Observations of The Urban Spaceman 
Adam yawned, lifted his arms out to the sides of his body and felt the pull of his muscles in a pleasant stretch. The sun’s heat warmed him and draped a veil of sleepiness over his mind. He resisted the sandman’s lure; there would be time for sleep later. Right now, he had a job to do.
The fire raged hotter; its flames, they grew
Consuming plant life old and new
The birds all flew, and beasts—they ran
a deadly race since time began
No water tamed the searing flames
Reduced were forests, to bare plains
Such mighty giants brought to their knees
Above the slumbering redwood seeds.
.
My take on today’s daily WordPress blog prompt: Devastation
Her painted face lies
No movement to betray thought
The ground accepts her
It’s Friday, and inkeeping with terrible world events currently transpiring, Chuck Wendig of terribleminds asks us to write about hope. So, simply, this is a story about hope.
Hope’s Fire
They took it all. Everything we owned. Our land, our homes, our possessions. Heirlooms passed down from mother to daughter and father to son. They took first the things which were tangible. Useful. Our wealth became their greed, and they squandered what they stole.
Next they took our ideas, but our ideas were not squandered; they were warped. Peace became war. Knowledge became power. Freedom became slavery. They learnt from us, and they exploited us. They struck when we least expected it, and before we knew it, our way of life was no more.
They took our words. Our books burned, our language banned. Hundreds of years’ worth of history, condemned to smoke. The ash of our funeral pyres became the ash of our traditions. We sang no more songs to the wind; offered no more prayers to the spirits of snow and sunlight. The moon passed through our sky un-blessed by our chants.
In iron they chained us to their fields, calloused old hands guiding the flesh of youth. This is how the soil is tilled. This is how the seeds are sown. The harvest is handled thus. Once masters of our land, we were mastered in turn by thieves.
But songs live on. We tell stories to our children of days long ago; days in which we were free, in which we sang to the wind and prayed to the sun and chanted our prayers to the moon. They have taken our land, our possessions and our ideas, but they cannot take the flame of hope which quietly burns inside our hearts. In our bodies we are chained, but in our minds we are free. One day, the embers of hope will fan, and a wildfire will rage across this world. We wait for that moment; for the moment in which we will rise up and live again.
Into silence, breathe
BUZZZZ—my cell phone summons me
The moment ruined
“It’s 1926, and New York City has been gripped by a spate of unexplained killings. But MACUSA are closing in on the killer, and two young boys from Brooklyn are about to witness a magical event that will forever change the way they see the world.”
…or, The Urban Spaceman writes a ‘Captain America’/’Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ fanfiction crossover!
Disclaimer stuff: Captain America and all related characters are owned by Marvel. Fantastic Beasts… and all related characters are the property of J.K. Rowling. This story is strictly for funsies and not written for profit or remuneration of any sort. The resized image below is © Anthony Quintano, reused under the terms of CC 2.0
Fantastic Heroes and Where to Find Them
Lights flashed and smoke flew and Steve Rogers pressed his frail body further back into the underground service tunnel as his jaw fell open at the sight of the battle raging before him. “Don’t play in the subway!” Mrs. Barnes had told them time and time again, but he and Bucky couldn’t help themselves; they loved sneaking onto the trains too much to give it up. It was the best way to see new sights, and Steve was definitely seeing something new right now. Read More
On Fridays, Chuck Wendig takes a moment out of his busy schedule of writing, parenting and defying time itself, to distract his many fans with a Flash Fiction challenge. This week’s challenge is to write something that scares you.
This isn’t an easy one for me. The usual phobias (rats, mice, snakes, bugs, heights, depths, open spaces, small spaces, clowns, ventriloquist dolls, the Dread Lord Cthulhu) don’t apply (though I’m not fond of gerbils). My fears tend to be a little more visceral: “Oh shit, I took that corner too fast on my bike and nearly ended up with me and my Kawasaki strewn all over the road!” But that one’s kinda manageable (slow down on that corner, idiot) and not so much something that scares me, as a niggling concern for my health and my bike.
So, this is what I came up with.
(Warning: due to the implied violence, some readers may find this short story distressing. Please use your discretion if you believe reading about a violent/victim situation may have a negative impact on your mental health.)
Read More
Fear is… waking in the middle of the night with your heart racing because something cold just brushed up against your hand. Switching on your lamp, finding the area clear, and putting the experience down to a strange dream you were having about Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
Fear is… hearing a small sound, like something dropping down from your bed onto the floor. Thinking, “Hmm, I’ll check the vivarium, just to make doubly sure everything is still where it’s supposed to be.”
Fear is… finding the door of the vivarium open by well over an inch, and your almost 2ft long California Kingsnake gone.
Fear is… putting on clothes and switching on every light in the vicinity, because you have no idea where your snake has gone, and the idea of a nude snake-hunt in the dark is entirely unappealing.
Fear is… not knowing if you’ll find your snake before it either: 1) Finds some dark nook to slither into and spends the rest of the winter hibernating in, 2) Finds some way under the floor and down into the foundations where it will be irretrievable and will freeze to death in the winter cold, 3) Finds some way to leave the room and seeks out your Malshi puppy or your half-blind, half-deaf, twenty year old cat.
Fear is… finding your missing snake, putting it back in its vivarium, returning to bed—still fully clothed, because GAH!—and wondering whether the snake will manage to perform another feat of Great Escapery.
Fear is… lying in bed wondering how a 1.5cm wide snake managed to open an almost 2 inch gap in its vivarium door in the first place, and whether it’s worth investing in a new vivarium… one with a deadbolt. And a padlock. And a keypad with a retinal scanner.
Fear is… considering the possibility that your house may be haunted by a malevolent poltergeist.
Fear is… wondering if you’ll ever dare sleep in the buff again.
This story was inspired by last night. And to give it a happy ending…
The antonym of fear is “cute puppy wearing Christmas outfit.”
You may now say, “D’awwww!”
It happened when we least expected it. The literary Apocalypse. The end of all wor—
Glorken
The Urban Spaceman
Observations of The Urban Spaceman 
Things humans said