The Astral
Cricket Match
by Dave Price
Lighting a
cigarette, Keating studied the mass of rubble
that had once been New York City. On Liberty
Island, a headless statue stood before the ruins
of The Empire State, its torch still held aloft.
“Sure
made The Big Apple crumble this time, huh?”
Keating had
tried to warn them, but would they listen? That
meteor is heading straight for us, he’d said;
but The White House, desperate to avoid a panic,
had placed a moratorium on the data coming out of
NASA control. Thankfully, they’d relented,
and an orderly evacuation had kept the casualties
to a minimum.
Now it was
just a matter of rebuilding an entire city.
“Never
saw a meteor moving so fast,” said his young
assistant, Shirley, handing him a carton of
strong black coffee.
“Let’s
hope we never do again. Still, there’s
plenty of extraterrestrial material for us to
study. I just wish that darned thing had crashed
into a desert.”
The scientific
work now done, it was time for the construction
workers to move in. An hour later, his findings
incomplete, Keating was packing away his
equipment. The origin of the meteor, however, was
still a mystery; it came, as they say, like a
bolt from the blue.
“Ah well,”
he said, “I guess that’s one more
mystery we’ll never solve.”
*****************************************
Satan took a
firm hold of the bat and faced Jesus, who had
just bowled out one of His Daemons with a
Chinaman. St Peter, the wicket keeper, spat on
his hands and went into a crouch.
“Right,”
said God, the umpire, “Good luck. And Satan
…”
“Yes God?”
“Try not
to whack it in the direction of the Earth again;
they’re still cleaning up after that last
match we played.”
Satan just
smiled. “As if,” he said, and assumed
the position.
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