Alien Massage (Comedy Short Story. Please comment your opinions.)
I suddenly felt very cold. The small room felt like it had an AC unit on the fritz. Massages always made me slightly uncomfortable. Just something about being mostly naked with a stranger touching me gave me the heebies. But admittedly, I could barely walk, feeling like an old man with too much back pain. Just waiting there face down with nothing but a towel covering my butt felt awkward as hell.
I heard the door slide open followed by a bunch of noises emanating from that direction. Noises, I can only parse as kissing smooches followed by a cartoon rendition of a bubble popping.
That's not what I wanted to hear nearly naked on an alien massage table. The sound came closer and became more frequent. It was freaking me out. I hazarded a glance up from the face hole to see a creature the size of a gorilla filling up the room with tentacles like a damn Cthulhu monster. Each tentacle was brimming with saucer-like suckers, way too many to count. It's face was like someone enlarged a catfish, painted it saturated purple, stretched it's lips a foot out from it's eyes, then gave it way too much lip enlargement plastic surgery. It was the perfect cross between a duck face selfie and that look you get when you have way too much sour candy.
It's comically long mouth smacked making the kissing sounds which I could only imagine it was trying to speak to me about how I was about to be it's lunch.
It came closer, it's lower tentacles squashing and popping as it snaked forward.
I shrieked and tried to launch myself off the bed, jostling the small wheels across the tile like floor with a squeak. But immediately, to my horror, two tentacles shot out from its mass and stuck to my upper back. It expertly slammed me back down into place. I just barely had time to tuck my chin to avoid jamming my nose in on the edge of the bed's face gap.
"Holy shit... I'm going to get eaten by this horror fest."
A few of it's tentacles pressed on my back so hard I thought it was going to crack a rib. It felt like enormous slimy spaghetti noodles and mini toilet plungers squirming around my back and upper arms. My body shuddered in disgust.
It smelled like fish that had been rotting in the garbage bin for a week. A light ooze dribbled down my sides.
The kissing sounds stopped.
I cocked my head up as much as I could to try to reason with it.
"Look I can't understand you, I don't know what you..."
One big kissing sound rang around the room.
More tentacles dropped down on different parts of my back, suckers sticking to me like super glue, and they began undulating. The up and down motion caused more pressure with each motion. It felt like it was trying to exercise my soul out through my spine. I wheezed. The air was forced from my lungs over and over like I was a damn human bagpipe.
My hands scrambled for anything I could use as a weapon. I had to get this thing off me and escape. My vision blurred washed with waves of darkness.
Crack! Crack! Crack!
"Oh..."
My back and shoulders popped as loud as fireworks during the finale of the fourth of July.
The alien thing took the pressure off me. I looked up too stunned to move still. It pushed in a panel on the wall and rolled out a large towel from a hidden compartment. Then laid it on the foot of the bed. It looked at me for a moment through it's beady fish eyes and paused.
"Uh, thank you I guess."
I sat up slowly and turned to facing it, making sure to keep my butt towel covering me. The ooze snailed down to my lower back.
I quickly grabbed the big towel, and started drying myself off. It was heated and immediately warmed me up from the chilled room.
The creature blinked, and made two more kissing sounds. It then slithered backwards until the sliding door opened with a hiss behind it, and it disappeared down a bustling hallway. I reared my arms to my hips and flexed my back with no pain.
"Oh, hell ya. Despite the near-death fright of my life, I'd totally give this place a solid four stars."
Whispers of the past
The day I found a weathered journal in the attic, its cracked leather and yellowed pages revealed a 1923 entry about uncovering a hidden truth. Inside were sketches, symbols, and a faded town map marked with an X beneath the old clock tower. Remembering a childhood story of a secret room there, I felt a strong urge to uncover the long-buried mystery.
You’re A Long Way From Home, Astronaut
The aeroplane flies away
And carves a bladed frame
Through hypnotic dead air,
Exiled from gravity’s bullying horrors.
Mood ring satellites
Nip deep at moon marrow fingers
And empties its milked ore overload,
To blind the wistful eye
Of an evaporating sun.
The unmoored aeroplane skirts the ebony rim
And punctures paper mâché lungs,
Exhaling death rattle transmissions
In 7/8 time.
Captain Zero kindly requests
That you forward any universal quandaries
To Violeta Of The Soul Sucked Skies,
Where her cosmos crowned saplings
Eat up an afterbirth of stars,
A million miles high.
The aeroplane salutes God
Then dips down
And bleeds a mercury tail,
As delirium casts radar shackled magnet eyes
Through television snow,
And the pull of below is a disintegrating ballet for the ages.
Arctic Waves
Silent hatred resonates between us and imparts
Infectious seeds sown in minds long since filled with doubt
Love’s lost labors are exhausted, have departed, and fled our hearts
Ensconced now in faraway places, leaving us severely in a drought
Never the like to be shared betwixt us again, we’ve splintered apart.
Catapulted over Camelot to land in the reality of love's cruel ways;
Everlasting reality spreads anew like a frigid blast of arctic waves.
Cynthia Calder, 08.21.24
“the only shore”
watering ivy grown on an abandoned ferriswheel in neverland
she remembered the eye of the sahara
there was no correlation between the two
but then was there a correlation between anything
walking away from ivy - she stalled her feet in quicksand
she dipped deeper and deeper till she looked down
she found that her feet werent in quicksand but quicksand was in her feet
she mustered courage and tried to find her feet
courage devoid of fate loomed to be nothing
it was the site of an approaching quicksand seagull that rushed her feet up
that seagull was her courage- quicksand her fate
life reversed these analogies to cast her anew
she walked with her thighs covered in wet gluey mud
that green ferriswheel zooming large
all of a sudden she saw kittens sucking onto their dead mother
her son had died leaving her mammary glands painfully milky
those kittens then sucked onto her
analogies reversed again
night had fallen anew
there was nothing in sight other than reflection of a single star on quicksand
she found hope in quicksand
changed her direction after having fed the kittens
her nipples didnt pain anymore
her feet no more in quicksand
she sat by the bay of quicksand and prayed to that single star
she prayed for the quicksand to turn into a lake for her to reach a shore
she slept over it
she woke up to see a shore
the mother cat was sleeping on her belly
she took a boat to the shore and rowed it with the mother cat and her kittens
they reached home to a red sky at a place called zanzibar where they lived happily ever after
star-splashed at what at happened she asked a local where they were
she kept asking but noone replied
there were rivers of liquor devoid of hangover at this place
there were rivers of honey
date palms here and there
and no-one talked but only took a sigh of relief
this really was zanzibar-
Breadcrumbs of Consciousness
Mavia sends in another great narration from the author, Todd Beller, who just happens to be among the pantheon of talent here in the halls of Prose. Grab some coffee, lean back, or put it in drive and listen to the words while Sunday moves around you like water around a stone.
Here's the link to her beautiful read.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdM3-ig6jBQ
And here's the featured piece.
https://www.theprose.com/post/827672/breadcrumbs-of-consciousness
And.
As always...
Thank you for being here.
-The Prose. Team
You have the clocks, but we have the time
You have the clocks, but we have the time
August 24, 2024
Evelyn waited longer than she was ordered to do so. She could have departed before sunrise. Now, she would wait until sunset. At least, that was the insurgency thought.
Evelyn was never going to leave.
In a God-forsaken country, only those with nothing left to lose, call it home.
Evelyn watched her husband (a native) and her two children die in the streets. The men responsible wanted to make an example of the three. In broad daylight, they skinned all three of them. She heard her smallest scream during the process.
Then the men beheaded the remains and fed it to the wild dogs.
That was nearly six years ago.
Since then, if she kept records, 216 paid for this. Their blood ran into the gallons. Their voices dwindled with each bullet, each knife thrust, each spear, and with each torch. Evelyn breathed their burning flesh as she stood motionless over the charred remains of the deceased and two of the living.
For them, death was a blessing denied.
But now, Evelyn stood her ground. She had come full circle in the village where it all began. Her friends warned her of the dangers. Her husband laughed at the warnings. They placed his head on a stake in the market square. Still laughing as it rotted in the sun. Still laughing as the insect devoured its flesh.
Fifty six times (almost four kills per event), Evelyn returned the favor. Fifty six times, the insurgents increased the bounty on her head. Today was to be number fifty seven. Someone thought the 5000 in local currency ($26 USD) was enough to stop counting and cash in.
Thirty pieces of silver goes a long way in this neck of the woods.
Taking inventory, she had three magazines for her AK and two mags for her Makarov. Add a grenade and a khyber knife prominently displaying the encrusted blood of yesterday’s work, and she was ready to meet her maker.
The conversation would only include a short, “I love you”, to her family before being cast into the pits of Hell.
Evelyn could accept such a fate. She had a six year guided tour of what was yet to come.
“How much worse could it be?”
The attack began with mortar fire from an old Soviet 82mm. The first two rounds were paint. Purple to be exact. The third round was still working.
The roof of the shelter and two walls were no longer.
Evelyn expected as much. She waited for the next attack. Most likely from a few not-so-bright AK bearers with more testosterone than common sense. These “brave souls” could not see her in the rubble.
But she could see them.
Four insurgents. Four 9x18mm bullets from a single chrome lined barrel and the deed was done. The first three fell inside the doorway. The last fell just outside.
Finally, came the barrage from all sides. Evelyn would have done the same had the positions been reversed. She rolled under a fallen steel door to shield her from much, but not all. Too many 7.62x39mm rounds to count flew past her. The two that hit her left foot left their unmistakable numerical identity.
Then came the flood of people. She never heard their voices. Perhaps her eardrums were shattered earlier. Perhaps it no longer mattered. All she heard were the screams of her children.
With her grenade in hand, pin pulled, she extended her arm and let it fly.
Few people lived to positively identify Evelyn during her in-country stay. With each telling of her story, her hair became more red, her viciousness became more extreme, and her body count inched higher and higher.
Few still remember the name of her children or the manner in which she lived prior to her change. The locals only remember the details that scare them.
Without a body to ID, many people will be scared for a long time to come.