Skip to main content

Betty and the Storm

 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 squints. Scrunches her nose in the way that drives Teddy crazy. But it’s there. It’s real. 


A spaceship.  That’s what it is. A chrome cylinder big as the battleships she watched roll into harbor when her parents lived by the sea. Smooth. Featureless. Alien. It throws half the prairie into shadow, and the first lightning strikes inside those far away thunderheads become dramatic and vivid, wild snapping illuminations as if war is being fought far away. The ship drifts. Silent as a dream. Betty is entranced by the sight, unaware of how it makes her sway side to side. 


It is the most beautiful thing Betty has ever seen. A flawless metallic Angel larger than whole cities. When the first squadron of jets slams overhead, flying fast and low and angry, Betty falters to the ground from their outgoing pursuit. Their scream deafens, disorients; and in seconds they’ve become distant looking insects like angry clockwork wasps spoiling for a fight. A dozen more follow, then a dozen after that, more and more until Betty thinks it’s Armageddon, face half buried in the freshly cut grass. Her damaged ears barely register a shrill, ominous sine rising. 


She watches. Wide eyed. The spaceship drifts, unaware or uncaring of its assailants. The incoming storm is suddenly real, close enough that the foreign leviathan plunged headlong inside, illuminated by snarling electrical outbursts. In awe Betty watches the jets follow, caught between black storm and fierce sunshine. 


Seconds tick by. 


When Betty sees the storm blossom from the inside out with silent, billowing green fire, she knows a different storm altogether has come.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Moons that Hunters Must Walk

 The Five Moons claim the sky with blood and cosmic violence. Crimson-saffron light splashes across the huge storm clouds beneath their fierce visages, and turns the world eerie. Dreamlike. Haskes, the Moon of Windfall. Storms curl into whirlwind frenzies across the bone-colored face. It is the place of howling furies and hellish nightmares, where hunters must walk across the Stormchasm to stand strong against endless wind-- or be thrown into bottomless abyss. Ahnios, the Moon of Waves. Hunters know the Tidesong, a deep welling howl of sorrow and exultance, the song to be sung out when those worthy sailed out across tsunamis vast enough to sunder continents into crushing abyss. A moon of an ocean untamed, beautiful, and unforgiving. Khinq, the Moon of Dunes. Those beneath the chaotic sky know the Blood Passage as a time of fear and annihilation, a time when the Moon of Endless Sand has returned from distant void to once again reign among its brethren. Red glows like silent, crawlin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bobby and the Big Time Swing

 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...
Post a Comment
Read more

This Sovereign Place

 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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more