“Beep beep”

A small spacecraft landed on my head today. Of course I was not aware of it immediately. As I walked down the street I felt a sort of sting, one of those that really bother to the point of making you stop whatever it is you are doing in order to reach it with your hands and do something as quickly as possible.

And that was precisely what I did. At first I thought it was a mosquito. But is just hurt a bit too much, which led me to conclude it had to be something else; a bee, probably.

This conclusion, as a matter of fact, took place in the very short time during which my left hand traversed the space between wherever it was and the point in my head where I had felt the sting. (Why does this matter?) So this made my arm decelerate abruptly and the hand reached the target much less strongly than it thought it would when it set off. But it really didn’t matter, perhaps because I hadn’t come fast enough to the conclusion that it was probably a bee; or even because my arm isn’t really well trained to perform the maneuver it was ordered to.

No, it didn’t matter: whatever it was I felt it was crushed right when my palm touched it. Not only did I feel it crushed, I felt it was different from what I expected. So different, in fact, that I took a bit longer than before to reach a new conclusion: it was actually not a bee, nor an insect, much less even organic at all, it felt like some kind of metal. “Aluminum foil, maybe” I thought of saying while I foresaw myself telling this story later. But that wasn’t even entirely true; as I approached this thing to my unbelieving eye in order to scrutinize it further, it were not them, but my ears which got ever more unbelieving: a very faint sound came from this thing, which, now so close to my eye, I perceived as what one would say was a little lump of baked potato oddly escaping its original aluminum foil wrap.

I don’t remember very well what ensued, but I’m pretty sure I heard a noise which reminded me of that made by screeching tires sometimes, but not often, when they go really high pitch. Still, the noise was faint. And was going even fainter as time passed and I stood there doing nothing.

By then, somehow, I was pretty sure of what was going on: a spacecraft the size of a rice bean, probably after traveling for longer than is worth mentioning, reached the Earth only to land exactly on my head; but, before it could do anything, I mercilessly crushed it to undistinguishable state. I immediately felt guilty (but, I have to acknowledge, not nearly as much as I should have been).

I still hadn’t the faintest idea what to do, so I did what anyone on those conditions would: closed my hand, taking care not to inflict more damage on the ship, and ran home as fast as I could. It is hard to explain as I think of this clearly now, but I thought then that, somehow, I’d be better equipped to help them if we went home.

What is even harder to explain is how I dropped it along the way without noticing and got home with nothing than more sweat on my face that it’s ever had in years and an empty hand. True story.

This very short story is part of a series of stories never before published (and, probably, unpublishable) simply because they were written, in a serial manner, by none other than me (who had never bothered to publish them).

rhwinter, April 27th, 2007
Filed under: art, short

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