Cloudy With a Chance of Visitors

by Charles C. Cole

I live in the country on a 12-acre tree farm, on the edge of a large valley which is cut in half lengthwise by a gently winding, no-shoulder, two-lane state highway. From my second-floor bedroom window, I can look down and across at modest 500-acre Highland Lake on the other side of the highway and, beyond and above it, to the large newish McMansions on Presidential Way, the ones with so many outdoor decorative lights that, at night, it looks like a constellation crashed into the hillside.

In the summer afternoons I can watch a rain shower start from the northwest and travel southeast like a slow-moving smoke-train, thunder announcing its approach. The weather has a routine pattern, a reassuring sameness. Very little surprises me in the sky, not even the hissing hot air balloons that drift low overhead on their way to the lake early Saturday mornings for some champagne-toast ritual. Maybe because I was once in the Air Weather Service.

But one day the clouds rolled in from the ocean, about seven miles to my east. The sky went from clear and blue with unlimited visibility to overcast with a massive purple mammatus blanket. The wind seriously picked up, and I decided to move our plastic Adirondeck chairs into the walk-in basement before they were picked up and slammed against the car or the house.

Having set the chairs inside, I closed the door behind me for one final look-see around the yard. The lean-to barn (run-in) was a disaster after the roof had caved in during some heavy wet snow that previous winter, close to imploding, but our horse (“Dakota”) was being boarded elsewhere, and I didn’t think the remaining pieces were going to hurl apart at that very moment.

The white-ribbon electric fence around the paddock was still up and functional, maybe in case we ever chose to bring “Ponyboy” back home or because my daughter was growing potatoes in the fertile manure, keeping the hungry wildlife at bay. I could hear repeated ticking, meaning the fence interrupter was on and touching a tree somewhere or maybe the metal gate.

I decided to disconnect the power source, a car battery in an empty plastic kitty-litter bucket, because there was no reason for it to be on and the snap was annoying. I took two steps toward the muddy pen when these glowing bowling balls started falling out of the sky, without a thump. I dove under the lowest boughs of the blue spruce at the corner of the house, startling a pair of nesting mourning doves that squeaked and dashed further into the nearby woods.

The balls, maybe a dozen in all, uncurled into three-foot dark purple “pedestrian crossing” figures. They grabbed their heads with mittenlike hands and stopped them from rattling, like they were recovering from a bad landing, I suppose.

I froze, trying to remain unnoticed, breathing quietly and shallowly. Nobody looked in my direction. Then again, they were all just solid-colored humanoid blobs. No eyes, no faces, no fingers, like stick figures but three-dimensional, like proto-Lego people but without the clasping hands. One by one, they tried to jump back up into the sky, but they didn’t get very far. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been in awe.

Somehow, shuffling tentatively and stretching their arms out like they were blind, they found each other and made a big circle in the yard, holding mittened hand against mittened hand, trying again, as a team now, to return to the cloud that had delivered them. But, no. They tried several times each, like a jerking jump rope.

They separated and some sat on the lawn. The fence was still snapping. That was when they heard it. You could see their Tootsie Pop heads perk up all at once.

Then they all stood, erect and confident, and walked deliberately toward the snapping. The purple cloud was starting to move on, so their return trip was now or never. They stood in a line just outside the fence perimeter and, at some unrecognized signal, they all grabbed the fence at once. There was a white flash and a loud POP. A little late, I put my hands over my face.

When I opened my eyes, they were falling upwards, about as fast as they had fallen downwards, if that makes any sense. I guess they were recharged in some way. The fence, however, was no longer snapping. I suspected they had consumed every bit of power the poor battery had to offer.

Truth be told, my brother-in-law keeps his Christmas lights up all year on his home. They aren’t lit, so I guess we’re not supposed to notice. We do that with our blue spruce. We had planted it when it was about 4-foot tall, and now it reached the peak of our two-story Colonial roof. We put the lights up a few years back and left them, only plugging them in at Christmas season.

The visitors were all gone back to where they’d come from but one. I reached in my pocket for my phone to snap a picture and dropped it. My remaining visitor heard me. He was interested. He shuffled over. I backed myself against the tree’s trunk. The little alien, or maybe a weather elemental, touched the tree with his palms, and the Christmas bulbs lit up all around me! About then, I could hear the siren of an emergency vehicle on the highway, which is what usually happens when a driver was a little reckless during heavy rain.

My visitor cocked an ear for a moment, if he had an ear. Then it sort of saluted and “fell up.” The lights faded quickly back to “off.”

The purple cloud was breaking into scuds, fading to dark gray. The wind died. I grabbed the chairs from the basement and waited for my wife to bring out a couple of sangrias. One day I’d tell her what I’d seen, but not today.