Most faces were kept behind glass ? those too scared to venture into the city streets.

    Yet they yearned for the outside, with their mooning faces stuck to the inside of the windows like posters... seeking sights, often locking on to others of their kind in the windows opposite, then tracking the movements of those diminished souls who did brave the urban phobias, watching with, at best, clouded eyes.

    The streets grew empty, the streets grew dark and, even come the mornings, the streets only grew vaguely less empty, only vaguely less dark.  As the cold closed in, too, the windowfolk’s smeary ears could only hear the oil-slicks upon the seas of white noise.

    The people behind such faces were realistic & tended to condemn the art of imagination.  And upon a dreadful morning, one such face, belonging to Hiram, saw, through the scattering of cushiony clouds, a seemingly endless tongue of metal.  He automatically assumed that it was a dream, otherwise his imagination would run away with itself.

    In actual fact, the phenomenon was an alien spacecraft, but who had ever heard of a spacecraft actually joined to its mother planet Light Years away?  That was a universal question fit to beat the combined brains of a thousand top notch philosophers.  It stood to reason that Hiram was not one such.  However, he was man enough for most normal processes of the mind, but the softness inside his head certainly had to go into over-drive.  He pointed, along with the other faces, and stated quite baldly to himself: “It’s a blow job! It’s a blow job!”

    Nothing ? not even a joke ? could make the world seem a sunnier place.

    He looked imploringly towards another face, another of his kind, in the bedroom window of the house opposite... in some attempt, no doubt, to cross-check.

    One wild Wednesday, it was, with winds of snow traveling up the river to the conurbation as if on a conveyor-belt.  The windowfolk were settling in for a seemingly endless ice-watch, when the playing of out-staring competitions with each other across the city squares was the most amusement for which any could lightly hope ? and, even then, all of them secretly yearned to lose such competitions without making it too obvious.

    Tania, who owned the face with which Hiram’s face had cross-checked, had seen the endless tongue of metal, too.  But she was one of the few who still held some semblance of free thought ? a mind untrammeled by the scaremongering media ? and she wondered:

    Did Aliens build the “tongue” as a space elevator & just kept on going?

    Was the “tongue” real, no more or no less than what it seemed?

    Or was it a rainbow bridge for poets to get steamed up about?

    Or a conduit between a dream she was dreaming to a dream dreamt by someone else?

    Or the only computer virus that could exist outside a computer?

    As Tania’s thoughts grew wilder & wilder, the weather became less so.

    Faces that were kept behind the frost-mapped glass in a blind state were quickly warmed with their own flames of sight switched on from some spigot in the soul.

    Indeed, the snow had already turned to sleet and, now, to a fast laced rain in which the endless tongue of metal was seen licking the gutters...

    “Singing in the rain, I’m singing in the rain, what a glorious feeling...” a deep voice thundered from the sky, tingling the facefolk’s newly pricked-up ears, the window-glass cleaning itself not only of the frost but of its smears of sound proofing, too.

    And many voices joined in with the chorus.

    Hiram and Tania, who had exchanged cold glances for many years across the street, now blew French kisses.

    The spacecraft captain, his mission accomplished, pulled the hyper-reverse lever and...

    NOT THE END BUT SIMPLY A HUGE BLACK HOLE