The Thing That Came Through The Window

The storm had taken the lights an hour ago, so they were doing the thing where you wait. Soren's grandmother had a candle going on the kitchen table and a deck of cards she kept shuffling without dealing. Outside, the rain came sideways against the glass.

"Count it," Maya said, when the lightning flashed.

Soren counted. "One. Two. Three." Then the thunder, low and long.

"Getting closer," Maya said. She was kneeling on a chair with her chin on the windowsill, watching the field go white and then black, white and then black.

The next flash did not come from the sky.

It came from the corner of the kitchen, near the window over the sink, and it did not flash. It simply was there. A ball of light, about the size of a grapefruit, pale blue going to white at the center. It hung in the air at the height of Maya's shoulder, not falling, not rising.

Nobody moved.

The ball drifted. Slow, the way a soap bubble drifts, except it did not wobble and it did not pop. It crossed in front of the sink. It made a sound Soren would try to describe later and never get right, a small hissing, like a wet finger on a hot pan, but quieter, and underneath it something that was almost a hum.

"Soren," Maya whispered. "Look at the window."

He looked. The window was shut. Latched. The rain ran down the outside of it in sheets.

"It came in," Maya said. "Through the glass. I was watching. It came through the glass without breaking it."

His grandmother had stood up very slowly. She had one hand flat on the table. "Don't touch it," she said. "Either of you. I saw one of these when I was a girl. In the barn. Don't touch it and don't blow on it."

"What is it?" Soren asked.

"I never knew," she said. "Nobody could tell me. I asked everyone."

The ball moved along the counter at walking speed. It did not light the room the way a bulb would. It lit only the things right next to it, the curve of a copper pot, the edge of the faucet, and those things glowed back blue for the second the ball was near them.

Maya got down off her chair. Carefully. She moved so she stayed exactly the same distance from it the whole time, the way you'd move around a wasp you respected.

"It's not hot," she said.

"You don't know that," said Soren.

"My face would feel it. I'm close. I don't feel it." She tilted her head. "It's not burning anything. It went right over the dish towel and the towel's fine."

Soren made himself look the way he looked at things when he wanted to understand them and not just be afraid of them. He looked at what it was doing, not what it was.

It was round. It stayed round. A flame would flicker and stretch. This held its shape like it had a skin. It was traveling against the small draft from under the door, which meant it was not just being pushed by air. It glowed without anything underneath it to glow from. No wick. No wire. No bulb.

"It doesn't have a reason," he said out loud.

"What?" said Maya.

"Everything that glows, you can say why. Fire, you can say why. A phone screen, a star, a firefly. Somebody knows the why for all of them." He watched it round the corner of the counter toward the table. "This one, nobody knows the why. Your grandmother asked everyone and nobody knew. It's been doing this in front of people for hundreds of years and we still don't have the why."

Maya looked at him. In the blue light her face was lit and then not lit as the ball bobbed.

"So we're not behind," she said slowly. "It's not that we're kids and the grownups know and won't tell us."

"No," Soren said. "Nobody's ahead of us on this one. We're all standing in the same kitchen."

The ball reached the candle. For one second the two lights were side by side, the candle's orange and the thing's blue, and you could see plainly that they were not the same kind of thing at all. The candle had a body, wax and flame and smoke. The ball had only itself.

Maya did the most patient thing Soren had ever seen her do. She did nothing. She just watched it, holding still, not reaching, learning it with her eyes because her hands were not allowed.

"It's getting paler," she said.

It was. The white center had gone soft. The blue had thinned out to almost nothing at the edges, like breath on a cold window fading from the outside in.

"Watch it," Soren said. "Whatever it does, watch it. Nobody's filmed enough of these. Watch the whole thing."

So they watched. His grandmother watched too, with the same face, he realized, that she must have had in the barn fifty years ago, the face of a girl who asked everyone and never got an answer and never stopped wanting one.

The ball drifted up. Just slightly. To the level of their eyes. The hum got higher and thinner.

Then it was gone.

Not a pop. Not a flash. It did not fall and it did not burst. One moment there was a sphere of pale light in the middle of the room, and the next moment there was the after-feeling of it on their eyes and the candle flame standing alone, and the smell, faint and sharp, like the air right before a match catches.

Nobody spoke.

The rain had gotten softer without any of them noticing. A car went by far off on the wet road. Soren could hear his own heart.

Maya was still standing exactly where she had been, holding still, in the spot the light had left.

"It came through the glass," she said again, quietly, like she was filing it somewhere careful. "It came through the glass, and nobody on Earth knows how."

The candle bent in a draft none of them had made, then stood straight again.

Outside the window, the clouds pulled apart, and the field came back, dripping and dark and ordinary, and they both kept staring at the empty air where the impossible thing had been, waiting to see if it would come back so they could watch it better.