~ A Flash Fiction Piece. ~

               From afar the cosmos whispered warnings of the ego.

            Naive, the Great Eye dismissed it, for she journeyed through the darkness with her eight siblings, guided by her yellow captain. What harm could befall celestials?

            Indeed, a fall it was. Their travels carried them through a meteor shower. Many of her siblings ignored the insignificant motes – missiles dissolved into nothingness as they struck the eldest, the collector guided the debris into her orbiting rings. The smallest, ever mercurial in his movements, simply sidestepped them. The one on the periphery, the scout, gave the cloud a wide berth.

            The Great Eye missed out on their luck. One meteorite passed close to the Great Eye’s bosom kin – her moon – and veered towards her. The missile snuck into her atmosphere at just the right angle that it struck her great green eye.

            Bright red exploded in its impact, releasing thick clouds of dust. They spread across her entirety, blinding the beautiful green eye, obscuring her magnificent blue oceans.

            From that moment of agony, cracks blazed outwards, shattering the eye, opening up new avenues for her blue waters to seep. Her vision returned, and with it came the realization that an alien infestation had rooted deep, growing, and spreading both in the solids and the liquids of her surface. Tiny, imperceptible individually, they were legion – she could feel them scurrying.

            She shuddered and wept great storms. But the infestation had grown clever. Her waves and volcanoes, deserts and frozen lands could not stamp out the threat. Calling on aid from her moon, she hoped to pull at them from afar. To no avail. Her partner’s influence paled even in her shadow’s strength.

            Though her moon was directly ineffectual, she cajoled aid from the siblings – a second meteor hurled from the blue one. This thundered into the Great Eye, striking her with intense pain. Her broken eye was blinded long, freezing the green lands and blue waters alike.

            Eventually, the pain subsided. Healing rains fell, banishing the ice. She gazed ahead, towards the darkness of her cosmic journey. She was safe.

            She was wrong.

            The infestation awoke again. This time fueled by ego. From a tiny shelter in a northern section of her firmament arose an equation. With this, the aliens concocted the means to her end.

            The gnats burrowed – first gently, then with vigor. Welts the size of mountains oozed and seeped, fragments of her crust corrupted from perfection into flaky compounds stabbed into her. The blue beauty of her waters browned with murk and death. The drilling mites ripped through her crust, puncturing her mantle. Great rivulets of plume exploded out, cracking across both land and sea. Her noiseless scream horrified her siblings.

            They could only watch from their orbits as she wept – red lava, invisible gases, and substances of her very life. Her once-great eye saw nothing now, for it had become blinded forever by storms and darkness, radiation, and silt. Surely she had seen the end of the infestation, had she not?

            But no… this tenacious breed rejected defeat. They erected their nests deep inside her, drilling and gouging away precious parts of her, corrupting what remained. Until there, in the core, at last she felt the tapping, mining even her soul from its protective confines – nothing sacred, nothing safe.

            She comes to herself, horrified by the threat sleeping in the asteroid.

            Was it a premonition? Was she destined to experience this?

            She is still trembling from the meteorite’s crash landing in her eye, her ground rippling like her waters. She feels it deep in her core. Her belly roils and gurgles. The firmament yearns to heave, to vomit its discomfort outward, but this will shatter the eye. She will refuse it – the vision showed her that it was the cracking of her eye that woke the aliens.

            She will overcome. So long as her eye withstands, she is safe. So long as it remains a singularity, she will be fine.

            She will.

            Crack!

~~~~~

I want to thank a number of people for helping with this. To Dennis W Doty, I thank for the prompt: “Horror. An isolated cabin or lodge in the northern states or Canada. A meteorite.” I’m always looking for more! Feel free to drop one in the Fiction Writing Facebook page! To my Writer’s Group: Kevin King, Rosaline P, Matthew Jones, Shana Hadi, many many thanks for giving it the time, and read-through. You’re amazing! Special thanks to Kevin King, who took time out of a busy schedule to help me get this up to speed for release today. If you enjoy flash fiction, check out kevinkingauthor.com, I can’t punctuate how helpful his mastery of this craft has helped with this. Image by Brian Goff.

Playlist: Phish – Tube, Goose – Earthling and Alien, David Bowie – Space Oddity, Marvin Gaye – Mercy Mercy Me, Tracy Chapman – The Rape of the World, Michael Jackson – Earth Song.

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