Leave Nothing, No Exception

‘I can’t believe I have to do this so late at night. Why did I have to clean my room so late?’ Dawn, an older teenage girl, thought as she looked up at the night sky with her brand new, silver telescope. ‘Come on, give me something, anything. I have to get up early tomorrow.’

Dawn continued to look at the stars, trying to find the one she wanted to study for the Science project that she had to turn in, in two days. She had to find something tonight, or else she would have nothing to work on tomorrow.

‘Wait, what was that?’ Dawn turned her telescope back to double-check what she just saw. She was having such a hard time finding it again that she was beginning to think she imagined it. She was about to give up when a glow entered the edges of her scope. “There it is!” she sharply and quietly said in triumph.

There was a strange light in the sky, kind of close to the moon. It shined with white light that she could have sworn had red, blue, yellow, green, and all the other colors she would see in a rainbow swirling throughout the whole thing.

“What...is that?” she asked in bewilderment. She couldn’t figure it out. She had never seen anything like it before. It was almost as big as the moon - she noticed as she pulled away from her telescope.

Dawn looked around her street to see if anyone else was seeing this, but all the lights were off in the houses. She looked back up to see if the glow was still there, it was. She quickly checked the time: 2:24 AM. Dawn brought the telescope to her eye again to see if she could take a closer look at the light again. 

‘Now what?’ There was something different with the light. Something black was coming through, or at least she thought it was black. It just kept getting bigger and bigger, meaning it was coming closer. She couldn’t tell what it was thanks to the light of the portal, which she assumed that’s what the light was, but she felt that nothing good would come from whatever it was coming through.

‘Is it some kind of UFO?’ Just as that thought crossed her mind, the object, or ship, blocked out the light, and then both it and the light vanished. “Where’d it go?!” she exclaimed loudly, but then quickly covered her mouth with her hands. She listened for any sound in the house, hoping she didn’t wake her parents. She heard a loud snore from her dad, indicating that he was still asleep. She waited a few more seconds before breathing out a sigh of relief. She looked back up at the sky to see if she could spot any trace of the light or object but saw none.

She shook her head. “Pull it together, Dawn. It’s late and I’m just bored and tired. I’ll just write a report on Sirius tomorrow. I need to get to bed and not think about what it was I thought I saw. I saw nothing, it was just my imagination running wild,” she lectured herself and pulled the telescope back into her room before closing the window it was sticking out of.

She quickly got ready for bed and shut off the lights, climbed under her covers, and went to sleep, no longer thinking about the strange thing in the sky.

Dawn yawned widely. She didn’t get a very good night's sleep last night thanks to going to bed at three in the morning and waking up at 7:30 AM. It could have been later for all she knew, after all the ship or object kept entering her mind and caused her heart to skip beats.

She had to drag herself out of bed and walk like a zombie to the bathroom so she could get ready for the day. She woke up a little bit after a shower, but she would do just about anything to go back to bed. As a matter of fact, she almost asked her father if she could stay home today, but both her parents had to work and she was considered to be too young by her parents to stay home by herself, even though she could; she was 16 years old.

Dawn sighed at the thought. She’ll just have to take a nap when she got home, which should be soon, as she was walking home from school. She paused in her steps when she heard gasps coming from some of the people around her and pointing up at the sky questioning what the thing they were looking at was.

She followed their gaze and saw the same object, which was definitely a ship, hovering high above their heads, even though it looked like it was close enough to touch. It was also not black as she thought last night, but rather it was a dark gray. She couldn’t tell what metal it was made of, but it looked cold, kind of like how she would imagine a black hole to feel like.

All of a sudden, fear gripped her heart in its cold, deathly grasp. It felt as if Death himself had descended on them all and planned on reaping everyone there. This fear only grew as something came out of the ship. It looked like a cannon, it was charging up a dark, yet somehow glowing, beam.

No thought could enter her mind. Her brain felt like it shut down at the sight before her. The beam became so big, it could destroy the whole planet in an instant when it fires. Dawn knew this because she could feel the burning heat radiate off of the charging attack.

She faintly felt some people bump into her, but she ignored them. She could not take her brown eyes off of the ship and its weapon. No sound could penetrate her ears except for the cold yet soothing hum from the ship.

Silently, the beam fired. She felt her mouth open but could not hear a scream. Did she even scream? She didn’t know, she knew no more except the blissful nothing.