Catastrophe Jones

The creature was a fascination; the captain hadn’t come back in hours and no one had thought to call out. When our band crested the ridge, the few children left to us ran down the muddied, rocky slope, heedless of the exhausted, wordless bleat of warning that came from an over-protective few. The fallen thing fell silent and reached for them as they came close, and they crowded round, grubby fingers eager to touch it, their mudstained hands leaving redgrey fingerprints and smears. Our captain stood and carefully watched them explore, watching, too, the skything, as it struggled to respond to each querying touch. At last, overwhelmed, it lifted its voice in song, and the astonished crowd drew back, holding its collective breath. That is how we found them, surrounding and surrounded by it. It sang as though that were the only way it knew to speak. It sang as though its voice were Music itself. It sang, and we listened, with no thought to the lengthening shadows, or the coming chill.

Return — Return 2 — Return 3 — Return 4

In the aftermath, there were those who uncovered the dead, and those who buried them. There were no services, no names, and no mark-stones. No one would look upon the fields sown with blood and ash. We were wide-eyed under the stars,  squinting under the sun. We staggered and tumbled, blown in every direction, fallen leaves in an unexpected storm. At times, there was little enough to say that we would go for weeks without speaking, without a sigh or shout or sound. Perhaps that is how, when it came from the heavens, cloudstained and broken-winged, the captain’s heart was caught — he was the only one who remembered what it was like to hear music. He stopped covering the faces of those who would never see again, and he followed the ghost of a memory as it drifted on the wind, to the spot where it lay in the stone-grass, shattered and scattered and still singing, staring up at the hole in the sky where it had fallen through.

Return — Return 2 — Return 3 — Return 4