Old Edith had stressed the importance of slitting its throat first,
so that’s what Sylvie did. In ’89, Edith saw the sky split open on the
far side of her ranch. The night bloomed as if God had taken a picture.
Dressed in a cotton nightgown, feet shoved haphazardly in her son’s
boots, she followed the stream of light to its end, a pulsing globe at the
edge of her property where the rolling land hitched up into the first start
of mountain.
Fear churned her belly something fierce, the slick summer wind
making wisps of her graying hair. Still, she approached the light which
dulled now like iron just pulled from a hot furnace. It belonged to a
metal pod that looked, she thought as she trembled to her knees, like an
egg, smooth and oddly beautiful as its glow slowly faded into the velvet
night. It cracked like an egg, too, as Edith’s weathered hands burrowed
into the long grass and took hold.
A dark, thin figure slowly extricated itself from the metal egg,
one leg extending, followed closely by another. Edith gripped the cold
ground with fists as tight and throbbing as beating hearts. She yearned in
that moment for her husband to come back, for Billy Jr. to not be lame
as he was, sleeping oblivious through the night. The wanting was strong
within her, something physical tying knots down her throat. She found
she couldn’t move, could only stare open-mouthed with eyes that gleamed
in the last of the pod’s dimming light.
Years after the incident, no one truly believed Old Edith. When
Sheriff Thompson found Billy Jr. limping down Highway 90 at six the
following morning, a young man with the mind of a child screaming for
his mother, puckered head bent to the fierce Montana wind, he drove
them both back to Brown Ranch with the sirens whirling. There, he
found the old woman curled in on herself where the foothills started
rising gently up, her nightgown soaked through so that it clung to the
contours of her body. She didn’t so much shiver as convulse, eyes wide
and staring blankly ahead, lips quivering with the ghost of words she
hadn’t strength to say.
Billy Jr. clucked his tongue as Sheriff Thompson cradled Edith
and led her back inside. She clutched at his jacket, her mouth still
working furiously. “Ehhhhh,” she gasped. “Ehhhhhhh.”
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