On a blustery winter’s night the Earth was invaded by space aliens. No one knew how or why they arrived, but they wasted no time rolling their gargantuan amorphous bodies over towns and buildings and humans.
People far enough away watched with hands on hips, curious about who exactly had come. Some postulated the cosmic amoebas had flown from a neighboring galaxy, but physicists debunked that theory. Space, they claimed, was uninhabitable, and no living being could survive a light-years’-long journey. A new theory formed: God commanded these creatures to ascend from hell as punishment for mankind. And so, while Christians and Muslims and everyone argued over whose version of hell they ascended from and whose God was punishing them, our formless foes easily engulfed entire continents.
One man sought to rescue his planet. Having dealt with aliens before this invasion, he was uninterested in the religious arguments bandied about. “No one can solve a problem by talking about the problem,” Woodstock Helmes was famous for saying, and it was with this sentiment that he turned to address a small team of rag-tag volunteers as pseudopod bodies blocked sunlight and the walls of his village began crumbling down.
(Written for a flash fiction collaboration: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/11/22/flash-fiction-challenge-200-words-at-a-time-part-one/)
People far enough away watched with hands on hips, curious about who exactly had come. Some postulated the cosmic amoebas had flown from a neighboring galaxy, but physicists debunked that theory. Space, they claimed, was uninhabitable, and no living being could survive a light-years’-long journey. A new theory formed: God commanded these creatures to ascend from hell as punishment for mankind. And so, while Christians and Muslims and everyone argued over whose version of hell they ascended from and whose God was punishing them, our formless foes easily engulfed entire continents.
One man sought to rescue his planet. Having dealt with aliens before this invasion, he was uninterested in the religious arguments bandied about. “No one can solve a problem by talking about the problem,” Woodstock Helmes was famous for saying, and it was with this sentiment that he turned to address a small team of rag-tag volunteers as pseudopod bodies blocked sunlight and the walls of his village began crumbling down.
(Written for a flash fiction collaboration: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2013/11/22/flash-fiction-challenge-200-words-at-a-time-part-one/)
RSS Feed
