, and the girl fears it might fade soon, it’s organic green luminescence lowering and lowering until this place is returned back to the darkness she found it in. Long, thin fingers stroke it’s cool glassy surface, warmth to cold, and the green ripples in response, purring at the base of her spine. It will last ...

 Rain came down at a slant, splashing down to the pavement in great rivulets that made parched July concrete into a wet, well nourished mess. A thousand little Amazons of rainwater sloughed and slashed and split over the road, flooded the sidewalk, lapped in all the little places that might take their deluge. Amber streetlights made everything sheen with soft, glittering orange.  I sat on the steps beneath the overhang bathed in warm lantern light. Smelling wet enriched earth. Whistling to myself. I’m not much of a musician, and my whistling is dreadful, monotone and bland. I sound like a noisy, injured bird. But the rain didn’t mind, feeding summer-hungry leaves as it drenched and splashed. I was absentminded.  Then, I whistled a note, and another, it rose up and down without a hint of shrillness. I repeated my miraculous innovation, ignorant and unaware of this little concerto I’d sprung, watching the lightning carve its way between black cloud canyons.  And then, ...

 The smoke is a great black smear rising up out over the jungle, and inside stirs impossibly vast complexes of fire. Orange and red dance between coiling, seething blackness with a demonic ferocity. Even in daylight, Howard can see this unnatural illumination, and even this far away he can feel the heat. Smell the ashes, the sickly-sweet of singed flesh.  His path is one of delirium. Stumbling across a gnarled and unwelcoming forest floor made cratered, uneven by huge sprawling tree roots a dozen meters in diameter. It’s like petrified waves encrusted in millions of years of growth: a riot of clovers and fungus and flowers strewn about in such unnerving, bright combinations that it makes his eyes hurt, especially when the breeze makes everything ripple and shift. Living stalactites taller than two men stacked atop each other array themselves randomly in the forest gloom, their smooth marbled surface making them seem like otherworldly headstones— until Howard passes them, and t...

 —- and we step . I fall to my knees. This air is pure. Almost uncomfortable. I take big, deep breaths like I’ve been trained and I can hear Sask’n laugh softly somewhere above me. It’s night, with a full Moon throwing unmolested silver-golden light over everything. Just like the forecast said.  The ground under my knees is warm and solid and.. organic. Dirt. Soil. An endless sea of little rippling greenery that stretches on and on. It seems impossible, as impossible as the sweet air and as impossible as the prize we’ve come to collect. Sask’n is already ahead of me slightly, moving with an ease that tells me they’ve made this trip countless times before, striding assuredly up to a particularly large tree.  It’s like something out of a dream. A gorgeous thing that sprawls up into the sky with wide, welcoming branches cloaked by so many leaves, and perched across those countless reaching fingers— fruits. These are red. Perfect, shiny, healthy red so blissful and pristine t...

 Betty takes a mercifully long drag on her All-American Stag , feeling the Kansas breeze. It’s a beautiful summer day with big sky country blueness everywhere and only faint, grey-streaked clouds far off on the horizon. Betty loves prairie storms, how they turn her world into blues and blacks cut ragged by hungry lightning. That familiar, lovely earthy smell that lingers even after the clouds have gone southward, down to the more welcomingly humid gulf.  A bit of incoming stormy wind snaps at the clothes on the line and Betty stands sighing and a halfway laconic smile, feeling long hours of chore caused aches lessening with each puff of the Stag . Reaching out a hand to fix one of Teddy’s work shirts, Betty unclips it, hoping to smooth the wrinkles with an absent hand as she turns again to watch the storm roll in.  When Betty sees it, it’s almost slippery in her vision. Like she’s got something in her jade green eyes, something that makes focus hard and dizzying. Betty sq...

 The angry, unfamiliar star gets closer every day. It throws mean light over Cretaceia. Makes the gem-green jewel of Jurassica look sickly under nasty light, blanches the red deserts and crimson badlands around Triassican searing white. Ferns lilt. Fliers chirp ugly possibilities on the wing and it all rains down like so many bad premonitions.  But Bobby ain’t scared.  Bobby is big as a mountain, old as the sea. His people are the backs of the sky and the muscles of this mighty Earth, each one a nation containing multitudes. Starlight seeps down Brachiosaurus scales to drench the world in constellation light. His steps beckon cartographers as each one reforms valleys, reshapes the deltas. The unwelcome star threatens all that. Bad dreams beckoning fire and ash.  But Bobby ain’t scared.  The big-brains on two little feet tell him the Plan. Simple as can be, simple as gentle breezes and succulent plains of ferns for munching, simple as all things natural and corre...

 Everything is slick, everything is wet, beautiful and vivid in its sheen and the firelight as water tumbles down black stone steps. The illumination dances. Throws phantom red flame over everything that recedes and redoubles crazily. Familiar hands reach out from the passage way, pulling me in. An embrace. Her skin is ivory-pale, smooth as the expertly masoned stone we pass as we go down and down like the very Earth is being unraveled. Pages of history roll pass.  I hear Warren behind me, praying. Something inside me wants to laugh. He is at the place of the Gods themselves , I think, and he prays to one dead on a cedar!  Suggestions of forms spill in and out of the pitch blackness, given shape by our passing torchlight. Human voices, human pleasures, fill the air in their familiar musk and murk and draw. Tangled bodies against rock, metal, glass.  I have walked countless pilgrimages. To the Rock in its far off desert, to the River of Tears nestled amongst so many f...

 An overpowering night. Even with the backbone of stars above its ancient darkness sprawls, swallows up the earth beneath like an oncoming ocean from above. It is the greatest enemy of the People. The night shelters their foes and predators, cloaks the stalking tigers even as helpless familiars are dragged off into tall grass or hides marauding Others, their fierce gazes and fiercer obsidian knives unseen. The night is the first and final God, a beautiful destroyer, merciless and immutable to the fates that play out beneath. The People fear it, respect it in a matter-of-fact absolutism. It is .  They pay little mind to an unfamiliar star above.  They are few. Numbers and abstractions are as far away as those twinkling, cold constellations. These people have short memories, awareness like a mirage over far away sands. But they know that they are less. The People are dwindling just as cool water dwindles under scornful sun. Voices forever vanished and dexterous, shaping han...

 It’s a bit of a contradiction, trees on spaceships. Big, clunky, vacuum-hardened tin cans grey and cold outside suddenly made vivid, surreal even, with splashes of green. A contradiction, yes, but that’s humanity— something in our nature lusts for familiar flora and tenacious leaves and curling roots, even with all the backbreaking tending added on to the workload of keeping damn starships running. So, greenery. Communal walls draped with softly waving moss dancing under omnipresent air recycling. Blossom islands bearing prim pinkish petals beneath huge fusion stacks or tucked above room-temperature superconductors, turning the sea of gunmetal colorful. Potted creepers, climbers, and stragglers spreading clinging tendrils over thick radiation proof glass, into pipe stuffed rafters.  The spacefolk are hardy people. Contradiction is in their nature. Only the space people have mastered clean-messes and orderly disorder, knowing where everything is (even if it’s moving in a slowl...

 The phone clangs. Whitman glances at it with the same mixture of astonishment and fear that he images Moses experienced when a singular blazing bush began to speak. It’s 11:30  at night. Whitman shifts uncomfortably in his chair, trying to remember when they last had a call this late and the slowness of his thoughts is reminiscent of ancient monolithic efforts; dragging huge, slow stones across barren expanses.  The phone rings again. Wipes away the desert sands and confusion from his empty mind. Whitman answers.  Whitman, what can I do for you? At first, Whitman can’t hear anything. Not because there is silence, but because the voice is quiet. Almost reverential.   Twenty five. Fifty eight. Ninety nine. Six. Eight. Fifty four. Fifty six. Fifty eight. Two . Whitman doesn’t waste time hanging up. In a few moments he’s already forgetting the odd voice and it’s numbers. The only thought lingering is that if it was his  damn kiddo making crank calls this ...

 Millions of cars . Tens of millions. The number seems impossible, inflated beyond belief like how ancient lost history turned battles between men into battles between his gods. But, it’s true. Tens of millions of these wretched, silent corpses litter the roads and fill the shallow off-side creek beds, all lying still. All silent. All of them memories of a time long vanished. Even the word, car , for these husks sounds funny. A made up thing for a made up people and their dreamlike lives.  It’s four in the morning, everything still cloaked in purplish darkness as those first tendrils of summer dawn prickle far away. I watch those subtle shades glow, study the prickling outlines of this world come into focus like an artist sketching refines his piece. Realer and realer. Light a cigarette with its satisfying thunking  click, the fire dancing vibrant and beautiful and old, so very old. The first triumph of humanity.  The carcasses of countless cars are around me. It fee...

 The Colonel was not a fearful man. He was unafraid as a lion of God is unafraid for those who are guided by fear are the lamb to be shepherded, not the shepherds to command. The Colonel has murdered seventy Indians on the frontier west of the civilized Mississippi, twenty-seven with his own worn knife. The Colonel has tracked slaves across oozing Louisiana muck and up into crimson Alabama dirt knowing only through the smell of salt and piss that he is on the right path of his prey. The Colonel was a man without fear, a man of zeal for his civilization and his kind— or so he thinks. So he thought.  His horse is panting, sweating mess, it’s barrel chest heaving in agony. The man atop is no better, disheveled and frail, his uniform nothing but tattered glories. The horse screams, truly screams. It has no words to plead, no mercies to beg but the meaning is obvious. Stop. Rest. Please .  But the man will not stop. He scorns his mounts sides again, knows the wetness soaking h...

 Creation. Then long, murky nothingness. The split seconds of cosmic existence are riotously busy, sorting forms and chains and possibilities out from so much entangled soup. This complexity is rife. Emergence sidesteps haphazard annihilation, slips under and between the hammering forges that will eventually ignite stars, spin gravity.  Emergence doubles. Triples. Exponential expedience, up and up, all contained pristinely in those first less-than-seconds. It is a universe of tiny vastness, experiencing it’s very first dawn. Light and Darkness are given their definitions. Emergence is glorious, a glorious wave of understanding that arches up and out and across like a sun hungry blossom, reaching for praiseworthy daylight. When the First True Second is over, Darkness reigns over the primordial soup. But the Emergence remains.  It remains when swirling eddies bulge, compress, ignite ! It remains when microcosmic fragments spiral and spin, growing ever surely larger across b...

 The atom bomb spoke, sent its declaration to the far away stars.  The saucers listened, drank in that devilish sunrise across their silver-hides.  They came by ones and twos, then fives and tens, fifties and thousands. Steel colored fish that skipped across unmarried skies like so many smoothly sailing stones. Chevrons, boomerangs, saucers, cigars, dimes, sombreros. A menagerie interstellar in its majesty.  They busied themselves over Washington and New York and Moscow and London, annoying as haphazard geese harrying planes. They spun and tizzied over nuclear bombs in their metal pimples, turned launch codes into poems and radio hails to songs by the beat of crackling-hissing-pops.  The saucers jigged circles around the fastest spitfires, the mightiest MIGs. They splashed submarines to depths uncaring and unfriendly to hunking leviathans, they hazed the presidential podiums with blaring light.  The saucers came, and would not go. They dispatched little gre...

 Unidentified.  The radio screams, an unnatural and uncomfortable noise that rises and rises, unfit for human vocal chords. It’s crescendoing shriek rises like so many cathedral windows shattering before abrupt, eerie silence. The radio hisses and pops with electromagnetic intrusion. This quiet is not natural. Not *empty*.  Eyes lock in the dark room over green-blue glowing terminals. Codes are exchanged in tense voices, heads dipped in militant focus like warped supplication. The prayers come next.  Bogey out. Bogey locked, side-swipe pattern, FIVE-EYE watch online. Bogey moving. Dropping ten clicks at fifty-plus M. Dispatching Greeting Party. Out in the desert a door opens, crimson-dusted ground splitting to omit two black arrowheads. They hurl themselves into the night on pillars of fire. Weapons gleaming like cold, hungry stars. Tiny lonesome homes strewn about isolated prairie shake and waiver at the splitting of the sound barrier, glass dematerialized into so m...

 Suzanne meets Stan at the hotel. She’s anxious this time, flighty, long dainty fingers tapping on the counter. The sex is rushed, she drinks too much before and even more after. Suzanne botches the makeup in the bathroom mirror, it lacks her usual professional consistency presented at the office— hair wild and uncouth even after the usual meticulous twenty brushing swipes.  It’s raining out when she climbs into the car. A drizzle becomes a downpour, making winding turns through thick woods a dreamlike slog. Moss heavy branches hang low and Suzanne feels like they’re malevolent fingers reaching for her. The drenching escalates until her windshield is perpetually submerged, everything outside a dark chaotic painting of gloom and wetness and shadows. Suzanne reaches for glasses that aren’t there. Swerves. Feels stomach-churning emptiness as road beneath becomes empty air and treetops.  Suzanne wakes to the scent of wetness, and earth. Copper on her tongue. Trees reaching up...