Tales Of The Gurrier

It was the children who doomed us. They were our hope, our future and ultimately the end of us. It was an invasion. We spent a thousand generations watching the skies, but when they finally came it was from inner space; crawling, flying, slithering, oozing, leaping, singing, hobbling, twittering, barking, squawking, vibrating, humming and exploding out of inner space, we were overwhelmed.

What were they? Who knows. Where did they come from? We never cared to ask, nor they to tell. But they did not come in peace. Did we fight? Oh yes, but who could thwart an enemy with sunflower eyes and electric teeth, with springs for legs or hands made of nothing. Who could eat concrete and fly backwards and make fire shoot from their pointy green nostrils. Who could live in your eye, or float through air, who had no face and ten legs or made music with fiery sunfire hair. Who rode a steed made of mystery, with shadows for friends and coat of downy blue fur. Who glowed in the dark and crackled and sparkled all over. Who could pluck secrets from starlight and hid clutches of fresh dragon’s eggs beneath a cloak of infinite sadness.

In the tenements and the slums, great garbage monsters with black glass eyes and refrigerators for teeth, raised scabrous, crumbling heads and gorged on corrugated roofs. In the endless leafy suburbs the used up creations of over heated childhoods spilled from garish playrooms, swimming pools and little league games; twisty night goblins with black, inch long nails, oak trees with knotted staring eyes and talking eggs with congealed yellow faces twisted into giggling masks. On beaches and playgrounds ten foot rabbits with celebrity accents gnawed on poodles and discarded packed lunches, wisecracking pigeons with jetpacks and space helmets plunged into windscreens screaming Japanese death curses, giant rats with perfect diction and ponies with bejeweled feet and diamond studded manes careered through exclusive shopping districts, running down shoppers and terrified debutantes.

Our response when it came was swift and ineffectual, there were baton charges on robot penguins armed with flamethrowers and rubber bullets fired at legions of screaming papier mache heads with bubble gum flavoured breath. We bombed sentient sheep and destroyed a sea of flying rubber fish with tanks. It did little but leave us more confused.

Why did the sky rain purple polka dots and who taught the cinderella dolls to make petrol bombs. What did they want with us?

But it was not us they wanted.

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This week’s Flickr Fiction snippet was brought to you using Space Invaders taken by Flickr user FFEEDDEE. More fiction using this photo may be found over with Tadmack.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Flickr Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.