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

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Tall Grass

 Evan sat in the car and looked out into the tall grass.  The dinosaurs were out there . Up and out over the prairie was a vision of ragnarok, all tall clouds black and bruised purple painted by pinkish sunlight as dusk became night. Shadows grew long in the grass and Evan strained looking into it all, eager for a sighting. Even without seeing a thing for nearly thirty minutes— the thrill was there, he could feel it, ancient mammalian fear mixing with modern excitement.  The dinosaurs were out there! Motion, and Evan as well as his fellows in the car instantly turned, making the Jeep rock slightly. It was one of the guides, a tall and lethe woman with dark skin— she was standing. Gazing out to the left off into swaying, pink-tinted grass. Everyone seemed to hold their breath.  She whistled then— or something like a whistle came out— long and thin sounding and oddly metallic. It echoed out into oncoming twilight.  Silence.  The guide looked back at everyone ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lepidopterophobia

You are dying.  Doesn’t matter how.  Feels so far away now— doesn’t it?  That’s it. Take it easy. Let that last breath slip away, like the warmth that comes in a killing cold. Gentle into a silent night. No more looking up at those crowding, concerned faces; a herd of pale, pained moons.  - - - - - ___________ A dark tunnel. Familiar, but not. You’re welcome all the same. Hands groping, grasping against glassy coolness, stumbling—  Light.  The most perfect, pure sunlight. Every idealized summer, every perfect candlelight and warming fire, all that condescend sun-sure dances across a lifetime of days. It’s mere existence is the most pristine invitation. In illumination alone it says come closer . If you had a heartbeat it would be racing.  Up. Up. Forward. Scuffing, almost tripping. Surging forward, hands outstretched.  You’re here.  The Light. The Light   It’s so— wrong . It’s purity vanished, replaced with an organic and oily sheen. Lik...
Post a Comment
Read more