Therapy Bits

Thanks to Fandango for setting the challenge! If you’d like to also join in click this link!

Fandango’s Story Starter #214 – Facts, Fictions & Fantasies

The city’s traffic lights started blinking in Morse code, spelling out a warning almost no one could understand.

At first, commuters thought it was just another glitch in the overworked grid. Cars honked, pedestrians cursed, and delivery drones hovered uncertainly above the intersections. Only one man on the corner of Seventh and Vine noticed the rhythm.

Arthur Kane, retired radio operator, froze with his grocery bag dangling at his side. He hadn’t heard Morse in years, but the patterns still lived in his bones. Dot-dot-dot. Dash-dash-dash. Dot-dot-dot. A chill crept over him. The lights were screaming SOS.

He scribbled on his receipt with a pen, tracking the blinks. The message repeated across intersections like a synchronized heartbeat: GET BELOW. DANGER ABOVE.

Arthur’s pulse spiked. He glanced skyward. The sky looked ordinary enough—gray with a hint of late-afternoon sun. Planes traced their usual paths. But if the grid was talking, something was very wrong.

He tried shouting to those nearby, waving his arms. “It’s a warning! Underground!” A few people stared, but most ignored him, assuming he was another eccentric muttering conspiracies.

Then the noise began. A low, metallic hum rolled across the city, so deep it rattled the glass in shop windows. Dogs began howling. Drones dropped from the air, their systems scrambled.

Arthur bolted for the subway entrance. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw others finally looking up. The clouds weren’t clouds anymore. They were unraveling, thinning to reveal vast, hexagonal patterns glowing with sickly light. Something enormous shifted above them, bending the sky like a curtain.

Panic erupted. People screamed, stampeding toward the underground. Arthur pushed through the chaos, his heart hammering. The traffic lights continued their desperate code, urging faster, faster.

In the dim tunnel of the subway, he pressed against the tiled wall, panting, clutching his groceries as though they might tether him to normalcy. Overhead, the humming grew louder, and then there was a sound like glass shattering on a cosmic scale.

The last thing he saw before the emergency shutters sealed was a fragment of the sky peeling back to reveal something vast, many-eyed, and watching.

The lights had tried to save them. Only a handful had listened.