BrokenTune

"They landed, if it could be called a landing, in everyone’s lounge rooms at once at two in the afternoon on a Thursday in late April. One minute the entire planet was planet-ing along, making the best of things, frying eggs or watching Countdown or playing repetitive endorphin-slurping games or whatnot on various devices, and the next there was a seven-foot-tall ultramarine half-flamingo, half-anglerfish thing standing awkwardly on the good rug.

Crystal-crusted bones showed through its feathery chest, and a wet, gelatinous jade flower wobbled on its head like an old woman headed off to church. It stared at every person in the world, intimately and individually, out of big, dark, fringed eyes sparkling with points of pale light, eyes as full of unnameable yearning and vulnerability as any Disney princess’s.

Those not in possession of lounge rooms encountered the newcomer in whatever places were most familiar and intimate to them. Anyone at work had quite a surprise waiting in the break room. Some, absorbed in accounts payable or receivable, absentmindedly hung their suit jackets up on its towering hat rack of a head; its long greenish-ivory neck flushed pink with embarrassment. A slender, glassy proboscis arced up from the center of its avian skull until the weight of the round luminous lamp at its tip bent the whole thing down quail-style between those trusting eyes, where it flickered nervously, its fragile-looking legs poised like a ballet dancer about to give the Giselle of her life. But every Homo sapiens sapiens in the biosphere, at that moment, came face-to-face with the feathered beyond."

*gulps* Tomorrow is Thursday. And we're getting to the latter part of April.

Should I be reading this so close to bedtime?