Nocturnette 14: The Meteor. By Jan Lakowski.
Once, I saw a meteor come down in an Usan field. It was about the time summer's sugar mountain begins to blacken and you assimilate the ravages of that particular quadrangle of seasons. Would you be one to quaff at that potion that would preserve your pert epidermis, the crystalline glow that suggests a fullness of soul in a being? A thousand years? Yet never leave, and never know further progression. Because you cannot grow unless it is to die. To be done in an end if that's what death is.
Summer, July, 2016, Usan, 23:48
I saw a meteorite touch down in a grey silence, its greenish light perhaps copper vaporising. I found a great illogical fear grip me like a finger in the turning spokes, and as such I was broken. I drove off into the night, my head swimming with 19th century martians incinerating red gold leaf steam trains, drowning colliery horses, Potemkin screaming women cut down in the delirious death ray, with pompous journalists rabbiting noxious prose like the luminous catarrh from a gangrenous sinus.
I was already in a panic having both waded through and emerged from a shore choked with fibrous red weed, of which Wells would have been proud. The scent of ammonia and carrion. The tang of night blossoms and a shot vixen rotting snug under a driftwood limb.
He is curate to a vast continental darkness, the world through his pineal eye like a seashell to his ear. The fancy of the ocean's spectral voice, purely real in childlike sincerity, yet, merely a glamour to a jaded rube.
A vast continental darkness, and his mind's eye bubbling gelatinous lodged in its wooly heart, the river's licorice root, the lions of the nursery veldt, flu fever hallucinations of your fat boiling head, misshapen like a worm-riddled plum, ready to splutter a waxen light like a snuffed candle into the dusk.
His vast continental darkness, and no black-eyed girl to knead the sun back into his bones. The black sun like a sunburnt sunflower seed, breathing the vacuum to touch down in the centre of the city. Just another everyday apocalypse, people barely look-up from their phones.
When Joan of Arc saw the saints approach through the poppied field; lithe, slender, grinning like survivors, didn't she know that none of her blink of life would be in vain?
I saw a meteorite fall in amongst the impenetrable copse, plumb down in the bellybutton of an Usan farmer's field . Bright like a sphere of lightning, for a moment, then spent. I've never felt like searching where it's not my place. However, I do know it's there. Doesn't that suggest something?
You know, if I stand here long enough, in the bewitching, hallucinatory summer twilight, perhaps something will answer me from within the hedgerow.......