Anna woke up in a panic around two o’clock in the morning. Nothing was familiar. Her bed. The darkness. The silence. Then, slowly, as her head cleared, she pieced together fragments of the previous evening. She remembered lying down on the porch swing for just a minute. She must have rocked herself to sleep. Somehow, Uncle Jack had carried her upstairs without waking her up. Anna was still in the clothes she wore from the plane trip, and a garlicky film covered the roof of her mouth. Yuck. She hadn’t brushed her teeth before going to bed. A first.
Her bedroom was so dark she couldn’t see the floor, the walls, or the door. All she could see was a single open window on the other side of the room, filled with more stars than she had seen in her entire life. Dead silence gave way to the hushed whisper of a night breeze through the trees outside her window.
Her eyes slowly adjusted to a kind of darkness she never experienced at her old home with its streetlights and ever present city glow. She crawled out of bed and made her way to the window to peer out at the night sky. The air was cool and felt good against her skin. She breathed in the smell of grass and dew. The stars were so dense she could almost sense their movement, the heavens spinning slowly above her in an arc. She instinctively leaned to her left to compensate for the motion of the Earth.
From the corner of her eye, lightning flashed silently in pink and blue-white bursts on the horizon. A spring storm miles away, a contrast to the clear skies overhead. She waited for the rumble of thunder, but the storm was far enough away that all she could hear was the soft murmur of wind. Anna traced the line where the storm came to an end to meet a sea of stars.
The storm began to fade. It had been several minutes since the last flash. Anna yawned and started to turn back inside when a new burst of light caught her attention. This time the light was closer, just on the other side of the trees that lined the far end of the field. It looked like a flashlight or maybe a floodlight. Whatever it was, it was bright enough to create a halo above the trees. The light flickered, then disappeared.
Down below, Herbie ran in circles along the fence, looking out into the field and whimpering. Something was agitating him.
Anna leaned out the window. “What do you see, boy, what—”
Before Anna could finish, Herbie began barking into the darkness. He sensed it before Anna could see it. A pause. A heartbeat. Then, a circle of light rose silently above the line of trees a half mile away—a light so bright it lit the ground below it like the sun. From this distance, she couldn’t tell if the light was the size of a basketball or a car. But there it was, impossibly bright and floating in midair. Anna felt her legs give a little. She stood frozen, her eyes the only part of her moving as they tracked the light’s slow progress. The object shifted direction and floated out toward the middle of the field and stopped, flickering between brilliant white and red. Spotlights scanned the ground back and forth in a crisscross pattern.
Then, just as quickly as it had appeared, the light disappeared with an audible pop. Almost instantaneously, sparks burst in a line along the edge of her uncle’s farm like a fireworks display. There were five flashes of light, spaced in equal distances, leaving behind five glowing pinpoints of ember that faded quickly. Silence again. No bugs. No wind.
Herbie had stopped barking and stared out toward the edge of the farm and the woods just beyond. Minutes passed. Neither of them moved. Slowly, the sound of the bugs returned. Not all of them at first—just a brave few. But within minutes the night was filled with a chorus of katydids and frogs. Anna leaned out the window and took in a deep breath of cool night air, held it in her lungs for a four-count, then exhaled—another trick she had learned from her mother to help calm her nerves. As her breathing slowed, her rational brain began to take over again. She could wake her uncle up. But what would she say? What would he think? There was an explanation for what she had seen, she was sure. There always was.
She crawled back into her bed and glanced at the clock on her phone, which read 2:45 a.m. As the rational side of her brain took over, her eyes grew heavier, and she felt herself fall into that space between sleep and consciousness. Before drifting away completely, Anna took a mental note to ask her uncle in the morning.