Jet Pack

The hen was caught mid-gobble, her beak snapping up whole corn cobs right off their stalks.

The stretch he can see runs away from him, due north, along the International Date Line…

“Unfortunately, it looks like we’re not going to make it to our destination, today. As you might imagine, this is due to spatial flux caused by the Proxima Centaurian spacecraft that was over London until just a few minutes ago.”

Outside the room where Father Bryce meets his first extraterrestrial stand twenty marines with face-masks and oily new guns. Politely, neither Father Bryce nor the space alien mentions this.

It isn’t like peeling an orange. It isn’t like popping a walnut. Skulls are harder than I’d imagined.

In his mailbox there is a hand holding a gun. It’s severed, this hand, just on the elbow side of the wrist, and it has oozed a bit of blood out into the box. The whole thing has gone sort of pale, which makes the revolver in its grip look blacker and shinier.