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

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monsters in the Age of Men

 I saw a woman in the grocery store.  I saw her true shape, beneath raven black hair and pale eyes. She bore great wings, wings that carried endless plains across them and above roared storms, bruised clouds cracking and howling. Lightning split the sky into so many shattered pieces. She stared back at me, surrounded by the tiny people who so long ago had feared and worshipped darkening skies, crashing crescendoes.  We found each other out in the night, behind the building where trees and grass and vines grew untamed like in memories of vanished wilderness. I felt electricity when our lips met, felt spiking painful potential when I caressed her bronzed skin. In my ear I heard thrumming and pounding, shrieking wind. Building and building up into the sky, strong enough to crack mountains and scatter the stars.  I gave her the sea, brine and crushing depths between every kiss. I unfurled myself beneath massive wings, sprawling and armored and impossible, flashing colors...
Post a Comment
Read more

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

Traitors Folly

 Traitors Folly Dad always dragged us to roadside attractions. But, while I’ve forgotten the tallest stack of butter and the fattest cow and a million other tidbits of oddness, I haven’t  forgotten the Monument to Insurrection.  I don’t think I ever will.  Whatever internet searches might have you believe, there are roadside attractions in the East Coast, they’re real common. Of course, I can’t tell you exactly where we were— no one can seem to remember, or doesn’t want to remember. Just that, heading back from relatives in Philadelphia and about five more hours from home, dad was excitedly pulling us into some lot. It was morning, maybe seven or eight, and no one was really there.  “All the better!”, dad practically cheered, and we were out, stretching legs or twisting backs. Dad went on ahead, of course, but not far. I could see him, standing in the shadow of what must’ve been our reason for stopping: a bronze statue of a man, maybe thirty or so feet tall....
Post a Comment
Read more