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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.

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