Congratulations everyone! We’ve made it through the first holiday of the holiday season with our stomachs only slightly stretched out and hopefully lots of love for our extended family intact. Only one more huge feast, or at least one more day of feasts with full houses to go and then on to the kiss at midnight and resolving to lose all the extra pounds we’ve put on during this season. Pardon my generalizing, certainly there will be many nights of celebration for some but we all are in the middle of celebrating something. Hang in there, we’ll survive the shopping and planning and everything else.

Right now I can hear the storm moving in. It is loud and threatening. I peer through the window to see the dark billowing clouds moving ever closer. The trees are already bending to the wind gusts and there are no birds to be found. I wonder what this storm will bring. The last one brought us peace, even if I am the only human who knows it. Drandon told me they created a shield around the Earth and all the cloudy days without any sun meant there were alien ships surrounding us waiting to kill us all. We were lucky to have them looking out for us. Can you imagine fighting red eyed, pale aliens that looked like their skin was melting off of them? Who knows how many of us would’ve survived, if any. Our militaries may have succeeded in defending us but it certainly wouldn’t have been without any casualties.

Children would be sleeping in their parents rooms too afraid to sleep alone well into their teenage years if they had glimpsed the nasty beasts that were described to me. Even I cannot fully imagine what they must’ve been like; perhaps it is a human defense mechanism, like forgetting the pain of childbirth so that we keep reproducing. Maybe if I could grasp fully the reality of how close we came to facing those things and possibly being murdered by them, I wouldn’t be able to sleep either.

The storm is getting closer; it just severed the last ray of sunlight from reaching my lawn. Maybe this time it is just Mother Earth quenching all the thirsty foliage with whatever precipitation she chooses. There had been storms before that one and cloudy days too. I need to remember that the invasion scenario only happened one time, it doesn’t mean it will ever happen again. It is winter, there are storms. We have plows and salt and there is nothing else to worry about.  I can see the lightning, setting the dark clouds ablaze. It is quite beautiful. Certainly everything is as it should be.

Perhaps I should stop thinking about it. It is cyber Monday, certainly Amazon has some good deals that I should check out. Certainly I could find some good science fiction stories to read next year and gift to my loved ones.

Goblins: Avta’s Quest