“First Contact, Last Contact” — FWG Flash Fiction for 5/17/2025

With apologies to Mr. Wells.

The prompt is:

https://pixabay.com/photos/sunset-table-mountain-landscape-sky-5004905

FIRST CONTACT, LAST CONTACT

Ships sailed past the artifact daily, without a second glance. Even the inhabitants of the villages at its base gave no thought to the monument of hubris that cast a shadow upon their lives, both figuratively and literally, every day. The annual recitation of the mythical warnings had become a shadow of its former self, its meaning lost in the depths of time. Replaced, instead, by scary campfire stories.

One remnant of those warnings remained, however—the absolute prohibition against climbing the flat-topped mountain.

For most residents, the legends of deadly plagues brought on by those who did kept them huddled along the water’s edge. Not Yasmine and her brother Wen, however. For them, Mesa Morte was a mystery they needed to solve.

Ten years before, their widowed father disappeared. The morning he went missing, they found a pot of water boiling on the stove. At the bottom of the pot, was a shard of metal unlike anything they had ever seen before. Scratched onto its surface, among the otherwise incomprehensible symbols, was a message.

Climbed the mountain. Now feeling ill. Show this to no one.

***

Yasmine crested the plateau first, followed by Wen. They wore hazmat suits she stole from the hospital.

“It’s a spaceship.” Yasmine’s voice was muffled by the respirator.

“It can’t be human. Not from five hundred years ago.”

A derelict ship stood in a shallow bowl carved into the rock. The twins stood at the top of an amphitheater that surrounded it.

“This place is littered with bones.”

Wen pointed to a low altar facing the open airlock. “And not just human bones.”

Several alien skeletons lay on the altar, their spacesuits ripped open, stone knives embedded in their oddly shaped ribcages.

“Which came first, you think?” Yasmine mused. “The bugs or the knives?”

THE END