First draft, bored at work, a dream I had.

The Cubes

The staggering towers of block, metal and oblique glass-like surfaces, emerged from the earth formed with quick precision, as if magma suddenly had a choice of size and contour. Physical and scientific laws Man has suffered to for an entire existence were proved invalid and unsound when the cubical figures moved up the vertical walls of the black cavern. Fear and Panic drove the actions of Man.
From the Crescent Rim through Nothern Africa, Morocco and across the Alboran, Spain and the Bay of Biscay, Celtic Sea and finally to Ireland, what we knew as Ireland, the Cubes inhabited the island. It was over the Celtic Sea where Man decided to drop the first nuke, the water is, of course, inconsequential when compared with land. After the explosion a great tidal wave crashed against the coast of Spain, Portugal, drowned the piers of the southern Irish border. The fallout caused sickness and death, radiation poisoning and hysterical vomiting in Western Europe, Iceland and Greenland. For the next ten years, rare cases of asthma developed in French-Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States. The World got sick. And after the explosion, the cube emerged black with soot, pristine in shape, flawless in design.
The Island was quickly lost to the cubes. Fighter jets tried desperately every type of bomb Man could conjure. In the fields where potatoes grew from dirt, and the barley stalks bent in the breeze, there now is only burnt and rotten flesh of soldiers, scorched earth, uninhabitable for Man. The cubes only secured the castles. At Carlow the walls were reconstructed, in a matter of minutes, in the bible-black night. Smaller cube reformed Ballinalacken and Carrigholt. Bunratty, Dromoland, Knappogue were the first to be usurped, the first to engender there.
At the gate of the restored and quixotic structures, the massive cubes lowered an abdominal drawbridge and in a slurry of gray mechanical hemoglobin, small Cubes the size of a man glided playfully (the only account of the beings not defined by austere, rigid movement) into the mouth of the castle. During those nascent phases of the Cube’s lives, their vulnerability was revealed.
The fighter jets and long-range missiles again persisted. Nuclear subs released heavy artillery. With each impending attack the massive Cubes would defend their progeny with minuscule shards of stone or glass, projected from an unidentifiable portion of their beings. The missiles and jets could scarcely cross the border of the Island before being discharged. Songs of thunder filled the sky. On every continent people wept.
It was a man and his son who revealed the weakness; an Irishman with eyes like the sea, and hands like worn leather. On a seventeen-foot, single prop boat the man and his son braved the blackened waters of the English channel, the torrent of waves, and the deadly coastline where the water crashed and disappeared from the limestone boulders that litter the beach. The boy and man hiked the few short kilometers to the castle where one Cube was keeping watch, dashing away rockets some ten to twelve miles away. From beyond notice of the Cube the father loaded a large, blunt construction of pvc pipe with a potato, dripped a small amount of gasoline behind the tuber, and secured a plastic screw cap with a twist-flint installed in the center. Like the two had done hundreds of times before, firing soft pots into the McCleary’s land, the boy rested the barrel on his father’s shoulder, the father said in a hushed voice, “May the enemies of Ireland never meet a friend.” And the boy twisted the flint.
A great hollow thumb sounded from the chamber the the recoil drove the flint into the boy’s shoulder. At the disturbance the Cube appeared behind the two, perhaps watching them, as the parabola of the potato peaked just over the freshly built wall. The Cube, upon the destruction the potato laid fired a panoply of varied sized shards into the boy and his father. His father, trying to save his boy, held him behind his back, his eyes cold. And the shards passed through he and the boy like they were one, singular body of liquid. Their abdomens were devoured by the speed of the shards, their shoulders pulpy and wet with sweat, slumped, up-side-down, their lips nearly touching the famous stone.
Although the actions of the man and his boy went unplanned (by military concerns), their result was witnessed by satellite coverage. Within minutes the world knew how to destroy the progeny. What was broadcasted across every channel, continuously for three days, was the potato obscured by the background of the gelatinous structures; its flight so difficult to distinguish, its aftermath would spawn religions. The potato, with what some for a millennia would call Devine Flight, sunk, like a fork into fresh pie crust, into one of the progeny at the base of a carefully stacked column. The column fell. Nearly the entire harvest of Cubes was lost; the remains of the man and boy lie out of sight.
Within hours a coterie of glory-seeking soldiers were projecting biological forms of ammunition, by every imaginable means of projection. Catapults were being built and shipped, and aeronautical engineer designed a wooden bullet that could cross the English Channel in a matter of minutes, fired from an aluminum chamber with a diameter of eighteen centimeters.
It appeared as panic, like a microwave beeping, starting, stopping. The Cubes propelled shards in all directions, unable to identify the organic matter destroying their lineage. Hours passed, daylight shimmered off the small projectiles, and someone took notice. One of the Cubes was at one time taller than the keep at Nenagh, now appeared to be shorter than the rampart. The barrage of wooden bullets and hardened roots continued.
The columns of Cubes fell, their tenuous shells cracked like eggs. The massive defenses surrounding the castles depleted, shrunk, became nothing more than a child throwing sticks. The velocity of their shards could be volleyed with a baseball bat (this game replete with religious connotations when played today, similar to a homerun one may send a great hit into Devine Flight). As the dwindling Cubes became the size of a large boulder, a child’s wagon, a soccer ball, children would hold the objects while their parents took pictures, the Cubes only able to spit shards the size of peas, which felt like a soft hail. Across the Island men were moving lumber, digging postholes and carving ashplants. One man sat on a hill, where Dublin once stood, thumbing through the pages of Ulysses. With one eye closed and his thumb sticking up, he surveyed the land, plotted the streets, and winced when he turned to the west where the sun met the nuclear, black earth.