Roswell

 It’s a disk, and men with guns stand beneath its visage. 

It didn’t crash. There is no damage, nothing extraordinary but seamless black hull smooth and frigid as ice. It stands resolute on the prairie with all the mantle of a dark miracle. Perfect, and alien. 

The rocks protruding from its skin seem almost natural. Like they belong. But they are the signature of the disaster. 

It has materialized in a rock face, half buried and sunken into ancient strata like some strange fossil of a dead metal age. Wind whispers across the exposed surface and the breezes makes uncomfortable sounds across a surface that does not belong on this earth, that does not know our laws nor our molecules. 

The men with guns are afraid. Even with its unfortunate entombing the craft, the thing, is not dead. Unseen forces waiver at the edge of anxious minds. Pressing pinprick instigations between every thought, underneath every preconception. Some of them have already been stolen away, and the memories come back to them behind white eyed stares; the memories of quiet, unnatural rooms and bottomless black stares. The rooms that spoke forbidden, lost words and seeded silent purposes. 

Those untouched among the quietly cursed eliminate the infection amongst them precisely. Little illuminations in the night against alien material, immutable stone. The disk feels that severing connection like hot iron to skin and it would scream if it could, agonizing at the loss of potent destinies. 

But it can not scream. But it can open a door. And it does, making a shadowed entryway where before there had been only stone and steel. 

The men with guns prepare themselves. 

One by one, they step inside, into the dark.