The Day the Traffic Stood Still

For weeks there had been an unusual increase in activity in the night sky, which had begun to leak into daytime; massive meteors, fiery shooting stars and UFOs were reported every day, and crowds of people were leaving urban areas for mountains, coastal and forest regions, causing chaos in all kinds of traffic. Holding its breath, sky a tense diaphragm, Earth prepared for an alien onslaught: red clouds gathered, birds flocked, and animals stalked empty city parks and streets.

Ray and Jessica had seen it all from their tenth floor flat in South London, where they had been hiding since everything came to a standstill, and they were now watching a television news flash, aghast at the alien space ships landing in Trafalgar Square, Times Square and other similar spaces in cities across the globe. The question on everyone’s lips was: what happens next?

Kim M. Russell, 14th August 2023

Image by Matthew Browne on Unsplash

I’m hosting Prosery at the dVerse Poets Pub, when we write very short pieces of prose that tell a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end, in any genre, with a limit of 144 words, including a complete line from a poem, which must be included somewhere in the story, of any genre of our choice, within the 144-word limit.

Being a fan of the late Irish poet Seamus Heaney, I thought I would choose a line from his debut collection, Death of a Naturalist: the vivid poem ‘Twice Shy’, which explores the blossoming relationship of a young couple taking an ‘embankment walk’. The line I chose is:

 ‘Traffic holding its breath,
Sky a tense diaphragm’

37 thoughts on “The Day the Traffic Stood Still”

  13. This is a great piece of sci-fi. An intriguing base to expand on the story in the future. I would certainly read it. I read NASA has been picking up unusual sound waves out there in the universe.

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    1. Thank you, Truedessa. It had gone quiet for a while and I hadn’t read anything about alien life and UFOs. I’ve just started reading a book by Matt Haig called The Humans, in which an alien comes to Earth.

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