Toward Silver Spires

Isaac was too young to remember much of the invasion. He remembered the adults being worried, everyone speaking in hushed, frantic voices while emergency broadcasts filled the television, and unwashed proselytizers on street corners holding signs pronouncing “The End is Nigh”. His parents sent him to bed early so that they could huddle close to the TV, watching the nightly news report with the kind of religious devotion previously reserved for Sunday morning services. He remembered tension palatable in the air, so strong that even the playground lost its interest, though few children knew why the tension was there. Those that did didn’t come to school anymore.

There were riots shown on the TV every day. The big cities were in turmoil. The aliens looked just like us, the reporters said. They could be anyone. Suspicion swept the nation and no one was sure who they could trust. Was the stranger on the bus an average joe or one of their new overlords come to spy on them? There were new rules for behavior, new laws put in place while old laws were broken, but none of that mattered much in backwater Idaho where Isaac grew up. His parents had raised him to have manners, and to his young, impressionable mind that was all the new rules were – manners and respect and being a better society.

He remembered getting out of school for a month, which had been great until school started up again and classes stretched into the summer to make up for lost time. He remembered sitting in Mrs. Engel’s English class in the sweltering heat with all the windows open because the school’s air conditioning had broken for the third time that month and staring out at the shiny silver spires rising up in the distance. The spires were the landmarks of a new era, but they also felt a bit like hope. They were the signs of the new order that pulled their society out of political chaos.

Whole governments had been uprooted and in distance places like New York City and Toronto, people were fighting, trying to win the world back in what would prove to be an exhausting, futile effort. But for the little people, like his mom and dad, who cared for little beyond putting their time in at the factory and the paycheck that resulted, life went on much the same.