Skip to main content

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. Like firefly glows made rotten, morphed in the shape of nightmares. Those summer days vanish into the maw of wildfire glare. 


Hateful, no— hungry.    


You try and fail to scurry back just as the first lancing pain latches into you, a barbed horror burrowing deeper inside like it’s alive and probing. 


A shape in the light. 


Terrible. Beautiful. Inconceivable. 



Great wings—

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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...

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...

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 ...