White Night

Henry was lonely. And not the overreacting, ingenuous lonely where his girlfriend’s been gone for a while and nothing’s on TV. But the lonely where the air looks cloudy and every object that most would perceive as entertaining now appears drab and unfortunate. Who put this basketball hoop in the backyard? What a waste. Tragic, really.

Luckily for Henry, it was nearing 9:00, time for him to take his antidepressants. He liked that time. He could count out the pills—one by one by two by one—and pick the exact one to swallow whole with a half glass of stale Coke. He did just that, and wandered back to the kitchen, aimlessly, and opened the fridge, closed the fridge, opened it again, and then closed it.

Then came the meteor.

It cratered into the earth, pounding away the grass in Henry’s backyard, sending up sparks of impossibly hot dirt that seemed to burn the air as they whizzed through. The impact was enough to shatter the back windows in Henry’s kitchen, the ones overlooking the backyard. Henry reflexively fell to his knees and wretched forward, covering the back of his head as shards of glass drizzled around him. He could smell the smoke engulfing him, feel it, cut it with a knife. It was ashy, tasted like Hawaiian air.

After Henry’s house stopped shaking, he stood up and stuck his head out of the windowless hole in his kitchen wall, the edges of it glowing orange with heat.

The meteor in the backyard was straight out of a sci-fi movie with cheesy 1960s special effects. It was round, clay brown, rocky, and filled with small craters of its own. The crater it made in the backyard was probably about two feet deep and another six feet or so of meteor rose up above the grass, for an eight-foot diameter rock. Henry sweated; the heat emanating from the rock was unbearable. But, despite what the movies said, the meteor was also dripping wet, sweating.

Coughing the whole way, Henry ran out for closer inspection. Expecting to find every cliché in the book spring forth from it, he was just the faintest bit surprised that the meteor wasn’t ejaculating aliens and that it was likely he hadn’t gained any superpowers from the encounter yet.

As he approached, in his plaid pajama pants, black t-shirt, unkempt short black hair unintentionally raising the nonexistent roof, enlivened eyes, Henry internalized the heat, feeling it melt his skin.

“What’s that you got there, buddy?”

Henry’s processional ceased, as his neighbor Oran, a tall, thin, crinkly, brown, annoying-as-fuck man, leaned over the fence, staring into Henry’s backyard and chomping on an under-ripened red apple. Oran always seemed to take things in the most nonchalant way, as if he’s experienced so much that nothing shocked him, while Henry remains convinced it’s the exact opposite. When it’s likely everything would shock you, shock becomes you.

“Some kind of new project or something?” said Oran, in his strange, Southern accent, before wiping his drippy nose with his bare arm coming out of the light blue Sears polo. “Rocks or something?”

“Rocks or something,” repeated Henry, mostly to himself. “It’s a meteor. I was in the kitchen, heard an explosion, and this thing blew half my fucking yard away.”

“Did you touch it?”

“Jesus Christ, it’s probably like 10,000 degrees right now,” said Henry. “Maybe later.”

“NASA’s going to need to know about this.”

“Probably.”

Oran tossed his bone-dry apple core at the meteor. Henry flinched when the two collided, but the apple just bounced off and rolled under the meteor, slipping through the cracks in the grass.

NASA came later that day, with Hazmat suits and prodding wands and master’s degrees that only identified the meteor for what everyone already knew it was—a meteor. They built a tent around it, held up by the stakes stabbed into the grass, through ant holes and other indigenous inhabitants. They asked Henry to leave for the day, but he had nowhere to go, so stayed mostly in his living room, watching reruns of MythBusters, with occasional breaks to open and close the fridge and steal glances of the tent being erected, samples being pulled, ground being probed, contamination being abated (hopefully) behind him.

Henry’s girlfriend wasn’t there, but he was actually excited about what kind of shit he was going to make up to explain it. He considered the heroic route. A much larger, deadlier meteor was within a hundred feet, but with his trusty rifle that he didn’t own, Henry forced it to take a string of bullets that chiseled off the piece currently sitting in the backyard and sent the remaining portion burning back into the atmosphere.

Or the alien route. The meteor landed gently, the top half opened, and a little man—not green, or violent, or having a second head attached to its tongue—stepped out, just shorter than your average Earthling, with much more hair that keeps it warm in its non-solar-centric galaxy. It tried to communicate with Henry, couldn’t, so it left. It was probably working at the local grocery store by now. The alien went by the Earthling name Valtrex Goodyear, stolen from the billboards he saw along the way.

---ooooOOO << >> OOOoooo---

During the last trip to the fridge, Henry saw the suits pulling something out of the meteor, under the glowing tent, slowly with a giant metal set of tongs. It was a strange blue, bright, slippery, sleek. And it was in Henry’s own backyard.

Henry rushed out the side door and could feel the media vans closing in on his house, screaming for footage of the meteor, footage of the E.T. Hazmat suits, still shots of the confused, frightened homeowner, maybe a little third-degree burnt from exposure. NASA kept the house locked down, though, and there’d be no way the media would find out about the blue thing for weeks at the earliest.

Henry stepped around a few suits, who mumbled obscenities and yelled for his clearance pass. Inches from the tent, one Hazmat blocked the way, eyeing Henry up and down. “You’re the homeowner, right?”

Henry nodded.

“You have to return to the house, sir.”

Henry tried to push his way around and the Hazmat stepped to the side to block him further, eventually grabbing Henry by the arms and shoving him back.

“Inside, sir.”

“What the hell is in there?”

“Inside.”

The desire was strong, too strong, for no reason other than it being something ridiculous on his land, his own land, his yard, some crazy-ass blue thing. Henry lunged forward, shoving the Hazmat out of the way. The Hazmat pulled Henry’s arm, swinging him back around from the tent, but not before Henry could see it, the blue thing, being pulled out from behind the tent, prodded, bleeding. There was a red, boiling, heated, living blood tricking from the center of the blue object.

As the Hazmat swung Henry away, NASA security moved in and escorted Henry from his home, as he neither resisted nor went along with their encouragement. He sat blankly in the back of the security van until late that night, when the scientists left, the specimens were taken away, and the white tent remained in Henry’s backyard, with a fragmented meteor underneath.

Security released Henry back into his home, where he immediately turned and stared out the window until the last van pulled away. He rushed back out, toward the meteor, and stood before the tent, closer than before. He knew they found something alive in there. Or at least it was alive at some point. Clearly, it did not take well to the collision in Henry’s backyard. Henry knew he saw lifeblood.

“Did Cheryl come by?” asked Oran, chewing gum with his chin slumped over the top of the fence.

“No,” said Henry. “Still gone.”

“Sorry, man; been a while, huh? A few weeks now?”

“Do you think they killed it?” asked Henry. “Or was it already dead?”

Oran slinked back, and his voice allayed. “If they found anything, it wouldn’t matter. Area 51. It’s gone now. No one will know.”

“What a waste.”