War Clads

Microstory

War Clads

Full moon, silent the guns along the line, now and then the milky flashes of alien death rays, the hollow thump of a bursting body, but nothing like the usual cacophony of desperate engagement when the armored War Clads hover overhead — the unspeakable chattering of their guns, and the waves of alien warriors leaping toward us, wanton, careless of death, warriors who resembled us in every human way except for the glittering coil…

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Commentary

I called the “clads” without thinking about it, not even realizing what the word meant, thinking I might have made it up. I just liked the sound. Then I looked it up and remembered, of course, that it’s a verb meaning dressed or clothed as in “My mistress Hedwig met me at the door naked, clad in light.” Then there is cladding, a construction term for material used to cover external walls. The coverings for cricket batting pads are called clads as in “clads 4 pads” (don’t you wish you had written that?).

As often happens in cases like this I can work backward from clads 4 pads to war clads, which, if you want to be reductive and literal, are auto-levitating armored (clad) vehicles crewed by alien warriors (or bots) dressed up (clad) to look like humans — except for that telltale glittering coil. I can imagine some earnest academic critic of a certain sort working out this derivation and thinking this is what I meant. But, as I said, at the beginning, I just heard the word in my brain. It sounded eerie and ominous, especially in conjunction with the word “war.” My mind leaped from the phrase to the image of waves of war clads racing towards the few remaining lost-cause humans in their redoubts.

The fact that the alien warriors remain undescribed (except for the you know what) is part of the special horror of the situation and reflects my general experience of other people. But the aliens I meet don’t even have a glittering coil to reveal their true identity. So you can read this story as thinly disguised autobiography.

But I digress.

This makes me wonder what other people make of the word “clads” or “war clads” when they read that first sentence. Because obviously most people don’t have the same catastrophic upbringing that I did. My mother WOULD come to watch my school softball games clad in riding jodhpurs — I had managed to repress this embarrassing fact until a classmate reminded me when I was in my 40s (Freud called this the return of the repressed, that is, when you remember things you’d be happier not remembering — forgetting is one of God’s blessings).

Not my mother but can you imagine this standing on the sidelines watching you mess up on third base. I mean she had that look.

The image of the last battle, humans dying before the alien hordes, is a favorite of mine when I am in that dreamy state of primary invention. See also “Some things cannot be put right…”¹ and “Zombie Attack.”² Obviously I have a barely concealed yearning to write science fiction, which, I think is an aspect of aging. I can’t write realistic fiction anymore because I haven’t mastered texting yet let alone swiped anyone for a date or taken any of the latest apex party drugs — large swathes of contemporary society reside in an alternate universe more real than the fantasy niche where I live where you can still find telephone booths on street corners.

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