Ghosts
Do we know God? Our kith and kin were indeed
favoured not to adequately understand loneliness
as we can now sense it. Until now our apathy to
all things was ignorance revealed. The
lesson and the letter delivered forthwith speak of
final passive indifference. We cannot unlearn…
we cannot withdraw. We can no longer
accept our self-determination; we cannot dream
or nightmare in quite the same way as once we
could council. Our illusions have been altered…
our understanding is flustered. Discovery came
to us, our revelation is all our own. A question
has been answered. We are not alone.
Do we know God? Our kith and kin were indeed
favoured not to adequately understand loneliness
as we can now sense it. Until now our apathy to
all things was ignorance revealed. The
lesson and the letter delivered forthwith speak of
final passive indifference. We cannot unlearn…
we cannot withdraw. We can no longer
accept our self-determination; we cannot dream
or nightmare in quite the same way as once we
could council. Our illusions have been altered…
our understanding is flustered. Discovery came
to us, our revelation is all our own. A question
has been answered. We are not alone.
June 24th
Keeping secrets was no longer possible…from the impermeable corridors of power through to the universal silence of our illustrious and respected astronomers; no one could hide the truth from us…there was simply little point. An amateur stargazer with a home made telescope or an intercontinental tourist pointing his thirty five millimetre camera skyward saw the same thing, at the same time as all those boffins who have been searching the night sky for additional life. For all intent and purpose, we all found out at the same time.
Before a blink of the eye, for its appearance was in human understanding, immediate. Exceeding the City of Southampton our hopes and our fears become reality. Aliens, Visitors, Company Monsters, Pilgrims, Traveller’s…what ever, they had arrived…their mode of transportation was now looming massive over the City. Its immense girth stretched out to sea. It’s underbelly casting a cold shadow over the Municipality.
Live pictures…frame by frame…by the millions were transmitted to every continent around the globe. Within hours cognate millions were transfixed by the images… beamed directly into our homes. The nations' televisions forthwith were by no means to be switched off…by government request…and during the next three weeks our sets over heated, exploded or simply wore out. Bombarded with self-generating speculation and with voluminous guff…the truth…whatever that could be, was up for the snatch. Our unimaginative TV channels for the most part offered us some, ‘exclusive’…channel hopping was rife, and no single station won the day…and brand loyalty exposed…there was little…and if you were not there, ‘live here tonight’ and most of us were not there, our reactions to the event were to be sourced and experienced through these television networks.
By the first evening we beheld news items about our fellow brave and intrepid missionaries, the news teams and reporters. They…citizen reporters ventured out into the far reaches of civilisation to gamut all humanity. We viewed in our homes tribes' people in Africa, Bedouins from Afghanistan and Inuit’s from Canada. We saw people poised, mannered and positioned in front of televisions, big new plasma TV’s brought into their lives by our illustrious news teams. The footage presented to these indigenous peoples’ came from each respective stations own news footage.
The edited film had been captured earlier on in the day…we could view some of the footage…picture in picture…the camera focused upon the faces of these exotics as they witnessed the spacecraft for the first time…their reaction was perhaps natural… a uncontrolled bunch of pros may not often land in the outback to rig up a television set and to then show you a spaceship every day of the week! Curious, amused, puzzled, there was no context to the image presented to them. After all, ironically perhaps, it is capacious as the space ship that had suddenly appeared over Southampton water.
On channel nine news for example, native Afghans could perhaps be viewed as being more preoccupied with the plasma television and with the over stimulated production team…than watching the floating carcass. Watching at home…with our picture in picture the anchorwoman presented to the indigenous people the images that we could also view live…she was articulating in English and she was eloquence personified. In anticipation for some daily cartoon strip comment…the natives possibly viewed the film footage as more science fiction than credible honest to God journalism. You could see that they were stirred by the technology presented to them; likewise, if you lived in Southampton at the time so would you. It has to be said, this spaceship is difficult to fake, yet if you were not there looking at the thing, you just wouldn’t believe it. Convincing the world this was definitely not a hoax, whose job was that? One could assume that because the spaceship was over British territory, it was ours, our very own spaceship…British airspace closed to all inbound flights…We were either the envy of the world or the most unfortunate. If it was to govern its disaster ray upon us, then the UK gets it first. Or will one shot do us all in?
What of the spaceship? It just floated, hovered, parked, hung, suspended and dangled by whatever method above the City of Southampton. From reconnaissance photographs taken by an all American spy satellite…and relayed to the National stats department we were informed that, ‘the space machine was actually more seaward than land ward.’ It’s size? ‘We approximate the length of ten Oil tankers, end to end.' The biggest supertankers ever built.’ The height of the spaceship at its widest point is? ‘It is the height of two Empire State Buildings. One on top of the other, masts and all.’ ‘It is as wide as the length of six super tankers’. We had to admit, we had absolutely no idea, which was the bow or the aft of this ship to add into these facts. The spaceship may have travelled great distances to reach us yet it was we who were on the trot; isolated from our own planet...we had nowhere to hide. Perhaps their journey had exhausted them, perhaps they were preparing for war, for peace, to send us a message.... We waited and we watched and we worried. To pass the time Sci-Fi films were viewed with renewed interest, every detail in these films were viewed anew, scrutinised. These treatises’ took on whole new meanings, their creators became the new visionaries and we were reliably informed that we should have taken these Artists much more seriously than we had previously done so. How could our fellow humans have had such insight? Were some of these consummate ones’ descended from aliens? How many visitors walked amongst us? We were buying Sci-Fi by the space ship load. The unbelievers, the sceptics were definitely not having the nervous last laugh now.
Our media, our leaders, our scientists speculated tirelessly on the television, in the newspapers and on the radio. Attempts at communication were as always ours, we knew nothing tangible about our ship. Everything we thought about this object had been speculative… it was all just lard. Since it arrived over Southampton three weeks hence, millions upon millions of people had flocked south. In the beginning what started as end of the world chaos and panic turned in to a state of becalmed and orderly routine with a mere undercurrent of worry. For three weeks in blessed weather we photographed ourselves with the dominant spaceship in the background. Assuredly we were safe, we had the exclusion zone for Christ sake! Hungry for a news scoop and for the benefit mankind, news hounds and extreme sport seekers ignored the exclusion zone. A microlight pilot with his cash rich reporter strapped to his underbelly did manage to penetrate the zone and land upon the surface of the spaceship. They promptly fell from its surface and perished in the sea, in full graphic view, live on television. These two individuals were not the first casualties lost to the aliens. Death and destruction was as always, ours.
How many people were to die with our alien encounter? The statistics piled up day after day. If you had the time you could have chosen to scour the papers…and build up your own statistical analysis…the deaths may not have immediately been attributed to the alien visit but linking these deaths to the ship was perhaps inevitable given the unusual circumstances. Recorded during the three uneventful spaceship weeks, one hundred and eighty-seven people were killed in car crashes. The occupants had been driving to behold the spaceship. Suicides in the south ran to triple figures (274) including sixty three people jumping off Beachy Head, twenty seven were saved however by the Good Samaritans and local volunteers who tirelessly lent a hand in these oh so trying times for all. In camping incidents alone, fifteen people died in their individual tents from camping gas fire accidents. Fifty-two people died from unhygienic food preparation, both self inflicted or otherwise. One man bled to death in his tent after cutting his hand on a can opener while under the influence of drink, drugs and following some form of mutilation through sadomasochistic sex. Fifty-seven people set fire to themselves/tents/families in unconnected camping BBQ incidents. The Police hit and killed sixteen pedestrians while rushing to emergencies, the Army accounted for eighteen deaths, plus there were an undisclosed number of service personal drowned aboard an army assault landing craft…the internet suggests the number of SBS/SAS personnel was sixteen. One canoeist departed this life; thirty-two additional deaths resulted from exclusion zone misadventure…or to put it another way…death consumed by ‘stupid excursion’ going into the sea while aboard inflatable rubber dinghies…furthermore there were sixteen swimming and diving accidents, fifteen speed boat fatalities and by no means the last statistic, seventy one heart attacks…these were induced by witnessing either one of the above or merely viewing the overwhelming and affecting spaceship. The Police inventory listed sixteen murders in and around the temporary campsite towns. There was also plentiful debauchery resulting in at least fifty rapes, thirty-three crimes against women and seventeen committed rapes upon men. There were also six combo murder rape crimes. If we humans can find accidental or deliberate ways to kill ourselves or take along others when we journey we shall do.
The authorities coped with in excess of an estimated seventeen Million people on the roads heading southwards. The troops moved in and order restored…cars and people were to be turned away on the main arteries around the Midlands…a North and South divide…blockades were abounded, the military and emergency services were stretched to the full. As stock markets crashed around the world we stockpiled food and water. We spent money like there was no real tomorrow and we purchased luxury items at knocked down prices. Televisions were expensive, however. Any spare cash was used to purchase the hastily designed spaceship mementoes. The Prime Minister and family, the great and the good were spirited away from our Capital. For safekeeping they were taken to a secret location. The Monarchy were first dispatched to Scotland and then sent forth to Canada…within a week…a new ordinariness ensued across the county…let the stock markets crash some said.
If we had witnessed the spaceship first hand we wrote profound words upon picture postcards and sent them home. These thoughtful notes were to be our last wills and testaments to our loved ones should the aliens unleash an attack. So many Britons’ were compelled to view and experience the ship first hand…we found ways of beating the system. For publicity purposes some lesser celebrities, those still in the UK were taken to view this wonder by their agents, the newspapers and glossy magazine press. For our sins we had to endure new pop songs composed for our pop princes and princesses about the men from Mars, and we brought or downloaded their tunes along with all the other tat of our times. In three weeks we had three multi-millions selling Number ones. At least a dozen other space hits were biting at the heel of the previous weeks victor.
We sent messages of welcome and goodwill from around the world to the visitors; these were deposited in a specially painted yellow barge. It was ridiculous; it was the colour of custard…this was towed out into the estuary and laid at anchor under the shadow of the spaceship. The occupants could pick them up, lift them, spirit them, haul them, beam them, whatever them up into their spaceship to read them at their leisure. How we wished they were ready to receive our letters. If our alien friends could read we hoped that they could differentiate the wise from the unwise, the intense essays composed by the newborn again or the new age crank. There were money bribes, diamond bribes, drug bribes and human cargo bribes by those hedging their bets, ready to jump the mother earth ship and join with the alien. We thought about it, debated it, communicated to it, argued over it and still we worried about it. Eventually to compose our own minds, our souls and to search for answers, apart yet apart we looked to the heavens for other spaceships. Non-were forthcoming.
At 11.52 on the morning of 24th June the space ship left Earth.
One Year On.
The wonder in the sky outwardly brought previously missing persons home to be united with their kin. These lost persons without exception made no claim to having been abducted by Aliens but stories about abductions were abounding in the newspapers. These human beings could at last be erased from the nation's nomenclature for the missing. In the City of Southampton however sixty-three people vanished during those three weeks in June. None were under the age of thirty and no one was over the age of fifty-five…thirty-one men and thirty-one women…one of the woman…with child yet unborn. Her name was Ola Niela, thirty-five of Spanish nationality…dedicated family nanny to Mr and Mrs Hopkiss’s two daughters.
Another world, flights of speculation.
Humanness is cultural. Humanness is genetic. We are subject to universal similarities. We all walk upright on two legs and we humans are the rudimentary models. We humans embarrass nature, we are bound by gravity and we fight with the self and make war with our own kind.
Physical matter is prevalent. We may be of the similar proportions yet in dimension we are idle. Advanced technology or advanced nature, they build greater than we, they construct and design and harmonise with nature, with gravity. They have day and night. Time, as we know it has no meaning, do they stow internal body clocks? We are reminded of our own basic needs, food, shelter, light and heat. They flourish on these necessities of life.
We can breathe, we can eat, we can sleep but can we live here? Are there others from our home planet here? Can we be a community as they? We hanker for home…for Earth and we lack the nerve to try to live as they live. We ask questions...to seek answers ... to help ease our anxieties. We utter in our mother tongue, we gesture, we scratch in the soil, and we make drawings and write upon the walls. Our actions, our efforts seem so over complicated…we are re-presenting to them in rudimentary form our world…one already witnessed…they are uncanny for their understanding of us. They deliver, present, and show us to our needs. They perform no subservient tasks or show us how to live off what they present to us…do we have the skill…the capacity? We are free to observe, to touch and to explore. We are apart yet apart.
The Crocodile smiles as the Cheshire cat smiles. Our hosts have orifices where we have mouths. They have familiar features…but altogether different. Emotions are observed upon tranquil faces…and sound is transmitted but we might as well be deaf mutes. We simply cannot comprehend how they work. We draw comparisons taken only from our experiences of our own world. Their eyes, they have two and they are round. They are watery yet they are crystalline. They are a rich, reflective, deep blue-black colour. They do not blink and they do not have eyelids, their eyes close and roll back akin to sharks' eyes before biting, yet these are not eyes of a nightmare. To observe this action is rapid and takes place under a skin that is seamless. To the untrained…the unfamiliar…we cannot know the natural laws that govern this evolution.
Their skin has the texture of a smooth skinned peach. It has the flexibility of a latex material that stretches and gives. It is a translucent elastic skin. They have small nostrils that sit closer to the mouth than our own configuration. They seem to Breathe through the skin, they perspire like we, they are hairless and seem to regulate their temperature by slight and subtle changes in skin colour. These beings are graceful and in familiar proportions to us, perhaps there are universal laws that govern growth patterns? They are perfect vehicles. Their size and features vary with individuals. These beings are not clothed yet modesty is preserved. They are not ashamed, inadequate or sexless. They do not rise to having any external sexual genitalia. These forms have a pouch of skin that protracts and retracts into the body around the abdomen area. Food is taken through this pouch. After
engaging in very modest sums of nourishment the pouch remains slightly extended from the body for a brief period of time. Stealthily and seamlessly, the pouch is negated back into the body…there are no strong odours.
We sit upon furniture that moulds to the contours of our bodies. The room is Spartan except for a highly polished stone table; its surface pattern is of marble. The veins of colour, reds and greens and yellows are perpetually agitated into prismatic life as they are held in the table plane. It is the only colour in the room. Free-floating ball lights provide lighting. They transmit a cold light and diminish in size over time. This is achieved through a lessening process, the results are that the ball lights deposit specs of metallic flecks upon the floor.
Our cause for concern is our well being…should we fall ill our anxiety is that we are inadequate to save each other from pain and suffering. Presented upon the table and soured from the natural world is our food, the sustenance that caters for human and alien alike. Hunger is abated ensuing our previous collective distrust of the food placed before us. Our delicate pallets, our bias, our resistance and our reluctance drove us to despair…yet we are explorers. Are we to eat to save ourselves or do we eat so that we can attain death…through nourished poisoned bodies… There is no way home and we have little alternative. Our human condition travels the universe with us. We thirst…we resist. This platter of plenty sustains life, but for how long?
We eat.
We determine to harvest the produce ourselves. Water is plentiful yet we draw most of our requirements from the food that we eat. Rich, juicy bulb like fruits, reeds that have thick stalks that are peeled away like bananas to reveal the succulent insides. Gourd forms that contain a meaty like flesh. It has the texture of homemade cooked ham but with the taste of peppered chicken. Other roots contain a mallow substance that is sweet to the taste and delightfully satisfying. The yield is abounding and the variety on offer immeasurable. We live on a full belly nevertheless we are ravenous for contact from our own kind. Our cry to our quiescent hosts... What are we?
…We are ghosts in another time.
Ghosts: Simon Withers (2007)
Keeping secrets was no longer possible…from the impermeable corridors of power through to the universal silence of our illustrious and respected astronomers; no one could hide the truth from us…there was simply little point. An amateur stargazer with a home made telescope or an intercontinental tourist pointing his thirty five millimetre camera skyward saw the same thing, at the same time as all those boffins who have been searching the night sky for additional life. For all intent and purpose, we all found out at the same time.
Before a blink of the eye, for its appearance was in human understanding, immediate. Exceeding the City of Southampton our hopes and our fears become reality. Aliens, Visitors, Company Monsters, Pilgrims, Traveller’s…what ever, they had arrived…their mode of transportation was now looming massive over the City. Its immense girth stretched out to sea. It’s underbelly casting a cold shadow over the Municipality.
Live pictures…frame by frame…by the millions were transmitted to every continent around the globe. Within hours cognate millions were transfixed by the images… beamed directly into our homes. The nations' televisions forthwith were by no means to be switched off…by government request…and during the next three weeks our sets over heated, exploded or simply wore out. Bombarded with self-generating speculation and with voluminous guff…the truth…whatever that could be, was up for the snatch. Our unimaginative TV channels for the most part offered us some, ‘exclusive’…channel hopping was rife, and no single station won the day…and brand loyalty exposed…there was little…and if you were not there, ‘live here tonight’ and most of us were not there, our reactions to the event were to be sourced and experienced through these television networks.
By the first evening we beheld news items about our fellow brave and intrepid missionaries, the news teams and reporters. They…citizen reporters ventured out into the far reaches of civilisation to gamut all humanity. We viewed in our homes tribes' people in Africa, Bedouins from Afghanistan and Inuit’s from Canada. We saw people poised, mannered and positioned in front of televisions, big new plasma TV’s brought into their lives by our illustrious news teams. The footage presented to these indigenous peoples’ came from each respective stations own news footage.
The edited film had been captured earlier on in the day…we could view some of the footage…picture in picture…the camera focused upon the faces of these exotics as they witnessed the spacecraft for the first time…their reaction was perhaps natural… a uncontrolled bunch of pros may not often land in the outback to rig up a television set and to then show you a spaceship every day of the week! Curious, amused, puzzled, there was no context to the image presented to them. After all, ironically perhaps, it is capacious as the space ship that had suddenly appeared over Southampton water.
On channel nine news for example, native Afghans could perhaps be viewed as being more preoccupied with the plasma television and with the over stimulated production team…than watching the floating carcass. Watching at home…with our picture in picture the anchorwoman presented to the indigenous people the images that we could also view live…she was articulating in English and she was eloquence personified. In anticipation for some daily cartoon strip comment…the natives possibly viewed the film footage as more science fiction than credible honest to God journalism. You could see that they were stirred by the technology presented to them; likewise, if you lived in Southampton at the time so would you. It has to be said, this spaceship is difficult to fake, yet if you were not there looking at the thing, you just wouldn’t believe it. Convincing the world this was definitely not a hoax, whose job was that? One could assume that because the spaceship was over British territory, it was ours, our very own spaceship…British airspace closed to all inbound flights…We were either the envy of the world or the most unfortunate. If it was to govern its disaster ray upon us, then the UK gets it first. Or will one shot do us all in?
What of the spaceship? It just floated, hovered, parked, hung, suspended and dangled by whatever method above the City of Southampton. From reconnaissance photographs taken by an all American spy satellite…and relayed to the National stats department we were informed that, ‘the space machine was actually more seaward than land ward.’ It’s size? ‘We approximate the length of ten Oil tankers, end to end.' The biggest supertankers ever built.’ The height of the spaceship at its widest point is? ‘It is the height of two Empire State Buildings. One on top of the other, masts and all.’ ‘It is as wide as the length of six super tankers’. We had to admit, we had absolutely no idea, which was the bow or the aft of this ship to add into these facts. The spaceship may have travelled great distances to reach us yet it was we who were on the trot; isolated from our own planet...we had nowhere to hide. Perhaps their journey had exhausted them, perhaps they were preparing for war, for peace, to send us a message.... We waited and we watched and we worried. To pass the time Sci-Fi films were viewed with renewed interest, every detail in these films were viewed anew, scrutinised. These treatises’ took on whole new meanings, their creators became the new visionaries and we were reliably informed that we should have taken these Artists much more seriously than we had previously done so. How could our fellow humans have had such insight? Were some of these consummate ones’ descended from aliens? How many visitors walked amongst us? We were buying Sci-Fi by the space ship load. The unbelievers, the sceptics were definitely not having the nervous last laugh now.
Our media, our leaders, our scientists speculated tirelessly on the television, in the newspapers and on the radio. Attempts at communication were as always ours, we knew nothing tangible about our ship. Everything we thought about this object had been speculative… it was all just lard. Since it arrived over Southampton three weeks hence, millions upon millions of people had flocked south. In the beginning what started as end of the world chaos and panic turned in to a state of becalmed and orderly routine with a mere undercurrent of worry. For three weeks in blessed weather we photographed ourselves with the dominant spaceship in the background. Assuredly we were safe, we had the exclusion zone for Christ sake! Hungry for a news scoop and for the benefit mankind, news hounds and extreme sport seekers ignored the exclusion zone. A microlight pilot with his cash rich reporter strapped to his underbelly did manage to penetrate the zone and land upon the surface of the spaceship. They promptly fell from its surface and perished in the sea, in full graphic view, live on television. These two individuals were not the first casualties lost to the aliens. Death and destruction was as always, ours.
How many people were to die with our alien encounter? The statistics piled up day after day. If you had the time you could have chosen to scour the papers…and build up your own statistical analysis…the deaths may not have immediately been attributed to the alien visit but linking these deaths to the ship was perhaps inevitable given the unusual circumstances. Recorded during the three uneventful spaceship weeks, one hundred and eighty-seven people were killed in car crashes. The occupants had been driving to behold the spaceship. Suicides in the south ran to triple figures (274) including sixty three people jumping off Beachy Head, twenty seven were saved however by the Good Samaritans and local volunteers who tirelessly lent a hand in these oh so trying times for all. In camping incidents alone, fifteen people died in their individual tents from camping gas fire accidents. Fifty-two people died from unhygienic food preparation, both self inflicted or otherwise. One man bled to death in his tent after cutting his hand on a can opener while under the influence of drink, drugs and following some form of mutilation through sadomasochistic sex. Fifty-seven people set fire to themselves/tents/families in unconnected camping BBQ incidents. The Police hit and killed sixteen pedestrians while rushing to emergencies, the Army accounted for eighteen deaths, plus there were an undisclosed number of service personal drowned aboard an army assault landing craft…the internet suggests the number of SBS/SAS personnel was sixteen. One canoeist departed this life; thirty-two additional deaths resulted from exclusion zone misadventure…or to put it another way…death consumed by ‘stupid excursion’ going into the sea while aboard inflatable rubber dinghies…furthermore there were sixteen swimming and diving accidents, fifteen speed boat fatalities and by no means the last statistic, seventy one heart attacks…these were induced by witnessing either one of the above or merely viewing the overwhelming and affecting spaceship. The Police inventory listed sixteen murders in and around the temporary campsite towns. There was also plentiful debauchery resulting in at least fifty rapes, thirty-three crimes against women and seventeen committed rapes upon men. There were also six combo murder rape crimes. If we humans can find accidental or deliberate ways to kill ourselves or take along others when we journey we shall do.
The authorities coped with in excess of an estimated seventeen Million people on the roads heading southwards. The troops moved in and order restored…cars and people were to be turned away on the main arteries around the Midlands…a North and South divide…blockades were abounded, the military and emergency services were stretched to the full. As stock markets crashed around the world we stockpiled food and water. We spent money like there was no real tomorrow and we purchased luxury items at knocked down prices. Televisions were expensive, however. Any spare cash was used to purchase the hastily designed spaceship mementoes. The Prime Minister and family, the great and the good were spirited away from our Capital. For safekeeping they were taken to a secret location. The Monarchy were first dispatched to Scotland and then sent forth to Canada…within a week…a new ordinariness ensued across the county…let the stock markets crash some said.
If we had witnessed the spaceship first hand we wrote profound words upon picture postcards and sent them home. These thoughtful notes were to be our last wills and testaments to our loved ones should the aliens unleash an attack. So many Britons’ were compelled to view and experience the ship first hand…we found ways of beating the system. For publicity purposes some lesser celebrities, those still in the UK were taken to view this wonder by their agents, the newspapers and glossy magazine press. For our sins we had to endure new pop songs composed for our pop princes and princesses about the men from Mars, and we brought or downloaded their tunes along with all the other tat of our times. In three weeks we had three multi-millions selling Number ones. At least a dozen other space hits were biting at the heel of the previous weeks victor.
We sent messages of welcome and goodwill from around the world to the visitors; these were deposited in a specially painted yellow barge. It was ridiculous; it was the colour of custard…this was towed out into the estuary and laid at anchor under the shadow of the spaceship. The occupants could pick them up, lift them, spirit them, haul them, beam them, whatever them up into their spaceship to read them at their leisure. How we wished they were ready to receive our letters. If our alien friends could read we hoped that they could differentiate the wise from the unwise, the intense essays composed by the newborn again or the new age crank. There were money bribes, diamond bribes, drug bribes and human cargo bribes by those hedging their bets, ready to jump the mother earth ship and join with the alien. We thought about it, debated it, communicated to it, argued over it and still we worried about it. Eventually to compose our own minds, our souls and to search for answers, apart yet apart we looked to the heavens for other spaceships. Non-were forthcoming.
At 11.52 on the morning of 24th June the space ship left Earth.
One Year On.
The wonder in the sky outwardly brought previously missing persons home to be united with their kin. These lost persons without exception made no claim to having been abducted by Aliens but stories about abductions were abounding in the newspapers. These human beings could at last be erased from the nation's nomenclature for the missing. In the City of Southampton however sixty-three people vanished during those three weeks in June. None were under the age of thirty and no one was over the age of fifty-five…thirty-one men and thirty-one women…one of the woman…with child yet unborn. Her name was Ola Niela, thirty-five of Spanish nationality…dedicated family nanny to Mr and Mrs Hopkiss’s two daughters.
Another world, flights of speculation.
Humanness is cultural. Humanness is genetic. We are subject to universal similarities. We all walk upright on two legs and we humans are the rudimentary models. We humans embarrass nature, we are bound by gravity and we fight with the self and make war with our own kind.
Physical matter is prevalent. We may be of the similar proportions yet in dimension we are idle. Advanced technology or advanced nature, they build greater than we, they construct and design and harmonise with nature, with gravity. They have day and night. Time, as we know it has no meaning, do they stow internal body clocks? We are reminded of our own basic needs, food, shelter, light and heat. They flourish on these necessities of life.
We can breathe, we can eat, we can sleep but can we live here? Are there others from our home planet here? Can we be a community as they? We hanker for home…for Earth and we lack the nerve to try to live as they live. We ask questions...to seek answers ... to help ease our anxieties. We utter in our mother tongue, we gesture, we scratch in the soil, and we make drawings and write upon the walls. Our actions, our efforts seem so over complicated…we are re-presenting to them in rudimentary form our world…one already witnessed…they are uncanny for their understanding of us. They deliver, present, and show us to our needs. They perform no subservient tasks or show us how to live off what they present to us…do we have the skill…the capacity? We are free to observe, to touch and to explore. We are apart yet apart.
The Crocodile smiles as the Cheshire cat smiles. Our hosts have orifices where we have mouths. They have familiar features…but altogether different. Emotions are observed upon tranquil faces…and sound is transmitted but we might as well be deaf mutes. We simply cannot comprehend how they work. We draw comparisons taken only from our experiences of our own world. Their eyes, they have two and they are round. They are watery yet they are crystalline. They are a rich, reflective, deep blue-black colour. They do not blink and they do not have eyelids, their eyes close and roll back akin to sharks' eyes before biting, yet these are not eyes of a nightmare. To observe this action is rapid and takes place under a skin that is seamless. To the untrained…the unfamiliar…we cannot know the natural laws that govern this evolution.
Their skin has the texture of a smooth skinned peach. It has the flexibility of a latex material that stretches and gives. It is a translucent elastic skin. They have small nostrils that sit closer to the mouth than our own configuration. They seem to Breathe through the skin, they perspire like we, they are hairless and seem to regulate their temperature by slight and subtle changes in skin colour. These beings are graceful and in familiar proportions to us, perhaps there are universal laws that govern growth patterns? They are perfect vehicles. Their size and features vary with individuals. These beings are not clothed yet modesty is preserved. They are not ashamed, inadequate or sexless. They do not rise to having any external sexual genitalia. These forms have a pouch of skin that protracts and retracts into the body around the abdomen area. Food is taken through this pouch. After
engaging in very modest sums of nourishment the pouch remains slightly extended from the body for a brief period of time. Stealthily and seamlessly, the pouch is negated back into the body…there are no strong odours.
We sit upon furniture that moulds to the contours of our bodies. The room is Spartan except for a highly polished stone table; its surface pattern is of marble. The veins of colour, reds and greens and yellows are perpetually agitated into prismatic life as they are held in the table plane. It is the only colour in the room. Free-floating ball lights provide lighting. They transmit a cold light and diminish in size over time. This is achieved through a lessening process, the results are that the ball lights deposit specs of metallic flecks upon the floor.
Our cause for concern is our well being…should we fall ill our anxiety is that we are inadequate to save each other from pain and suffering. Presented upon the table and soured from the natural world is our food, the sustenance that caters for human and alien alike. Hunger is abated ensuing our previous collective distrust of the food placed before us. Our delicate pallets, our bias, our resistance and our reluctance drove us to despair…yet we are explorers. Are we to eat to save ourselves or do we eat so that we can attain death…through nourished poisoned bodies… There is no way home and we have little alternative. Our human condition travels the universe with us. We thirst…we resist. This platter of plenty sustains life, but for how long?
We eat.
We determine to harvest the produce ourselves. Water is plentiful yet we draw most of our requirements from the food that we eat. Rich, juicy bulb like fruits, reeds that have thick stalks that are peeled away like bananas to reveal the succulent insides. Gourd forms that contain a meaty like flesh. It has the texture of homemade cooked ham but with the taste of peppered chicken. Other roots contain a mallow substance that is sweet to the taste and delightfully satisfying. The yield is abounding and the variety on offer immeasurable. We live on a full belly nevertheless we are ravenous for contact from our own kind. Our cry to our quiescent hosts... What are we?
…We are ghosts in another time.
Ghosts: Simon Withers (2007)