A super quick post cause the dog and I are waiting in the truck together for the kid to finish his swim lessons.

Behold, hear ye hear ye, read all about it….My start to NaNoWriMo 2017!

The Aliens Are Spying On Us

“Red sky at morning, sailor take warning. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.”

I hummed the old ditty to myself as I watched the endless sky light up in every shade of red the human eye can encompass, deepest blood red to faintest pink. The trouble was it was noon, and the weather report had called for a clear day’s sail. The nearest weather of any sort was 100 nautical miles away, not nearly close enough to build such a sky. I pondered the rippling, flowing red sky, noting the shade of pink of my niece’s first birthday dress, the red of the heart shaped love letter I’d had tossed in my face a few weeks ago, the catalyst of this trip.

It was right about the time a booming shock wave knocked me on the ass of the deck of my boat and a huge wave crested and broke over the bow that I decided it was time to rouse my brother from his mid-day cat nap, with the ship’s cat aptly named Dickhead (short for Moby Dick). I needn’t have bothered to have the thought, my twin brother being as much as of a sailor as I. I had barely picked my now dripping self up to eye a suddenly becalmed sea when he burst out of the hatchway stairs, a set of parallel scratches on his bare chest to show where the cat had launched off at him when the ship bucked.

He took in my rather soaked state and the shade of the sky, his wide eyes reflecting the darkest shade of red. I watched his lips form the W sound, when I realized I heard nothing. Not the steady hum of the desalinator, the soft slap of waves on the hull, the faint whir of the wind turbine at the top of the mast, or my twin’s question. Thought what else could it be than “What the fuck?”

I shook my head and turned back to the wide expanse of ocean, which should have been relatively empty in this massive stretch between Hawaii and Tahiti. Instead the near horizon was filled with something massive and dark, sleek with the turquoise water of the Pacific spilling off it’s sides. Our beauty of a ship was not insubstantial, at a sturdy 85 feet long, but we were suddenly, utterly dwarfed by whatever took up the view to the south.

My twin’s hand gripped my shoulder and I jumped, bursting out “They don’t say what red sky at noon means!” At his wince I guessed I’d shouted in his ear, but at least I could distantly hear his response of, “You still haven’t answered my ‘What the fuck’, sis.”

Shaking my head, we looked out over the utterly still ocean to see something detach itself from the impossibly huge dark shape, heading right for us. A million possible courses of actions flitted through my head, and with the ease of the Navy’s long training I decided that waiting was the best course. Anything that appeared in a blaze of fire out of the sky wouldn’t be easily outrun, and since we were the only ship for a few hundred miles as far as we were aware (present company excepting) clearly we’d been targeted. Running away from someone who was gunning right for you was folly without more information.

My twin left my side briefly, only to reappear after a short stint below deck, now fully dressed albeit in his sailor style of board shorts and a blindingly yellow sun shirt. We stood on the starboard side and watched the shape head for us, my short Columbia dress already mostly dry in the high noon sun of the Middle Pacific Ocean.

We couldn’t quite make out the shape, other than to tell there was one, which seemed odd that I couldn’t put a word to it. Rectangular? Not quite, yet not quite round. Somewhere in between, but it had to be sleek based on the zero wake left behind it.