Post 1: Moon Spiders

Welcome to Gaslight Rambler, home of rampantly unpublished part-time writer Paul Spears. Here we have the leftovers, the little deaths, the minor earthquakes and tremors of a story that might be or a story that might have been. Flash fiction, chunks of memoir, the story of what happened when Bonnie and Clyde got Instagram. This is the spiritual zoo where we keep the psychedelia, the purple leopards with yellow spots and eyes like beetles.

Here, under glass, I stash the strangeness in my head.

Post #1: Craterface

There are things on the moon.

Put that away. No, you can't see them on Google! Open your mind. That's not how you see reality. You go in there, reality has already been taken from you. Invisible fingers scrabble up the evidence, scraping the images clean. You're never going to see anything online. I'm talking about the naked eye here. I'm talking extraterrestrial shit.

I'm talking moon spiders.

Yes, laugh. Go on, laugh. I like it when you laugh: it reminds me they haven't gotten to me yet. The ones who tell me I should have stayed on the funny farm, the ones who burnt my fingers with matches when I was six, they yes T H E Y have already been lobotomized. Don't ask me how--it's not my place to say!--but I bet if you opened up their skulls, the cranial orbs of the cacklers and hatemongers, you wouldn't find brains but some sort of slippery collection of artificially inserted tentacles. Don't you tell me what's crazy!

I know a thing or two about crazy.

The moon spiders. That's what we were talking about. Yes, I can see them. You can too with a powerful enough telescope. A piddly Orion patio tripod isn't going to do it--no, you need something bigger, something on the order of Hubble. A big beast, the kind NASA shits out like diamond-encrusted taxpayer-funded turds every now and then. Turn my money into an orbital bombardment satellite and call it a telescope, will you? That's all well and good but you might as well put a lens on the damn thing, you know what I'm saying?

You don't know what I'm saying. That's fine.

Anyway, if you can get remote access to one of these--it's easy, if you know the right people--you can zoom in on the lunar surface. Very bleak, very beautiful landscape, like Arizona or Nevada with all the color slurped out. The Midwest in grayscale, ha-ha. And if you can up the resolution on the images a little--of course they've got a digital feed, you don't really believe that it's not live and twenty-four-seven and watching us all constantly, right?--you can see them. My strange little friends.

They're quite busy creatures. They live in craters, mostly; I find their communal structure fascinating. They seem to have a modicum of intelligence, which is more than I can say for the humans I know. Ha! Most times they roll rocks into odd configurations, or skitter across the landscape like dainty little puffs of legs on spiny tendrils. I say 'spiders' but really they're much more like crabs, big crabs on the order of the Marianas Trench entities or the ugly bastards off the coast of Japan. They're quite agile due to the low gravity. How do they eat and breathe? Don't look at me, I'm not a biologist. God, you just don't listen at all, do you? I've told you this a thousand times, over and over: I'm a cryptozoologist. I study cryptids. You don't care, you just don't care. That's alright.

I'll make you understand.

Sometimes the little guys (I haven't come up with a name for them yet, but I will--I named the legless weasels of West Virginia after my sister, she was so sweet when she was alive) will put on a puppet show. I shit you not; this actually happens. It's fascinating. They'll drag out a space suit from some poor undocumented CIA astronaut or lost Soviet cosmonaut, they'll crawl inside that ripped fabric with the bloodstains still caked in (frozen solid for all time, of course, it's chilly on the moon) and they'll do a little dance. I don't know what the dance is called, exactly, but they seem to be having a pretty good time.

I suspect it's a jab at communication. Communication is so important, don't you agree? I would have communicated with people more, if they'd cared about me. About my work. I would have talked with my sister more often. I might have even talked to you, before you cut my funding and stole my satellite uplinks away. We could have had camaraderie, you and I. We could have been good buddies.

But we're not.

It's so peaceful here, I like it. Nobody to bother us, or make noise. Just us, and the moon spiders. And this is why I brought you: they've taken up art, lately. Scribbling designs across the lunar dust. Not tracks, designs--they're writing. A curious, alien foray into literature, scratched on dead gray particles for the whole world to see. And they're very committed to this project--they've covered several square kilometers already. It will only be a matter of time before the patterns become visible to the naked eye. What will NASA and the world government do, then? Mass mind-wipes? Theta ray bombardments? It seems so much trouble, just to hide a few invertebrates. I shudder at the thought of such misuse of public funds.

Why are they doodling up there, do you think? Documenting their history, perhaps? Their culture? Or maybe they're just tired of being ignored. Like all strange, creeping creatures living in ugly places, they feel the urge to come out and taste daylight occasionally. To push their boundaries. Much like myself, when you put me under duress.

You shouldn't prod the lesser creatures of the universe... We have a tendency to bite.

Place your eye against the telescope--yes, right there. The patterns will become visible quite soon. A few days at most. The adhesive on the viewfinder will keep your skin nice and snug, removing any chance of a missed sighting. Electric shocks will keep your eyes open, when I want them open. It will take a little while, but you'll see. I was right all along, don't you get it? The proof is out there, right over our heads! My vindication!

At long last, you'll truly see.