So the owls go hoot-hoot-hooting over the
landscape at night to terrorize their prey and
frighten them into risking exposure by trying
to make a run for it.

And this night-bird glides life-like through
the dark and deep midnight, hooting, "Who?
Who? Who?", a grim dark implacable shape,
the great glinting metallic slicing wingspan
blocking out large sections of star-shine in
the sky, thousands and thousands of twinkling
lights getting blacked out at a time.

The head moves smoothly back and forth, the
lubricated, articulated, polished sheen of every
simulated ebony neck-feather and wing feather
reacting so realistically to the fluid slip-stream
of warm-wet night air rushing by.

Two big round night-vision goggles give this
fantastic bird of prey superior eye-sight that is
so sharp it can easily focus on any bright greenish
animation of anxious life-signs trembling and
twitching within the misty nocturnal panorama of
city lights below.

At precisely timed intervals, the bird-thing
broadcasts green-screen moving pictures of the
very worst news of the world, rapid-fire reports
of nightmarish disasters, lurid visions of hellfire,
sharp-edged divisive and controversial opinions,
and wide-open shrieking mouths howling their
prophesies of imminent doom.

It watches hungrily for units of the artificially
terrorized prey to panic, fling open doorways
and rush outside, the whites of human eyes
staring around and flashing quickly upward
just before they make a lot of futile desperate
attempts to escape, running through the narrow,
cluttered, stinking streets and alleyways below.

Suddenly the great malignant bird falls, drops
swooping downward, and strikes again and
again, happily harvesting fools until, still
negligently clutching a few dangling bodies
in its steel-sharp talons, wide wings lazily
flapping upward now, the owl returns to the top
of the rusty old transmission tower where it has
its filthy nest and coughs up brittle little
skeletons until daylight returns once more.

Then its cybernetic circuits power down to
sleep-mode and it dreams of long night flights
through a world of perfect unbroken darkness...
all day long, day after day, this owl-thing is
dreaming of a new age of darkness.

02/26/2020