I grew up without knowledge of clouds, my grandparents refusing to recall such imperfections. My home town had been pacified under the clear blue sky. People moved about the place as ghosts, passing their serenity onto me with an implicit warning; I felt it when I talked with my friends past curfew, or when my clothes outshone the muted wooden buildings. After school I would tear off into the forest like a mangy little squirrel just to get my energy out. Now that I had graduated I didn’t find myself needing to, if only because there had been one too many spiders picked out of my hair or shoes covered in deer poop. I never saw many people anymore, houses were spread thin along the outermost edge of town. The center was for the special events and adults only meetings, which were the only human contact we got after we left school. I hadn’t heard so much as a whisper from anyone but the trees over the past few months. Then Jess showed up out of the blue. We were never close, but now she looked up in fear from my doorstep as if we were the last two people on earth. She was disheveled and small, in an overworn hoodie despite the August heat. The fear in her burrowed through to me as though we were siblings.

“Um. Hi”
She spoke slowly like a smoldering candle buffeted by wind. The two words took their time stretching out.
“Is something up, Jess? You look really tired.”
She tensed up in preparation to speak again.
“Can you… just. I need someone to talk to about something. You don’t have to, like, care.”
I leaned against the hardwood to my left and exhaled. She looked like she were going to collapse whether I said yes or not.
“Yeah. You want something to drink.”
She stuttered out a response.
“Water. Or anything’s fine.”
I turned and held the door as she took her first cautious steps past me and into my kitchen, the stool she collapsed onto wobbling timidly. The walls were cluttered with orderly and pristine implements of all kinds, the counters empty of all but dust, all of the cupboards closed neatly and the dish drying rack next to the sink, empty. By the time I poured a glass of water she was drenched in sweat.
"Are you too hot or something? I can take your hoodie and put it up-"
"No. Can you please just… sorry."
I could hear the restraint in her voice wavering. Sitting down across from her, I passed over the water slowly. She grasped it with both hands, in a race to gulp liquid down and get this over with.
"It's fine. Take your time."
The glass clattered to the table as she hastened to clear her throat and begin speaking. Her words clambered over my warning like a sand castle.

“So 3 days ago, right, I was on a walk out back at around 10 or 11 at night. I know it’s bear season or whatever, I’m a fucking idiot yeah. It’s just nice being in the woods when it’s too dark to see it’s like you can just listen to it breath. This isn’t about bears… anyway sorry…”
I shrugged and took the glass back to the sink to refill it. Any word I spoke risked making her feel even more precarious.
“Uh, I heard some weird shuddering from the trees, like there was something passing overhead. The leaves were shaking loose in clouds but there wasn’t any sound. No, like, helicopter blades and it was moving too slowly to be a plane. My stomach started to feel all twisted up in knots about it."
The rhythm of speech brought a calmer pace to her breathing. Words came flowing to me from her concrete shell.
“I could see moonlight splitting open lines between branches in front of me so I figured there was a clearing and I’d go check whatever was happening from there. I guess I shoulda gone home or something but I wasn’t thinking about that, I kept seeing light that didn’t match up with where the moon was, even though I saw it in front of me. Like someone was holding a mirror up to the sky and it was bouncing everywhere.”
Page 2.