Skip to main content

Forteana

 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 green men, and tall blonde angels, furry dwarves sprinkled between the giants and mighty robots. Occupants disembarked of numerous feverish types, bearing ray guns and bad poetry and prophecy worse than any runaway weatherman. Big, hairy feet stopped across backwoods roads to scare tangled lovers. Bug-eyed critters chirped to policemen, stole secretary pens. The UFOnauts were everywhere and anywhere, nuisance and pestilence all, flashy as childish daydreams in all their assortments of color, uniform, and design. 


And all the while, in silent places from ages past, crept things unseen. While the disks shimmied over Beijing and buzzed New York, ancient stone circles were vibrant with visitors once again. As Washington blared in furious alarm and Moscow tailed rides mounted on screaming pteranodons, the old forests groaned and flexed, growing wild and shadowy again. Mothmen roosted under rusty silver bridges, phones hissed and cracked and moaned, assailed by electronic haunting, and all the while the lakes grew chilly, dim, and dark as huge things sailed beneath their glass-still surfaces. 


The saucers were here to stay. Or so we thought, gnashing our teeth at unfriendly lights in clear skies. But in truth, the monsters had always been with us. And always would be.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Time Cadillac

  ”Please keep all hands and in feet inside the ride at all times! Please do not—“ Conrad and Lucy didn’t pay any attention. The Time Cadillac ride always started the same way. And they were too busy all over each other, submerged as deep in youthful needs as the Cadillac was submerged in deep time.  Conrad was already kissing Lucy again, breathless and with too much saliva as the slick, black car slowly rolled over a desolate landscape that would’ve fit Hell or the airless Moon than Earth. Lucy ran her hands through her boyfriends short, combed brown hair, feeling the car lurch a little. Far away came lightning flashing beneath cataclysmic looking clouds all purple, bruised, and furious looking. She glimpsed jagged landscape burbling,  saw the eerie monoliths of volcanic happenstance which poured streamers of superheated gases into impossibly thin air. For a full ten minutes they rode over different variations: fire, ice, black blistering sands— even a sea bottom, flat a...

Necropolis

 It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space. There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.  And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.  Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.  It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.  The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridge...

Vanguard of the Nest

 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...