The Forgetting

They are older now of course, even their fat tabby cats are living longer, contrarywise, the world is younger, the world has caught a disease, the sky is getting closer to the ground, and the ground gives way. They are older and more lost now, few are ever found living in the day, though their gandering minds will remind you precisely of the weather on any Wednesday in March, forty years ago. The cities are almost empty of them, they have been removed to further outskirts, parts given new names, since the end of those alien wars. They have forgotten the horror, forgotten, their shocked, unready husbands, sons and daughters, that ran toward the ravening monsters. We were all unready, the government, and the military fell apart in days, in the end we prevailed with bolt-action rifles, knives and axes, even our clawing hands. We used to call the old ones, Alzheimer patients, they live in a world not yet drenched with the blood-soaked gore of our own memories - how we envy them.