And, Then, After A Long Hiatus, The Return

Green On Red - Gas Food Lodging (1985)

The wind blew alternately soft and wild against the robot girl's thin steel and diamond legs, caressing and savaging. She/It imagined the wind as a lover, but in ten thousand years She/It had not been able to define the term "lover" beyond the pre-loaded definition She/It had been programmed with. The dead creators had been lax, She/It knew.

The visual sensors She/It used had not moved from one spot on the increasingly eroded horizon in exactly 19,729 days, 15 hours, 29 minutes, 3 seconds and increasingly meaningless segments of seconds. Not since a small but lifeless starship had entered the atmosphere and imploded spectacularly, briefly absorbing She/It's attention for a period. Thus, She/It was as surprised as a machine-thing can be when the white monkey suddenly appeared, hovering briefly in mid-air directly before the hillock of granite upon which She/It was bolted. The monkey fell fast to the planetoid's grimy surface just as suddenly. With a loud belch.

Hybernation Of One

Pixies - Doolittle (1989)

They came in fast and low, black and orange wings reflecting the ruby moonlight, flying in garish stealth patterns, spattering radio wave jam signals across all frequencies, strobing the chemical patterns of their own delusions across a planet of wild and incestuous criminal strengths, nothing rising to meet them, nothing stopping their seeming rampage, nothing caring about them at all.

They landed. They emerged, from their silicate bath cockpits. They used enhanced and natural vision to see what they had done. And it was as nothing had happened.

Humbled, they re-engaged with their now pathetic tech and slowly, almost reverently, betook themselves home. It would be a long, long winter they knew. And spring might never come again.

Celebrated Summer!

It's a marmalade mixup, a tossed tea salad, a rhubarb-crawdad jambalaya, a solsticial celebrational solution of more than seven percent! Yeah, man, the good stuff.