Dark Fiction - River
By Casey Douglass
The first body
floated past the town. It went unnoticed, soon lost around the
gurgling bend.
The second passed early the
next morning and was spied by a fisherman. A host left the town,
tracking the river in the hopes of retrieving the unfortunate soul.
While these were away, a third body became entangled in the small
jetty, the place where the children liked to sit and dangle their
small feet into the gentle current.
More bodies appeared
with every turning of the clock, the small warehouse behind the
main-street soon turned into a makeshift morgue. Word had been sent
for the coroner, but he was hundreds of miles away. Amateur sleuths
tried their hand at deduction, many thrown off by the injuries that
the bodies had endured during their watery journey. One person
guessed right, and then the others saw it too: Suicide.
Crosses were sketched
in the air with shaking fingers, tears shed for people not known, and
tongues clucked about the state of the world.
The coroner didn't
come.
A traveller did.
She walked into town
with her garish clothes and laptop bag swinging from her shoulder. No
one approached her, a state of affairs that always arose when people
from the sinful world entered their haven. Broaching no games, she
strode up to the mayor and showed him something on the glowing device
in her hand.
A friendly alien
invasion had taken place.
The town's folk didn't
comprehend, but a meeting was called, and the traveller explained
more, her gesticulations and enthusiasm at odds with the statue-like
audience. It was a time of revelation, she said. They made us, she
crooned. They’ve come back to elevate us to our full potential she
gushed.
She moved on the next
day, the town stifling in its silence. Even the dogs and chickens
held their tongues. Minds weighed with doubt turned their thoughts to
the towns upstream, the places the bodies had flowed from. Good
places, pure. God-fearing.
The first suicide in
the town came the next night, but no one saw as the body splashed
into the river. The next was caught in the nick of time, the noose
pulled slack with sweating fingers as colour returned to the skin.
A mass was called, the
sermon reaching the ears of the shaking townsfolk. Suicide is a sin,
and not the way to show your love for God!
A voice shouted that
God didn’t make us!
Another yelled that he
did, that Satan had come!
A third bellowed the
query of who made the aliens? God of course!
The pressure cooker of
debate smashed together the tidbits of belief and desire, until the
township came to the decision to merely conduct themselves as before,
observing their prayers to the Lord, and showing that their faith was
strong enough to meet this challenge, whatever it may be.
The aliens did elevate
humanity, a little bit each day, until hundreds of years later,
humans roamed the stars with their new allies, their makers, dancing
in the light of super-novae, skimming black holes, and enjoying a
life without boundaries.
A taint pursued them
though.
However far they went,
whichever star they orbited, some were dogged by the phantom of a
bygone age, by the thought of an unseen power whose hand stretched
towards them wherever they might rest. These people withheld their
awe, suppressed their wonder, and waited for the lash to fall, the lash of a
whip that transcended space and time.
THE END
