(Trembling with Fear, March 2018)

They called it an unexplained tragedy, but it wasn’t true. Seventy people dragged into the ground by the elongated fingers of blackened children encased below the asphalt. A massive black umbrella expanded overhead and manipulated the reality for the outsiders. We knew about them. They called them black sites. Vanishing places. Rewritten places. Horrid black icicles witnessed. I see hundreds of the biggest from orbit. I’m the only cosmonaut that has ever breached into space. They apparently sent no more. Apparently seeing the black umbrellas from a distance tethers me to the glitch enough to see the loops evolve forever.