the very worst thing

A post it note is stuck on the cover of a battered journal. Bold black sharpie spells out the following:

If you are reading this, aliens are not real.

Collection of false alien sitings in rural town of [redacted]. Spring 2010. Entry 1

I’m pretty sure the fae figured out that people were on to them ages ago. The first ‘alien’ sighting was what, ten years to the day after the last disappearance? I guess they needed different lures and getting into that old tourist trap was probably really easy considering the dude who runs it (well…RAN it. Pretty sure the thing at the counter isn’t him) refused to put up the iron and use a fake name like I told him to. Should have taken his own advice about believing.

Anyway, that’s probably where they got the idea to trade in ethereal human beauty and glorious wings for grey skinned weirdos. Now we’ve got ‘aliens’ showing up all over the county trying to trade wishes for teeth and generally reveling in the fact that no one seems to be onto them yet. Well, no one but me.

Everyone else has agreed to put this place on information lockdown to protect our ‘extraterrestrial’ guests. They’ve seen the movies, read the books, watched regular old earth critters pushed to extinction at lightning speed just because they were too Pretty to not kill or too ugly to save. If we’re not alone in the universe then they don’t want to be the reason that we become so. And I get that. So I write everything down and make backups of my findings but I stay quiet to all outsiders other than two very trusted sources just on the off chance that I’m wrong.

(I’m not wrong though.)

The ‘aliens’ aren’t *currently* as bad as they could be I guess, but they certainly aren’t pulling the ruse off flawlessly. They’ve got the spirit of the act but they can’t resist including their own little touches. They mirror their home just a bit too much with their glamors, mixing ungainly monstrous disguises with shades of birds and insects. A reluctance to veer from the comfort zone of our planet’s habit of always mixing elegance into the grotesque. A nostalgia for beautiful winged things. Earth things. That or they look like fun-house mirror versions of badly made generic alien merch, which is actually much more frightening. They’re not picky about either aesthetic.

They slip up in other ways too. They don’t hide that they understand us perfectly even if some don’t seem to be able to speak themselves (at least not with their voices) and their actions, well. You would think that cow mutilation that ended with the cow being dead would be worse than…the alternative. At least the animals seem chill about it. Being in several pieces is mostly aesthetic I’m told and doesn’t interfere with their quality of life at all outside of unfortunate snags on fences and questionable milking logistics. That’s the way the fae operate though. They’ll go for making something Wrong over murder most of the time. It’s a much more entertaining form of violence to them.

But anyway even though they’re goofy as hell and they haven’t done anything too terrible (yet) I still think it’s dangerous to mingle with them this way. For every report of a silly little green man spotted nibbling on someone’s prize tomatoes in the dead of night or talking to the raccoons behind the grocery store dumpster in tones that inspire revolution, there’s a person who talks about being woken by dazzling lights, beckoned into the fields or forests, and led through gleaming metal doorways onto fantastical ships where they spend nights walking through starlight ballrooms and discussing the wonders of the universe with beings made of glittering emotion and light.

So far all of them have come back.

No one believes me about the car doors I found in the woods. How they look as if they’ve been pried from their previous homes with long humanoid hands strong enough to bend metal and propped up on wooden supports that mimic doorways. How each one is surrounded by an thick unbroken ring of blinding white mushrooms and inky black stones that resemble the night sky.

No one believes that they’re keeping an eye on me instead of merely being curious about the lady who lives alone and knows so much about earth myths.

No one’s gonna believe me until someone doesn’t come back.

I hope no one ever believes me.

I hope aliens are real.

i thought that this bit of micro fiction came from nowhere but then i looked back at my prompt notes from last month on patreon and saw that it morphed out of combining Rax’s ‘supermassive black hole’ prompt with RKS’s 'suburban crossroads demon’ prompt. which is weird because this has nothing to do with either of those things. also i still want to make stuff for both of those things.

anyway, enjoy the perfectly normal 'aliens’.