I was out walking around the neighborhood, enjoying the sun with the kiddo today and completely forgot to post. The streak has been broken! Oh well. Back to it, I suppose. It was bound to happen eventually.
I’m going to take a nap, but I will leave you with this piece of writing of mine that I enjoy. It may or may not make it into the thing I’m working on at the moment.
I’ve always like the idea of an alien crash landing and getting adopted by a pack of coyotes. Here’s how that thread would start out:
It’s an empty desert, full of life. Land so flat you begin to notice subtle inclines in the road, the wheels you bought at Discount rattling as you drive the needle up past eighty, feeling a bit drunk on the night time, drunk enough to convince yourself that odometers are pseudoscience. Out here there are telescopes taking pictures of Jupiter and three trailer communes of doomsday soothsayers drinking Natty Light around a campfire. Pools of light with deep divers scavenging two dollar bags of chips, taking showers with flip flops wrapped in tinfoil, the feeble oases of asphalt loaded with three ton cylinders of natural gas, their drivers watching Netflix in their mesh cab hammocks, wondering what their kids are up to, or maybe even their wives. Further out into the flatland where promises of Mexico meet the rules of America. Out there we have rattlesnakes and roadrunners, cacti and ugly bush, a sky so open you can see the weak stars. A bit further out, a pack of coyotes sniffs at the dirt.
They lift their heads to see the streaking across the sky, the flying saucer come to hard fought rest in a caldera two clicks east. Looking for some kind of order, they turn to the alpha, new to the position but he can’t crack, and he indicates that they should head in that direction. Could be food, yeah?
So they go, the whole eight of them, half suffering from tapeworm brought on from eating a batch of bad chicken they’d found in the purse of a dead immigrant. They wonder about their children, long dead, they wonder about the growling in their bellies between the long thick bodies of the worms, they know that fire brings nourishment, and there’s a bright one on the horizon, blue and green and orange, and they can smell the dead. It smells enough like human to be edible.
What they find is at first disappointing: a tangle of metal, a flying saucer from Alpha Centauri, shiny even in the starlight, like something that has lived forever at the depths of the sea. It is completely fucked, shot down by a missile birthed from the ground in Los Alamos, thought to be a Chinese drone, but other. From the fire a silhouette emerges: skinny body/big head/long fingers. The coyotes are cautious. They back off. The alien falls to its knees, a classic grey, those big bug eyes the kind that can make a man go weak in the knees. The coyotes breathe in the burning bush. The alien coughs up black blood.
It collapses and the coyotes surround it. The alpha sniffs it twice and indicates that this one should live. The pack responds. They descend on the wreck and begin to eat the dead.
Til next time!
Broken River Blog 