They came for us in the waning days of fall, while the last red leaves still fought for purchase upon the branches. Humanity had fooled itself with plucky underdog movies like Independence Day, but the Visitors proved too advanced. One by one they snatched us up in beams of light.
I hid for weeks, but eventually they caught me drinking from an old, mossy well and pulled me unceremoniously skyward.
Before I hit the clouds, my last vision of Earth was of the treetops. I couldn’t help but think how, from above, it looked like the world was on fire.
Thomas J. Griffin is a fiction lover and sumo wrestling enthusiast who lives in Nashville, Tennessee and writes out of an attic that could use more natural light. He is the editor of Flash Point SF and his own stories have appeared in such publications as Daily Science Fiction, The Arcanist, and Speculative North Magazine.
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