Angels

                                        
TW: Violence.  I'm just in a strange headspace this week.


                                                          
    
Tara listens to the intense whispers of those around her.
"Please disperse," yells a Marine in front of her, "this is just a crash landing of a test ship."
The crowd ignores him and continues to push and surge against the ramshackle barricade that the military has hastily erected when the ship crashed.
It took only minutes for the first wave of pilgrims to arrive at the burning neon wreckage.  Tara was among them.  She lived a block away from the crash site and was eating dinner when the shockwave drew her eye to the kitchen window just in time to see fire streak the sky.  She had prayed every night for something like this to happen during her lifetime.  She prayed that something would take her away from this dreadful world forever.
The crowd, breathing as a single entity, waits for something to happen.  They wait for someone, anything, to emerge from the wreckage.  Tara keeps clawing her way through the chaos until she is belly up to the bright orange barricade.  She peaks around the broad shoulders of the heavily armed military men.
"They were waiting for me," she thinks as a door cuts away from the brightly lit saucer.
 Tara holds her breathe with the crowd and shot up a quick prayer to whoever was listening that a Russian didn't stumble out of the blaze.
She let out a sigh of relief and horror as a deeply alien figure emerges. 
This creature is nothing like the little green men or Lovecraftian strangeness she imagined when she was young.  This creature is so much worse.
'The eyes,' Tara thinks.  All around her people groan.  The soldiers fall to their knees.  Tara's feet move forward in spite of her fear and revolution that seeps through her.
"We have heard your prayers," yells a voice in her head, "we are here to answer them."  
Tara doesn't notice as her nose starts to bleed.
'Angels,' she thinks, as the chant of "Angels" rises up behind her, 'these are old testament angels before man made them human and beautiful.'
She scampers toward them, drinking in the millions of eyes and limbs and feathers that combined to create something for more divine than any artist's graven image. 
Tara feels the love that they radiate.  Pure consuming love.  They were everything that God had promised his creation.  Tara runs to them, limbs akimbo as she falls before them.
The hot acid of their embrace brings tears of joy to her eyes as she burns.






Comments

  1. InnatejamesJuly 16, 2020 at 9:45 AM

    Tara’s Let It All Burn attitude in this is relatable to me. You wrote her passion well, and the inclusion of the crowd awaiting what would come out of the ship was a good way to show that Tara’s beliefs were unusual in that world. The crowd waiting for something to happen edges Third Person Omniscient. There were a few times past tense was used when I don’t think it should have been (shot up, She let out...), but those were probably typos. I like how you interpreted the woman in the photos look as knowing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JenJuly 16, 2020 at 4:21 PM

    Phrases like "ramshackle barricade" and "burning neon wreckage" illustrated the scene well for me. The aliens are gruesome and intriguing. I wanted a bit more info to know exactly what happened, did they speak telepathically? Are they going to kill everyone?

    ReplyDelete
  3. write my fireJuly 16, 2020 at 6:11 PM

    The joke about the Russian made me laugh. Your prose has good motion, it feels like she is both pushing and being pulled towards the ship.

    ReplyDelete

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