Dakar #4
Planes just drop from the sky and disappear into the middle of the ocean. There
are pockets of swiftly moving vortices that have suction capabilities so powerful
that a plane falling into their path would stall and drop. This is a result of
global warming. Or highly charged fiberoptic cables that are woven into the ocean
floor. Temperature fluctuations are so extreme over the Atlantic that the patterns
of warm and cold waters are all mixed together. Birds in New York drop out of the
sky. One after the other, shooting stars. Flying over the parks and houses and
then suspending airborne, dead in mid-flight. A strand of Encephalitis never
before seen in North America has made it to New York. Now that the world has
gotten smaller, airplanes move from one country to another, picking up passengers
and exchanging packages. Parasites fly. We have set them free. Canals constructed
for shipping in the early part of the century allowed lampreys, normally
restricted to the ocean, to float into the Great Lakes. By 1960 trout populations
had plummeted and once prosperous fishing towns became economically depressed.
Planes fall from the sky just as lampreys cup their round incisor mouths around
the body of the trout. Parasites are nothing to fear. As humans we are all half
parasite. No one is purely human. We are filled with the blood and infections of
the entire human race. With time we will evolve to accept our hybridity. Birds
fall from the sky and land in playgrounds where children, witnessing the descent,
will forever after believe that it is natural and right for birds to remain for a
moment suspended airborne and then fall down dead. Those who refuse to accept this
will fall from the sky in planes and sink to the bottom of the ocean where their
flesh will become wrapped in fiberoptic cables and send a signal to outer space.
When the aliens finally arrive it will be clear to us all. We are all aliens, and
we have been here all along.
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