The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

First Contact Party
by Angela Yuriko Smith

Apologies to the Foil Hat Brigade, you were right all along. Officials finally coughed up the truth, vindicating conspiracy in whispered press conferences, blurred footage and testimonies mumbled in congressional monotone. Lizard people, shape-shifters, light beings. Not new, they said—just newly verified. We sat as a nation, collectively stunned and trying to decide if we were more afraid of aliens among us, or that they’d been here all along. Can reptilian overlords run for office? we whisper-shrieked as we hid from the stars. We connected dots and dot points. Is this the beginning of our end or the end of our beginning…

…and then we watched a comet in reverse, a shooting star leaving us and our blue marble to burn as one more billionaire launched himself into space and new frontiers while the rest of us rationed hope and water and life. He left his baggage behind: 2.1 billion tons of Municipal Solid Waste, 220 million tons of plastic, and 150 million tons of trash for our land-already-fulls. These were the souvenirs of progress, he said, and told us we should be proud. As we watched his chem trails bleed to dark, we realized the aliens were an unknown option, but the known was a nightmare.

I hang streamers high
and make some foil party hats—
welcome, honored guests.

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Fiction © Copyright Angela Yuriko Smith
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com.

More from Angela Yuriko Smith:

Angela Yuriko Smith is a third-generation Ryukyuan-American, award-winning poet, author, and publisher with 20+ years in newspapers. Publisher of Space and Time magazine (est. 1966), two-time Bram Stoker Awards® Winner, and HWA Mentor of the Year, she shares Authortunities, a free weekly calendar of author opportunities at authortunities.substack.com.