Gareth D Jones
“What’s wrong?” asked the tall, strange man.
The little girl looked up from where she sat snivelling beneath an ancient oak. She regarded the man in the way of young children, without fear or prejudice, just accepting him for what he was: a very tall man with a bizarrely twisted face.
“My air-plane,” she pointed.
The man looked up to see a flimsy plastic aircraft tangled in the high branches of the tree. He stretched up to reach it, his body growing taller and taller and becoming unfeasibly thin. His face distorted into an even more grotesque visage. He picked the aeroplane carefully from among the branches and his body recoiled back to its regular size.
“Get away from her!” a panicked voice screamed. He looked round to see the child’s mother running across the park towards them. Sadly he placed the little plane on the ground a couple of feet in front of the girl, stepped back a pace and raised his hands placatingly. He knew it was no use; his kind would never be accepted. As the woman drew closer he bent over, grasped his ankles and launched himself down the gentle slope of the mown field. His body formed into a rigid circle and he rolled swiftly away.
Smiling, the little girl picked up her toy and held it carefully to one side as her mother grabbed her off the ground and held her in a tight embrace.
Gareth is unofficially the second most widely translated SF short story author in the world.
Through the window Calum could see the pleasant grass lawn studded with brilliant buttercups, the trickling stream that bordered the garden and beyond that the soft, rolling hills that stretched into the distance. It was a vista of pure joy and relaxation that he never grew tired of.
“You’re doing it again!” The shrill, whining voice interrupted Calum’s reverie. He blinked and looked away from the window, briefly, at his haggard looking wife. “Why can’t you pay me half the attention you pay that, that window?!”
Calum shrugged slightly and turned back to the window.
“It’s all we have left,” he murmured, “all there is of Earth.”
A thin screech was all the warning he got as his wife advanced with a heavy saucepan and swung it with all her strength. The pan collided against the window with a sharp crack and the view disappeared in a haze of static and a spider web of cracks. A quiet electrical fizz was all that broke the stunned silence.
“What have you done?” Calum looked aghast at his wife, who stood there panting, pan held limply in one hand. “Now there’s nothing left. It’s all gone.”
Outside, through several feet of solid rock, the toxic wind howled across the barren landscape, blasted rock showing no sign that life had ever had a hold there.
Gareth is unofficially the second most widely translated SF short story author in the world.