Sitting in his easy chair, Henry watches it all with an incredulous, frightened look on his pitted moonscape of a face.  In the darkened kitchen, the television-glow surrounds him like an aura, pooling around his head in a halo.  He takes another drag off his Winston and rubs the stubble clinging to his chin.  The camera pans back.  Emergency personnel.  Strobe lights and disoriented chaos.  People scurrying like ants.  When the angle is generous enough Henry sees that a full-grown man is no bigger than one of the things’ toes.  He glances back down at the ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen. 

            The statues are in Paris, around the base of the Eiffel Tower and blocking traffic along the Champs-Elysees.  Shepherds in the Scottish Highlands have spotted the carven giants, their upper halves disappearing into the mists high above.  They’ve been found in every quarter of the planet since the sun pierced this morning’s horizon and made it bleed.  It’s impossible to fathom how these stone figures got here overnight.  Some are standing snug against the facades of buildings or next to two-hundred-year-old trees. 

Many are so tall they disappear into the atmosphere somewhere around waist-level.  They seem to be wearing sandals and long robes.  Some bear suggestions of wings.  “Stone angels,” the press calls them.  Helicopter pilots and people in skyscrapers have seen the statues’ faces, described as almost cherubic, but with disproportionately large, vacant eyes.  Eyes left without pupil or cornea by whatever sculpted them.  Henry finds the shaky footage of the things horrifying.  Snuffing his cigarette out, Henry wonders if there’s any connection to the sounds he heard in the sky this afternoon, coming simultaneously from the gray clouds and beyond them.  A strange hybrid of elephant, writhing metal, and Tibetan horn.  His skin crawls with the memory.

            Then the power cuts out and Henry jumps.  As the afterimage fades from the television screen and his eyes adjust to the darkened room, he notices that the night sky outside his windows is actually quite light, and growing brighter.  He feels around the shelf next to him and grabs his old transistor radio.  Switching it on, he fumbles with the dial, searching for the A.M. news stations.  But there are no stations.  Just a vacant soft-static drone with a high-pitched whine behind it, the same across the entire band.  He swallows, his pulse quickening.  Luminescence steals through the windows now.  It looks almost like sickly daylight.  And then a voice breaks through the radio’s hum.  A child’s voice, or a young woman’s, slightly fuzzy around the edges, almost insectile.  It speaks in English.  Henry just has time to notice that the voice actually sounds like someone who is imitating English, repeating a word, a name, because they know the meaning but not the language.  It’s a single word, spoken as a question:  “Mother?”  The light that pushes through the windows now is beyond daylight; it’s blinding.  Pure, searing white light that somehow isn’t white at all.