Prime Directives, fiction by Matt Prater

 If we were all good people, we could work in perfect rhythm

If worms had daggers, birds wouldn’t fuck with em

– Todd Snider, “If Tomorrow Never Comes”

Milton Friedman used to have this theory about the pencil, used to use it to explain the holy concepts of peace and libertarianism. He said the eraser and the metal cap and the paint and the wood and the granite and the machines that put them together, and even the people who ran those machines, along with all the farms and the mines and the quarries that produced the goods – all of them had to work together and cooperate peacefully to make a single pencil; and that that made a single pencil a powerful symbol of the general resourcefulness and amiability of humanity when left to its natural devices, unecumbered by war drums or the other social engineerings of governments and their onerous regulations. Friedman’s libertarianism, as opposed to Rand’s, was a liberal, egalitarianly unselfish paradox of an economy. The self serves other selves of its own free will, and money is a currrency not of power but diplomacy.

Nog, on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, called this concept the “Great Material Continuum” – a river of goods and services, and an ethereal force that permiated all the galaxy, distributing a holy inequity of goods that forced all the sentient beings of the cosmos into contact, contract, and trade. If one could navigate this force with skill and cunning, Nog explained, they could not only fulfill every one of their own desires, but also spread growth and wealth and ever-increasing dividends and measures to all of the partners, and prosperize the cosmos. If greed was not, in this model, necessarily good, then at least the forces of everyday hunger for the belly and wallet and bed could be managed and shaped to engender peace and reciprocation.

And yet here is a story, in spite of all of that, about simple positional good.

Radney lived along the single boulevard of Archetype, Kentucky, somewhere in that big strip of strip mines between Pound Gap and eastern Adair County. A town that was proud of its Applebee’s that redacted its blue laws to accommodate it. It kept a small bit of the money that the operators of the Red Sandy Fork MTR site mad, and at least its football team, if not its school, was funded. It was a land of off-brand Dollar Generals: TruSave, GreenbucksXPress, and the town’s one independent gas station, the Holler Dollar, famous because it had a cake lady and homemade boiled peanuts and a Slushie machine and farm fresh eggs and local minnows – and, though it wasn’t quite in West Virginia, homemade pepperoni rolls (from a Fairmont transplant) on Fridays. It also didn’t put that ethanol crap in its gasoline, so everybody preferred it to the Exxon. And, maybe more miraculous of all, though it wasn’t a chain and thouse the deli closed at seven, it was open all night every night except Christmas and Easter. None of this, perhaps, is extremely important, except that it was at the Holler Dollar where Radney was when he first saw the ball.

Radney was, and had always been, the quiet, unassuming, happy go lucky, take him home to Momma, typical All-American kid from the small town, Main Street, just folks, every day people, born in the USA, sleepy little town where nothing ever happened till it did and when it did everybody already knew about it hours before it go on the radio or morning paper or the TV news. His favorite food was Nabs. His favorite thing to do was mud in trucks. He worked – day shift on road maintainence for the county. He was going to school – night school in electrical technology at the community college. And he had never before killed anything he considered sentient, a word he knew but would never of course use. The worst that you could say about him was that he had a little bit of McMurphy’s vices, that he liked to fight and fuck. In fact, on the night in question, he had come all the way back from Versailles, where he’d spent a few hours with a discrete tax attorney who was a fan of college men. So needing a drink and some kind of packaged meal and a new pack of Durexes for his wallet, he pulled in and got him some peanuts and lay down to eat in the back of his pickup (on the blanket and pillows he’d stashed in the back seat just in case).

Archetype, except for the lights at the gas station and on the street corners, doesn’t make a lot of light pollution, so even from the edge of the parking lot he could see the height was of what he soon remembered was the Perseids. And because some of those streaks burned a little green or a little blue, and because the occasional one would linger in its trail for a little while, for a little while he didn’t think that what he saw top over the hill across the road was any different. But then he realized it was slow, and that it didn’t die away.

It had no tail.

It pulsed.

It made a sound.

Radney had heard in school about ball lightning, so he thought from the first that this was what he was seeing – certainly not any kind of ET or UFO. The thing was green and the sound of it was electrical, somewhere between a transformer’s buzz and the crack of putting an old appliance in an old outlet and watching the little blue sparks almost fire up. It followed, almost, the sloping contour of the hill, and bounced almost as if it were a solid thing and bouncing on the ground. It was the color of green your spit is after chewing on a wad of grass.

And it wasn’t a hallucination. Beth Ann, the night attendent, had noticed it too, and was standing off near Radney’s truck trying to get a picture of it on her cell phone.

“Mars invades!” he hollered over at her.

“Aw, don’t say that. You’re going to get me scared.”

“You know all that thing is, don’t you?” he asked her.

“Well, no!”

“All it is is that transformer on the hill behind it got struck by lightning near it or something when it stormed earlier. It happens, you just don’t see it all the time. It’s kind of like the electric wire farted.”

Well, flatulence or visitation or haunting or other natural phenomena, Beth Ann’d finally got a good enough video of it that in a couple of days she’d got a couple hundred likes for it on Facebook. A reporter from the Mountain Eagle out in Whitesburg even came and did a little story on it. She interviewed both witnesses, and though Radney’s mother didn’t like his little farting line (“Do you always have to cuss in every sentence?”), she was happy at least that someone didn’t come across, as she put it, as the crop circled hillbilly farmer.

“I know it’s jut the paper in Letcher County, but did she really have to say she was ‘real scared like’? I mean, come on.”

“Yes, my mother is now Strunk and White.”

“Radney, you know what I mean.”

“I’m not getting in this again.”

“Well, you will if you want to get a job when you get out of college.”

“Yeah, they’re really going to worry about my grammar in east Kentucky.”

“Well, they will when you go to Cincinatti.”

“And who said I was going there?”

“You did that night.” Somebody had left his condoms on top of the dryer when they’d last washed his jeans, but neither of them’d actually talked about it directly.

Before he saw the ball of light, Radney had never harbored any conspiracy theories. He didn’t have a story about the chip that had been put in him by aliens the night they lasered the balls off his cattle. He did not have nor hold any fears about the Europeans expanding their Union worldwide and forcing him to take the Mark of the Beast – his family was Methodist, not Baptist. He didn’t think a lot about the moon landing, but when he did he assumed the thing had happened; and he’d never thought about whether the Mafia or Johnson or Hoover or Castro killed Kennedy. Marilyn Monroe did not have a butterfly tattoo, and Jimi Hendrix was not the propaganda tool of MK-Ultra. Kris Kristofferson was not a lizard. The gold in Fort Knox was not food for aliens. And anything Don Blankenship did he did in broad daylight.

He had seen the ball. And though it was not made by a man in any way he’d ever heard or had been made known of before, and though in its way it astounded him – it was rare and ephemeral and in a very real way sublime – he felt he knew enough to understand it. As it wavered and wobbled and shot up and out and left and down and back up in the sky, a brilliant green electrically crackling against the new moon, he didn’t think at all that it was supernatural, or alien, or governmental.

But someone else did.

About a week after the report in the Mountain Eagle, Radney found an unaddressed letter snuck behind the visor in his pickup. It was typed, with no indication of who had sent it or how they got it in his truck:

Though I cannot tell you why at this junction, and though I must keep my identity masked at this point in time, you need to know that you have found a friend in your situation – which is more precarious and illoquacious than you could possibly imagine – and that I mean to give you in this endeavor my full support and succour and supplementation. This I say because I have reason to believe that you are not an agent of the elite imperial corporatists, nor are you under the manipulation of American military or intellegence sources – though you are, whether you choose to believe this or not, a certain target of their surveilance as a result of what you saw on the night of the Perseids. When you talked about the event you saw, you I am sure thought you spoke reasonably, and by the knowledge you have been allowed to receive through official channels, you did. But you will learn in time, young padowan, that the reasonableness of this world is the currency of cooptation. The facts of the rulers of this world are the bricks in a prison of lies. We are dealing with reptilian minds, snake people; you, my friend – it is time to examine the mind of the gecko, to learn its inner workings and verisimilitudinies. There are those such as myself, thought insane in this world (but not insane in the eyes of Truth!), who have learned the truth which is the ignorance of fools and the Lord to the scoffers and sheeple of this world, to those under the control of the elites and their masters, whose identity you would not yet believe if I told you, who make the Masons and the Illuminati seem like bedtime stories in comparison. Yes, though you believe me or not, what you saw was not of this world, but of Zeta Reticula. It was a probe of the Grays, alien beings who are the servants of the rulers of this world, the Nibirians, reptilian beings from a planet far away from this galaxy who control the elite of this world, exchanging technology for the precious metals and other resources of this planet, rare and desired throughout the cosmos. They have marked you out; I know not yet why, but keep your head on a swivel. Stay true. You have friends, but you also have enemies. Stay alert. When the time is right, I will contact you again. Do not try to find me. I make myself as dust in the sky, darker and softer than night. This is the only way.

“You’re an asshole,” Radney texted his friend Amy, who was the first person he thought’d try and pull something like that – the only friend he had who knew that many words and knew how to jerry rig a door lock.

But no dice.

“Thanks, mommy’s little bitch,” she wrote him back, obviously knowing nothing about the letter (they would always call each other horrible things for fun).

And nobody else he talked to knew about it, either, though they all assumed it had to be a joke. Nobody, not even a dope head, could be that stupid.

But apparently somebody was, because a few days later, he got another note – same envelope, same place, same typing:

Sorry, man, to come off so strange before. I had to put a little disinformation in my letter, just to make sure if the wrong person saw it they’d think it was just a joke. I honestly didn’t know if you were with the government. But nothing came up, so I think you’re clear. A lot of what I wrote you in that last letter was bullshit, but one part of it was true: I don’t believe that what you saw was just ball lightning, and I don’t think it was any other kind of accident, either. I’m what some people call a UFOlogist, somebody who studies strange sightings to find out if they’re from outer space or the military or just really are weather balloons. What you saw was part of what we call a cluster; I don’t know if you know it or not, but on the same night as your sighting, there were at least fifteen other ball lightning reports in the eastern United States. That’s a really high number – really, really high. What’s more: almost all of them took place near military sites or industrial mines. Just like in Archetype. What this suggests to me is military experimentation. What into, I’m not sure. But my feelers are telling me it isn’t good – this sci ops stuff can be serious bad mojo, man. There are some fucked up people in sheep’s clothing, and that’s the truth. I’d like to stake them out. Would you be interested in helping me? If you are, call in sick next for next Friday at work, and meet me that morning at the Waffle House in London.

Radney, of course, went.

Surprise of surprises, the guy was real and, surprise of surprises, was actually named Dale. And while he didn’t have jars of Mountain Dew in his basement labled “Alien Urine,” nor did he keep pet racing turtles or smoke Manitobas, he was a skinny man in a baseball cap with his shortwave/AM tuned in to reruns of Art Bell. There was no way Dale should have been alive, much less this skinny. He ate no proper meals, and lived it seemed 100 percent on convenience store snacks: Combos, Riesens, half pound bags of praline pecans or dried mangos. And when Radney was driving, full Big Gulps of crushed ice and Mad Dog 20/20.

And the guy, while nice enough – he really was – in the three hours Radney had known him, still would not shut the hell up. “Now some people’ll look at me, and, as Barney Fife’d say, say ‘there goes one happy NUT,’ but I’m telling you, hand on my Bible, what I’m telling you tonight are facts,” Dale said, drinking a fourth cup of coffee while Radney tried to finish his omelet. “Bush knew, Johnson knew, Reagan knew I’m sure. Now Carter didn’t, and I don’t think Clinton did at first, though he does now – they didn’t come up bluebloods. Remember, man: the government’s full of all different kinds of people. And some of them are even alright. But the ones with the real money, there’s enough of them to pull enough strings to keep everybody else in line. You think this is about crop circles and farmers getting tubes up their buff? Oh, no. This is about oil, and war, and money. You see they know two things: we know just enough about the alien’s stuff that we could power everything – cars, houses, cities, every single bit of of electrical equipment in the world – without pollution or fuel or anything else. And the aliens will not have anything to do with us, no matter what we do, until we threaten them or come to complete world peace.”

There were, Radney and Dale came to find, no UFOs or orbs that night at the hot spot near the mounds at Chillicothe. “No matter,” Dale said. “It’s like fishing, anyway. Most of the time I just do it to spend the time. Excuse to eat out late at Bob Evan’s not have to make me anything when I get home.” So the two of them stopped at an all-nighter outside of Lexington, where Dale explained the relationship between Lockheed Martin, the Nordics, and the Trilateral Commission—using Splenda packs and ketchup bottles, of course. While he did, two truckers from Dayton came in and took the booth them. They were long haulers, both on their way to Brunswick, GA on the Hillbilly Highway.

“I hate driving through Kentucky. I’m always afraid I’m going to get stopped on the side of the road and buttfucked by Leroy,” the one trucker said.

“By your uncle! At a condo! In Gatlinburg!” said the other, and they both laughed.

Apparently Radney in his plaid and Dale in his Hank Williams, Jr. ballcap didn’t set off any radar in the men – or maybe it had, who knew? For Radney’s part, he didn’t see much difference between an Indiana truckstop with Fox News on in the background and a Tennessee truckstop with Fox News on in the background. One had better pie by a bit, and one had better gravy, but nothing else was really all that different.

Radney nudged Dale with in the arm with the bread basket.

“Hey, man.”

“Yeah, man?”

“Fuck Deliverance.”

“Yeah. Fuck Deliverance.”

The two truckers were still sitting there, eating ice cream, when Dale and Radney got their checks and got up to go. Radney walked up to the one:

“Buddy, I wouldn’t worry too much about old Leroy. You got about ten pounds to drop before you could get the old boy up.”

“Did I ask your opinion, friend?” the trucker answered.

“No, you’re right, I suppose you didn’t.”

“Well?” he answered again, noding Dale toward the door.

“Alright, then,” Dale answered, and he and Radney left the restaurant. But just as Dale was opening the door, he turned around one last time to the men and tuned up his air banjo.

“Ting-ta-ting-ting, ting ting ting!”

Radney didn’t hear from Dale for a few days after they got back, but he figured that was just what came in the package of eccentricities starter kit. But when, having gone on the UFO siting sights Dale had led him to, and having seen two sightings, repeatedly reported, in southern Ohio in the three days since they’d got back, and no word or sign or sight of Dale to tell him about it, Radney got worried. When he went to Dale’s apartment to check on him, he found a sticky note on the door with Dale’s truck key taped to it:

Go to the big hill past the gate to Warren Frye’s deer blind. What you will see you cannot unsee. But you have to go. I can’t say anymore. It would take too much to explain.

            Stay safe. My gun is in the back. It’s yours now.

            Your friend, Dale. I’m sorry I can’t say more. I’m can’t be safe here now.

            Okay, so maybe the son of a birch had absolutely lost his mind. Maybe this was the most elaborate Halloween prank anybody had ever pulled on him. Maybe this was intergallactic snipe hunting. But—the story was too interest, and Dale was too interesting, and too much of what he had said had been too out there for somebody that was just off it to be able to say it so well.

So Radney got Dale’s gun out of his truck and drove there, that night, just like the note told him to.

And he snuck up in there hoping to God he wasn’t going to get ambushed or have the county cops run by thinking he was checking on a still or some BS. None of the parts of any of it fit together, and none of it had a logic to it. But, hey—better to believe in something stupid than sit around like a log all day.

At least the logic behind why Dale thought it made sense. Aliens had to exist, Dale told him, because of Fermi’s paradox. And for aliens to get to earth, they would need to have energy sources beyond anything humans had. Certainly, certainly beyond coal and gas. The government and military knew about the aliens, and the aliens would like to make themselves revealed to humans so they could help them. But the government and military and the corporations won’t allow it, because it would destroy all of their power structures. And the aliens, well the aliens don’t interfere with people who don’t want to be interfered with, especially when they’ve got guns and nukes. Aliens might be advanced, but they can still get killed.

But the aliens, or at least of them, act like anybody from any group and go vigilante. They want human beings to know they aren’t alone. So they send messages, or they show up, or they abduct people (but since they’re not professionals they end up scaring or accidentlally hurting more people than they help), or any number of things to get folks attention. And they fuck with the military, and with the government, so that they can’t mess with the people but so much. Most of the aliens we encounter, Dale, theorized, are essentially high-tech Marxists.

Except for the few who aren’t. Aliens are are diverse as people, and just like there are vigilantes, there are sell-outs, aliens who would like to assume their own hold on power when a planet like Earth really is brought into the galactic fold. So some work with the government, some supply military secrets, some spy, and some kill people who know too much. This, Radney thought, was what Dale thought was about to happen to him.

Dale had told Radney he was a man who knew too much – too much about the Greys, too much about the Deep Web, too much about the shadow military government (and its connection to big energy). Sitting, knowing all of this in East KY, he was a marked man. And so before he got killed – in his own imagination – he’d fled. And now, Radney supposed, he was supposed to play the Padowan, and take up for Dale whatever work was going to lead him to this mountain, this night.

When Radney got to the top of the hill, there wasn’t nothing but damp and a windy sixty degrees that felt more like thirty-five. But the heater in his truck was good, and he didn’t have anywhere else to be, and if nobody had followed him or caught him there by now they weren’t going to do it the rest of the night, dark as it was. So Radney decided he’d take a nap, and let Dale or some chicken wake him up about dawn, and he’d head on back to the house and consider this whole wild goose of the past few weeks a good time he was just about done with.

But then, we he woke up, Dale wasn’t so crazy after all.

In fact, Dale was there.

Or at least his clothes were. Bloody, rumpled, and in the hands of a thing with three fingers that looked very much like what Dale had told him they were going to look like.

Radney was having a nightmare about the Greys, he realized, not so suprising being that’s all him and Dale’d talked about for the past week for so. But still, it was a little on the nose. Ttwo of them, in the headlights of the truck (now mysteriously turned on), buring Dale’s clothes with a human shovel. Well, since Radney was dreaming, Radney decided he might as well play along, pass the time until he actually woke up.

So he blew the horn. Neither of the Grey’s looked up.

So he reached for the gun, which was exactly in the dream truck where the real gun was, and opened the door.

“Hell, guys, what ya’ll doing up here so late?”

The little Grey turned to him and blinked, but then turned back to digging.

“I’m talking to you.”

He pumped the rifle and it clicked. Still nothing.

“Answer me, fuckers.”

Still nothing.

“Yeah, I know I’m a monkey to you,” Radney said, kicking up mast in the Grey’s direction, spitting at them.

The big Grey just stood there with its big eyes, not doing a thing.

“You gonna do something about it? What don’t you hit me? Why don’t you cut my nuts off? Why don’t you do something!?” Radney hollered, picking up a stick off the ground and throwing it at the big Grey.

The big Grey just stepped aside and blinked, and kept on standing there.

“Hey, hey man. Now a monkey’s going to kill your friend,” he said, and pointed the gun at the little one.

He was almost surprised at how cruel he could be in his dreams, when there were no consequences.

“Hell, I figured you didn’t have no balls to you.”

Radney put the barrel up to the little Grey’s neck, for what of that there was. He turned his head. He wheezed. It was the first kind of sound either one of the things had made.

“So what’s the little grey Picard man going to do? Pull his memory eraser out and I wake up thinking I was out hunting a buck tail, or is he going to abduct me and take me to space jail? Or is he just going to stand there and watch the monkey shoot his gun?”

The Grey picked number three.

The little one, the one with bigger eyes, clawed it feet around, like a dog goes, when it died. The other one, the one who chose, Radney shot in the back as it ran away, and it fell down flat without another step. The second that it fell, there was a bright flash in the sky directly over head, then a streak of light – but it headed off, wherever far away.

There would be no reinforcements.

Once Radney had convinced himself he hadn’t gone insane, that he was still dreaming, he squatted and examined the bodies. They had green blood, but not so thick as he’d expected. In fact, the meat inside of them was pink, and they even took on rigor mortis, just like humans. They stank like they had soiled themselves, but had no buttholes. But when Radney held his hand up to his face, which had been handling one, it smelled and felt like it was covered in cow dung. He had made the greatest discovery in all of human time – a race of green savants who toured the stars, but shat through every pore of skin.

And now here he was, a man who defended all mountaineers but had become, in one night, an expert in cruelty to outlanders. No horror movie could have been more stereotyped. No photographer from the city could have painted the place any worse. He wondered, when he woke up, if he could prey to Earl Scruggs for some forgiveness.

So he called in the sour Southern warden, wary of everyone. And when he got there, Radney found out that the warden already knew.

“These coyotes have been rotting a long time, haven’t they, Radney?”

“These ain’t rotten, buddy. Look again.”

“I know what they are. So: these coyotes have been rotten a long time, haven’t they, Radney?”

“I don’t see nothing rotten.”

“Listen, man. You need to understand what I’m saying. These coyotes. Have been rotting. A long time. You don’t have no other choice, man. That’s it.”

“Fuck you.”

“I know, man. I know,” the warden backed off. “I know it’s messed up.”

“Well, how fucked am I?”

“You’re not. How many boys in East Kentucky say they saw the sasquatch? How many of those boys go missing? You’re good, man.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“You’re gonna do something for me, though, and then you’re good.”

“What’s that?”

“Erase the pics off your phone and give it to me.”

Radney didn’t want to do that.

“You’ll get a new one in the mail. You broke this one.”

“Did Dale break his?” Radney asked, although he finally handed the warden the phone.

“You sure you don’t want to erase nothing?” the warden answered?

“I’m good, man.”

“Alright, then.”

“Is Dale good?”

“You know, I think it’s getting a little cold on this mountain, man. I think we ought to get on back to town.”

“Yeah, man. I guess we ought to.” Radney left Dale’s gun, and didn’t turn his back on the warden as he walked back to the truck.

Radney drove for a hour, he didn’t know in what direction, before the nerves wore down, and he’d calmed down enough to cry and throw up a bit. He noticed after a while his hands were still stained with dry green gunk and they still smelt a bit like poop. With the window down, it was warmer than before, strangely for that time of night that time of year. The moon was setting, but full, and the clouds had pulled back, and Radney could see as he came over the ridge, the moonscape that was scattered over east Kentucky. The whole sky smelled like cold oysters, and though he still had the green stain like the gunk of chartruese worms dug deep under his fingernails, he had to admit that the night was lovely, even the razed hills almost lovely in their perverse way.

He realized now – what he had just done, he had actually done. There was no dream. This was the world. And then he wondered if he had any friends in any other towns; none of them knew, and he knew he couldn’t tell a one of them. So he wondered if it would, in fact, be all good. He needed lye soap to wash this damn mess out. And his mother, whether he told her the true story or made any other story up, would assume he’d just taken up pills. But Stacy, Stacy didn’t ask a lot of questions. So he turned toward her house in Versailles, took the second turn to the left and went on till morning.

He turned on the radio to make some sound.

A woman calling herself Sally Dillinger (West of the Rockies) wasn’t believing the subcommitte report, and said she had in her possession a drawing of the creature’s ship she was able to recall in hypnotherapy. Art Bell did not believe her description of its headlight third eye or octopus tentacles, or its Nordic telepath ambassador, who, with power and prowess set her and a set of children on tables, and for unknown reasons took samples of their vital fluids, replaced them with a kind of snow, and let them rest, organs open and unenestitized, on tables like floating surfboards.

“They can do this because we do not have citizenship in their government!” the woman tells the local host, who says he is copying her on an email to an expert in these matters, who shares her theory of intergalactic sentient rights offenses. “What people don’t understand is that I don’t have an aluminum helmet;

I wouldn’t have believed this either if it hadn’t happened. Our U.S.A. President, our Pentagon, our whole government knows aliens are real, but I’m telling you Dave they’re all playing a shell game with the American people; this is why: if your mother was a witch, wouldn’t she want you to think that she was the most powerful one of all? This President of ours goes out bowling on our tax money and his Secret Service officers binge on cable porn in hotels in Rio de Jineiro; and this whole time they know – and we know they know, because Israel has told them – that Iran has been negotiating with these aliens to gain a strategic position in the Middle East. Dave, I’m telling you now there will be wars and the rumors of wars.”

“Now that may sound like the most absolutely craziest thing you have ever heard if your life, but I want your listeners to think on then: if Iran isn’t going to be able to build a bomb, then why are they so eager to sign this bill? They know if they can weaken our position internationally, not only will they get relief from international sanctions, but the aliens will supply them with nuclear energy. I mean, who needs a bomb when you have an internstellar sugar daddy?”

“I’m telling you, Dave, this country did not become a superpower because we won World War II. The being we are holding at Area 51 – and I have this is good authority – is considered by other civilizations

to be the finest scientific mind in the entire quadrant. All attempts to weaken America in the past fifty years – every war, every terrorist attack, every confrontation – have been orchestrated, by both terrestrial and extraterrestial forces, to steal him. Abduction and experimentation of American citizens is merely one tool these powers use. We think we can beat them, Dave. But we’re getting too cocky.”

None of it still made any sense. None of it still added together to anything at all. Everything he heard still sounded preposterous. But now he was proposterous, too, and any violence and cruelty he had shown wasn’t the violence and cruelty of his own isolated exception, of his own isolated place. Violence and cruelty were a language in the galaxy, and power was a language there as well. It was hard enough for people to be kind when the earth was the end of the map. But now he was caught green-handed, marked as a citizen of the universe. This was not Deliverance. This was not Kentucky. This was the whole lot of Earth, and as Radney drove on to Versailles, he wondered if behind him there was an angel holding a flaming sword against the other lane of the highway.

Matt Prater is a poet and writer from Saltville, VA. Winner of both the George Scarbrough Prize for Poetry and the James Still Prize for short story, his work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in many regional journals, including Appalachian Heritage, Appalachian Journal, Now & Then, and Still; as well as national and international journals, including The Honest Ulsterman and The Moth. He is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Tech.