Fine Wine Green Men

Bright lights turn to silver dishes, and he remembers his telescope’s previous use. For a moment he wants to disinfect the eye piece, and for another he is enraptured by his vision. He hoped that this was just what he wanted to see, rather than what was there, that he, like anyone else, was just dreaming before bed about flying moonmen and their little saucers.

He wonders if he’d been caught peeping, by looking up at the ‘little net’ with his secondhand telescope.

But at the time it didn’t matter, he was young, and curious, and really he was just a happy witness to that blinking brightness which seemed so much closer to him than the stars. He holds the memory, but tells no one. Not for fear of ridicule, but for the selfish desire he felt as it hovered above him.

…

It was nineteen-forty, he’s grown older than he thought he would when he first learned what the stars hid from human beings. He’d been the type to think that he’d die young, and while in this instance he’d been told to guard his mind, those memories willed themselves to the surface as he watched the vessel crash.

It felt like a crash at least, it was nothing to the majority of the crew, of diminutive stature and unlikely disposition. Save the one they watched struggling, burned from its unfortunate place on the ship.

A team was sent out rushing to attend to it, a charred mass of truly foreign flesh blinking and breathing careful of it’s own pain. The being carried was inside as quickly as could be done.

He felt an inexplicable terror, as the other beings walked past. He hadn’t seen them before that time, not as surely as then, but he was much too aware of them as he saw the heady glint of their shiny black eyes.

The dull tones of their skin, the common nature of their visage.

Too small features on bloated skulls. 

Distorted bodies, neither child nor dwarf, too thin save the musculature of age.

The contrast of their clothes made in a Nylon-esk material, their collars tight black around their necks.

‘What a pretty way to see us,’ he hears in his head, before there is a bright-Loud bang, sharp through his synapsys.

‘Liers! Puny creatures, you’ve bound us on record, do you have any sense- the madness of it?’ the last being in procession scratched into their minds, he knew then as he saw his teammates crumble.

‘-You should spare them a scene, dear brother. They risk not but their own minds.’ a calm voice said, without breath. Benevolence, that’s what it meant.

Still he’d heard it, felt it really, the missing vowel to a word he didn’t remember.

‘You shouldn’t be so easily flattered by them.’ the lagging one said, still burdening the minds of the human surrounding them with all manner of distressed sensations.

‘I’m not so simply seduced, Love,’ it says, as he feels the reverb on his mind, ‘Forgive my brother’s outburst, I am certain you had not meant to incur our wrath. Still, your hypocrisy burdens us.’

It turned to him, holding out a hand not on offer but on request, ‘Don’t you see it as a bit unfair?’ The sweet buzz of it’s imposed presence became hot, and he couldn’t help backing away. It blinked, and the feeling snapped beyond the ether of his mind

‘We should really go inside now’ He hears it say, as a buzzing senseless disconnection consumed the rest of that day.

Luckily, their visitors weren’t displeased.

… 

It would be some time later, date forgotten, like an anniversary to the absurd. He doesn’t like to remember these kinds of things, but there it was, in this bath of flesh. It’s skin nourished by the fermented- rendered corpses of citizens, this is what they do with us. Eating rotten blood with thin pale skin. It sighs, into the heat of it, and he is disgusted.

Dirty.

Vile.

‘Hungry?’ it asks right into his head. The friendliest voice he’d ever felt, like he could ever tell this from the next. ‘You should eat, little creature.’

It isn’t referring to physique. “I’m not hungry.”

‘But you are, you might not have an appetite now. But you are,’ that was a statement, or at least as close to it in his mind, ‘Why won’t you take my permittance?’ it asked as the thought seemed to fray.

“I’d be sick if I ate now.”

‘I understand.’ it breathes with that thought, closing its eyes, and stretching to comfort in the tub. ‘You should eat though.’

He leaves it be, does as he’s told and while he feels sick for what his job has become he doesn’t retch at what he’s given. He wonders for a time after if this was a power these beings possessed, or if he was just that detached. His brethren, other human beings, whatever other wretched things they’d been…

He takes his time with his meal, as the being does the same.

He wonders if it was as disgusted as he, that if in the bazaar reality they shared it had as much reason to find him wrong. But he leaves the notion with a stale biscuit and beans, simply too tired for the thought.

He walks back once he’s finished, and while he knows that there are others bound to attend to it, he finishes what he’d started.

Hungry skin.

It doesn’t bother to greet him in any such comfort to his mind, no soft strokes, no kind figments of words, as it blinked upward to him. Its sleepy gaze exaggerated shining onyx orbs in the soft light of the bunker hidden room.

He holds his arms, an unneeded guide, for a body that wasn’t a child’s, as it shuffled to straighten from the bath, a slick pearlish tone to its skin. It leaves the space, unperturbed by its nakedness, and he knows nothing for a moment as it walks past.

The putrid color was gone, nothing more than a faint scent of sulfur and a liquid as clear as water.

He was alone, and as crooked as the being.

… 

It was nineteen sixty somewhen, on a saturday, he’d heard on the radio some time before about the lie he’d lived almost a decade back. About strange minds, and telepathically imposed sensations, pain as real as any other. It was just about an open secret what the stars hide, but he listened with a near certainty of its irrelevance. They are out there.

He’d seen it. We hide them.

And it matters about as much as the bastards of the royal family.

He drives by himself, and he lets go of the voices, the thought of it as he finds his way on the road. He’d heard tell about missing time, and harrowing journeys through space and mind, but he knew well enough when to stop for flying saucers.

It was alright for him to wonder, that’s why he remembered the day but not the year. Still he saw the shadows, and knew well enough that they’d be unseen even out in the open, and he pulled over.

They were really following him on his weekend? Was a thought he’d had back then, but it seemed they’d have little need for that kind of propriety, still he said it, “Ain’t you ever heard of a weekend?”

There was a sensation in his skull that he’d taken as a warbled, ‘no’ he doesn’t actually remember if there were any real words in it or not.

They visit with each other in an abandoned field, and while they are all within spitting distance they don’t speak with him. He’s alone really, save the insistent buzz of their presence they make no move to impose on him, for whatever business they required.

One of them left to go back inside the saucer, leaving him with the other, who gazed at him much too intently.

He wonders why that is while the saucer levitates, leaving them fully alone.

They watch it leave, and he worries that the creature’s been left on accident, or for some slight he’d been barred from hearing. It turns to him imposing on his mind, ‘I look into you, and you-’ it stumbles in his mind, and he’s almost flattered.

It’s forgotten to think properly, forgotten how to speak.

‘You see what I’m thinking all the time, but you don’t say anything.’ it says into him, and he doesn’t  speak, waiting for more.

He only thinks to speak when he feels nothing, “You think it like you aren’t the telepath. I’ve never heard a thing you didn’t tell me.”

It moves toward him slowly, with a presence that feels like a smile.

‘We should not need to rely on the fallacy of the irreplaceable in order to love those around us.’ it thinks to him, with a terse anxiety begging for correction.

“What does that even mean for us?” he asks as it tries to hold his hand.

‘Nothing,’ it says with a strange hope.