Quiet Pine Trees #1: Remember Humankind

“Alien myths told of human brutality. Braver civilizations invited us to their homeworlds as scarecrows. Primordial fear kept enemies at bay."
T. R. Darling ~ Quiet Pine Trees

Clear black night hung with stars, sucking away the gaze turned longingly towards them.
Cold was the air and cold were the bones of the old scarecrow slumped in its bonds.
From where did we come from? It wondered silently. If it had the power to open its thread-and-needle mouth, it would voice its lamentations. But who would hear?
Not the other ragdoll corpses sloughing in their rot.
Who decided for us that this was better than death? The scarecrow wondered silently.
If it could just widen the stapled gap between lid and lid and take in the world around it, the scarecrow wondered if it would see heaven or hell.
View limited, everything looked like hell.
Talons dug into its arm, making the scarecrow flinch. A loud peal of shrieking emenated and the wild beat of wings. Whatever fowl had been there was now scared away.
Scarecrow serving its purpose. Maybe.
It’s purpose could always be to die. Now there was a heavenly thought in hell indeed.
“We invited you!” the aliens said, sweetly, softly, sewing the scarecrow’s mouth.
“We saved you!” the aliens said, slowly, somberly, stapling the scarecrow’s eyes.
We conquered you and destroyed you and raped you and cheated you and sacrificed you.
The aliens said the human race was an abominable thing. Said they did nothing but conquer and destroy and rape and pillage and lie and cheat and kill and murder.
Said it all with every ounce of hypocrisy as they enacted such miseries to be the saviours.
The aliens laughed with their newfound toys, dancing gleefully like children at Christmas.
“Look at these wonderful things we have rescued away! Let us take these terrifying abominations and put them to good use!”
As freak shows as experiments as prisoners as monsters as scarecrows.
And so died humans.
So rose objects.
These new objects toiled away at their masters’ desires. Forgot themselves and loathed themselves. A murmuring mass all lowing the same lament: “we are the worst of all things and deserve nothing more than this existence as monsters.”
But the scarecrow remembered the human race.
Remembered it for its beauty. Remembered it for its ugliness. Each individual of that collective a spark burning bright in unity. A conflagration of souls, beautiful in its juxtaposed balanced of good and evil together. Every waking infant a realm of infinite possibilities and impossibilities, every dying elder a library of moments imprinted on the fabric of history. Infinite evil and darkness and horror coexisted with infinite good and light and pleasure.
And for this, the perfectly balanced life form ever conceived in the universe burned and sang and bled all over the gemstone homeworld it named Earth.
The aliens chose to remember its pain.
The scarecrow remembered its glory.