I’ve always had a healthy disregard for the value people ascribe to things. Maybe it’s the rebel in me. Or maybe it’s just a healthy resistance to idiocy. It was always the fools who pursued the riches in Indiana Jones that met messy deaths.
In 1981, I was eleven years old and watched the Nazis’ faces melt when they opened the Ark of the Covenant in their pursuit of ultimate power. Then there was Donovan, who chose the flashy cup of Christ and turned to a skeleton in seconds, or the one eaten by crocodiles. One simply does not mess with artefacts.
Yet desperate times call for desperate measures.
Moving to a coastal town this year has been stressful. I’ve barely been able to pay the bills, let alone keep my husband fed with Vegemite toast and nasi goreng. When you’re under pressure like that, you use what resources you can find. You make do. The sheer amount of seaweed I’ve dragged from the beach and compost I’ve hauled from the old house has given me muscles I didn’t know I had. I can’t afford soil, but I can make it. I can't afford groceries, but I can afford time and energy to invest in a 663-square-metre block to create a food forest.
The sand, however, is a pain. Easy to dig, but nutrient poor. As much as I would have preferred to dig for treasures or enlightenment, I just wanted to have tomatoes in for Christmas salads.
Like the old place, where I unearthed matchbox cars for years, this one has its own treasures. There were cedar posts under the house, pavers behind the shed, expensive vintage lights that’ll do just fine in place of the raffia pendant ones sold by assholes to fools for exorbitant prices in the name of trends.
The plan was to create a vegetable patch using scrap tin and cedar posts, but I needed my husband and a chainsaw and an angle grinder for that. One simply does not hand the wife a sharp and mechanised tool. I thought I’d start by digging out the patch, at least two feet down, to aerate the soil and see how deep this sand actually went.
Then, a clunk.
A clunk is either a good thing or a bad thing. You’ve either hit a pipe or unearthed something interesting, something you can re-use, ponder, sell, or at least remove from the garden. I immediately thought of Europe’s Iron Harvest, where they’re still unearthing bombs from the world wars. Being in the antipodes, as far south as you can get, that seemed unlikely.
What I found wasn’t a pipe, a bomb, or a rock.
It was what I can only describe as a wing.
It wasn’t rusted or corroded, and it was cool and strange and smooth as a shell. It wasn’t aluminium or plastic and didn’t have rivets, seams, or bolts.Not matte, not glossy. I suppose I was thinking in terms of paint, having spent all week splattering the house with Dulux.
It was just a smooth arc of something, about a metre and a half wide, tapering to a kind of point. I’d like to say the surface shimmered when the sun hit it, but it was more like the light got a little confused. I’d like to say it hummed in a deep low resonance you feel rather than hear, but it was silent. So were the birds, whose endless squaws usually formed the tinnitus-inducing soundtrack of this new landscape.
I pushed aside the thought that this thing knew I was there.
Using the shovel’s blade, I scraped away more sand and brushed dust from the surface to reveal a kind of glyph or sigil. Irregular, organic, beautiful. I tried Google Lens, which brought up nothing. Then ChatGPT, which suggested it might be from a science fiction movie, though no known cipher matched. This thing was more than foreign. It was freaking alien.
The “wing,” of course, was just the edge. A tip. A suggestion. Like finding a fingernail and realising there’s a whole corpse buried beneath.
Remembering Raiders of the Lost Ark, I sure as hell wasn’t going to call anyone. I wasn’t interested in fame or fortune, and immortality sounded like too much work. And I sure as hell didn't want my face to melt.
It was beautiful. Forget Area 51. I had a spaceship in my garden. I placed my hand on its sun-warmed surface, closed my eyes, and imagined it bursting through the stratosphere millions of years ago, the screeching metal, burning eucalyptus, the hiss of seawater as it cut through an ancient ocean, the scattering flocks of ornithopods in the polar darkness, the southern raptors racing in terror.
I tried to picture the impossible journey it had made across across the black gulf of dust and silence and dead stars, perhaps thrown off course by a dying sun, or accidentally slipping through some fold in space, its coordinates scrambled like eggs in the back of my van. Perhaps it had drifted for eons, asleep, unmanned, the creatures within it long dead, until the Earth rose up to meet it, until I showed up with a shovel.
What might it have seen, should it's surveillance be awake to see the eons pass, the icy moons and molten planets, the shimmer of atmospheres, the centuries old storms? Did it carry something important, a message, a cargo? Where was the rest of it - was it only this fragment in my wannabe vegetable patch, or was the rest buried in the neighbours garden or in Kazakstan?
Whatever. It was a relic not of gold or empire but of unimaginatible distance and loneliness, of everyone and everything that tried to get somewhere but didn't make it.
Last week, Jamie had talked about a car worth ten million dollars. I wasn’t impressed. But this? This was unfathomable. Imagine hauling it onto a trailer for Antiques Roadshow, I thought, unable to process the magnitude of what I’d found. I certainly wouldn’t have to worry about how little super I had, or whether I could afford the next mortgage payment, the exorbitant sewerage bill, or the solar panels we desperately needed.
But Nazis with melting faces, you know?
I just didn't have that desire.
And all I really wanted was a cool roof for my chicken coop.
It was time to figure out how to use that angle grinder.
Image at my prompting by Chat GPT
This post was written in response to the prompt this week for the Sci Fi Multiverse which you can find here.
I commented on the posts of 
With Love,Are you on HIVE yet? Earn for writing! Referral link for FREE account here
h