Visitors

For Daryl, the story started with a loud, dull thud—which he had mistakenly believed to be one of the dairy cows getting hit with the old pick-up truck again. To his surprise, he exited the horse barn to find a hole down yonder by the now overturned pig trough. Holes don’t normally draw Daryl’s attention, but the perfectly rectangular shape of this one made him take quite an interest. 

He ran toward the hole with big steps and flailing arms, trying to picture what type of rectangular-shaped thing could’ve made something like that. Daryl was standing next to the hole in no time. He brushed his sandy-brown hair from his eyes and peered over the side with raised eyebrows. 

His question was answered. A big, metallic green-gray box had made the hole. But know Daryl had many more questions. As he stood their scratching his head, he heard Pa coming up behind him.

“If I’da known you were just gonna stand around all day, I would’ve just put a post in the ground instead of havin’ a son. Woulda done me the same amount a good.”

“C’mon Pa, look! I think something came off an airplane or something.”

“What in the heck is… Alright, dig it outta there. Let’s see what we’re dealin’ with.”

Daryl ran to get the shovel and started digging faster than he ever had. The box was a few feet deep, so it took him the better part of an hour. Pa stood there watching that whole time, rubbing the stubble on his chin and furrowing his brow so much that it was any wonder he could still see.

The box was so heavy that Daryl and Pa had to call over the farm-hand, Chuck, to help them pull it out. Luckily the thing had handles on either side to grab on to. They heaved it up onto a dry patch of dirt next to the pig pen.

Pa undid a couple of clasps, ones that didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before, and lifted the lid. He gasped—Daryl didn’t think he had ever heard Pa gasp before, so he looked over Pa’s shoulder with great enthusiasm. What he saw made him gasp as well.

“You think it’s dead, Pa?”

“Well darn straight it’s dead, but what the heck is it?”

Daryl and Pa turned to each other looking for an answer, their faces painted in mutual bafflement. Then they turned in unison to see if Chuck had anything to say, but he was already back in the field, putting hay back in the scarecrow. Pa nodded happily. He pays Chuck to work, not to sit around looking in weird boxes. Chuck was a good hire.

Pop! A sound shot through the air like the firing of a hunting rifle, only it wasn’t. It was the sound of a spaceship breaking the sound barrier. It looked like a single-wide trailer with a cockpit. The spaceship hovered for just long enough for everyone to get a good look, and then gently landed in the middle of the pasture.

A large door opened on the side of the spaceship and out walked three beings that looked vaguely like the one in the box, only more embarrassed—and less dead. None were the same color though. The one on the right (Daryl’s right) was a dull blue, the center one a dull violet, and the far right one a dull red. This contrasted mightily with the stiff, bright-green alien in the box. 

The aliens were each roughly the shape of a person, with the head being their highest part. They had flabby cheeks that drooped from either side of the face like a basset hound’s, or that one president they made the masks of. Their torsos undulated from side to side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, while the boneless arms swayed like jellyfish tentacles with seven-fingered hands on the ends. Their legs were pretty much like normal, people legs, but they had a rigid tail coming from their lower backs that was slightly shorter than each of their legs. When they stood still, they would lean back and prop themselves on as if it were a kickstand, and they were bicycles. 

They each wore a pair of three-legged white pants and a long-sleeve orange shirt. This was in addition to a pair of black and white wing-tipped shoes to cover their feet. Daryl had never seen such class.

The aliens approached speaking a weird language. Whether it was Norwegian, Spanish, or some alien language, Daryl couldn’t say. Though he assumed it was the third one. When it was clear that Pa and Daryl weren’t understanding, the aliens spoke in a low whisper to each other (as if the volume of their words would have mattered) and then began to communicate through the art of mime. 

The red one put his hand up to where his eyebrows would be if he had them, and pretended to scan the horizon. He(?) then motioned toward the violet one who was laying on the ground with his tongue stuck comically out to one side of his mouth. 

“Stay back boy, I reckon they want to find someone to kill.”

“I don’t know, Pa, they might just be looking for the box-guy over there.”

Daryl caught the eye of the red and violet one, and pointed them in the direction of the box containing the dead alien. The blue alien was distracted, seemingly trying to discern what Chuck was doing to the cows (he was milking them). 

The red and violet aliens closed up the box and wheeled it to their spaceship like it was some mildly heavy luggage, and tossed it in. They made various gestures with their hands, which could have been thanking Daryl or a series of complicated, yet obscene gestures. Daryl preferred to think it was the former.

The violet and blue aliens climbed aboard. Before the red one hopped in the side door, he turned and looked at Daryl. He gestured toward the open door and made a face like he was asking a question.

“I think he’s inviting me to check it out, Pa.”

“Maybe just a quick look, but come right back, ya hear?”

“I hear.”

Daryl walked up cautiously and then peered through the doorway. The inside had seats facing each other like a train compartment, and a dashboard that looked like the cockpit of some futuristic airplane. He stepped up into the ship to see some posters on the side walls. He couldn’t be sure, but they seemed to be quite lewd. 

Next thing he knew, the door closed behind him and then there was another loud Pop! He looked out the window into a black void speckled with varying sizes of lights. The view was deeply unsettling, but so intriguing and novel that he couldn’t look away. After what seemed like only a few minutes, they were rapidly approaching a planet that Daryl at first thought was Earth, but then he realized all the continents were oddly shaped and in all the wrong places. As they approached, he stared off into the horizon, which slowly lost its curvature as the ground grew larger beneath him.