Thunder In The Distance

Thunder in the distance

Rain falls down from leaded skies between colossal trees, thick entangled branches. Wet moss and dripping, vibrantly green clover sways in slight breezes that whisper here, here, here. Slick muddy earth richly black against red-brown bark and vivid greenery. My three-toed talons sink into the softly sucking, cool mud with infinite balance. My steps are swift and elegant, naturally quick in organic movement.

Disembodied symphonies fill my sensitive hearing. Footsteps miles away from a Leviathan, ten thousand years old and nearly a thousand feet long, moving like a living mountain. I can hear the breeze moving through the rooted trees upon its ancient back. I can hear migratory herds hooting and calling, singing with millennia aged durges about the sky, about important rivers, about familiar nesting sites.

I am quiet. My vocalizations resound like thunder. Felt in the chest and in the bones of friend or foe alike. But for now, I am quiet. My jaws open and close, sampling the air, obsidian railroad-spike-teeth glistening with condensation wetness.

Somewhere far away, thunder rumbles.

Dinosaurs on the Brain

I have dinosaurs on the brain. That’s a bit silly, isn’t it? But I swear: I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel their breath, their movement when they pass by. I can hear their rumbling and chirping and crying and howling, feel their knightly armor or exotic feathery-tuft. I can sense their passage; swift and quick or slow and graceful.

At the library, on the way home, at the park, at the restaurant: I have dinosaurs on the brain. I can feel things like the unseen breeze. I watch them amble down packed highways, or stride along crowded beaches. Softball games dont phase them, cookouts neither. Graduations are just another boring shindig for the dinosaurs on their way. Hooting movie theaters dont scare them away either, not one bit.

So here I sit on my front porch under the summer night sky, beneath stars the dinosaurs wouldn’t recognize, in a neighborhood crowded with houses and metal stumps we funnily call cars. The dinosaurs don’t mind. Not at all. Their never-ending August goes on, gorgeous and unreachable, primeval paradise in all its savage, strange, stinging reality.

I’ve dinosaurs on the brain. Really, it’s true.

Night of the Metal Trees

I am lost.

I stand, unsure, afraid. Unfamiliar light and painful sounds and rushing motion blare at me with an unnatural malice.

I turn and turn and turn, slashing with claws and snapping jaws, quills raised, iron feathers shivering.

Where am I?

My vastness dwarfs such tiny glassy-metal trees, but I am fearful, and step uncomfortably, slipping, careening into painful metallic thorns. My calls do not bring familiarity, my connection to the Earth severed and dull.

Is this Uhan, the Bleak Underworld? Or something else..?

I scramble, limping, howling.

Running.

Beneath

I never thought about what Aunt Lily did in her basement, or why she went down their so often. You’d be surprised what you don’t notice when you’re young and there’s a big sprawling tv screen clear as any window and you’re up in the countryside with ponds to splash in, woods to play in. You don’t notice when the adult your with—especially someone as lovely and kind and fun as Aunt Lily—disappears for several hours at time. You just don’t notice.

Then I got a little older. While now I had a phone, and a game system I could carry in my backpack, I started to get a little.. bored. The pond seemed dinky and tiny. The woods were hot, filled with too many bugs too eager to nip and bite.

And I started to notice Aunt Lily disappearing. I noticed how bare her lovely country home seemed. Few pictures or artworks, just a bit furniture.. It was like Aunt Lily didn’t really do much other than spend time in her basement. And by the time she finished it was only an hour of tv or so with me before she was snoring away.

It’d be always been a kind of unspoken rule between us to not go into the basement. I wasn’t a fussy kid, and didn’t break rules: so why would I just barge down there? Aunt Lily was obviously busy on something, so by right could I go on and barge in, disrupt her? As a kid, the thought seemed impossibly rude, nearly sacrilegious.

Now, things seemed different. I noticed how Aunt Lily had numerous solar panels on the roof and even three churning turbines like odd, white trees on the hillside. I noticed how sometimes the power seemed to fluctuate, oddly. I noticed how far away Lily lived from everything, even in the country; easily a four hour drive, two of which seemed only dirt roads deep in redwood country..

By the time I was eighteen and spending a last summer there before college; I couldn’t contain my curiosity.

What the fuck was Aunt Lily doing down there?

One night she went to bed. Tired as always after our of tv and some supper, she kissed my cheek and ruffled my hair before climbing the steps. As soon as I heard her door close my heart began to race. My skin tingled. Thoughts raced. I waited fifteen, twenty minutes. Just to be sure.

The basement door was colossal, and heavy. Metal like something out of a laboratory or security room, not a dainty little wood entrance. The stairs went down into a hallway, and onward.

To where?

I descended. Heart thrumming with intensity. The hallway seemed to go on for moments, smoothly carved black rock with soft but discernible lights carved at equal distance. I noticed how strangely tall the ceiling was, how wide the walls were from another. Almost like a hospital..?

I waked for five, ten minutes. It seemed longer.

The room was large. Larger than the entire house above it, easily twice or double that, maybe more. Dark electric blue-black light played over the slick, sterile surfaces. Bulbous machines seemed to line the walls in rows, like twisted glassy-synthetic plants from some otherworldly oasis. Scientifc instruments and mechanisms sprawled along the tables and islands, files in open piles.

What the fuck was she doing down here?

I noticed the hatchery.

A singular, bowl-shaped placement the width and breadth of a dinner table covered by a glass top. Within was a bedding of grass or moss, and a thin fog seemed to trail within.

There were eggs. Easily twenty, thirty eggs. Maybe more. The smallest were seemingly normal chicken-sized eggs, ovular and grey. Then.. there were the others. Eggs thin and lengthy, with leathery coatings, which seemed to softly breathe. Round, ball-shaped eggs with dark splotched coverings in bizarre patterns. Skinny almost tubular eggs tinted a rich, almost creepy bluish purple.

A singular camera or watching device dangled from the glass dome, gently swiveling, ever observant.

Was Aunt Lily some kind of farmer..? A really weird, underground chicken breeder?

When my hand touched the cool glass, a digital printout sprang to life under my fingertips, outlining the egg in a soft virtual outline. Temperature readings, internal diagnostics, likelihood of hatching within a certain timeframe..

But what caught my attention were the species names.

Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Triceratops Horridus.

Allosaurus Fragilis.

They were dinosaurs. And in that moment, I understood.

Hate of the Fossil God

I am furious.

My hide is black as night, carved with scales like iron and feathers like blades, glowing in negative illumination from ten thousand fires.

My talons are scythes, clawing at the angry metallic insects that dare oppose my movement; petulant fireflies that barely sting. Petty creatures I swat into oblivion or swallow by my cavernous lungs.

My tail crumbles metropolises like an earthquake topples termite mounds: shimmering glassy cascades that shatter into dust and cataclysm. Such childish things, so fucking minuscule!

My jaws scream in hatred, yawn open forever, fangs that could puncture the greatest of steels brought to bear. My scream is supersonic, hateful down to its core, so strong as to make a million tiny naked apes deaf in seconds. Crimson lightning howls from my fossilized throat.

Ships dangle upon my thorny quills, skyscrapers crushed within my clawing fingers, armies pulverized beneath my steps.

This was my world once. Primordial and free of a crawling infestation. Trees that towered a mile into endlessly cloudy, storming thunderheads. Lifeforms ancient and graceful that dwarfed even me..

Gone.

I have slept too long.

Did these infernal meddlers destroy my precious Garden? Did they ruin all I held dear..?

I am furious.

I will make them pay.

Far and Away, Silence Stretches Forever

The forest is empty, and quiet. Sketched black tree trunks are empty, hollow. Their scorched carcasses painfully thin in the half light. Pale white ash swirls gently in the whispering wind. Silence reverberates in hallowed tones.

The rivers run clear and still as glass. Empty of life. Dark rocks, smoothed pebbles without purpose or design.

Quiet bones litter the forest floor. Shimmering antlers that once glowed like gold. Obsidian dark feathers without color that once shined like flaring midnight. Discarded pelts once as smooth as silk, rich as regal banners.

Nothing remains. Far and away, yawning silence stretches forever.