The Telling

Chapter 1

The Falling

Sarah’s pixie cut hair stood up in the center where she had spiked it to look like P!nks. It was honey colored, and soft. Her tortoise shell horn rimmed glasses rested on the end of her nose while she read An Abundance of Katherines on her Kindle. A book by John Green, young adult novelist and vlogger, brother of Hank Green. She turned slightly on her loft bed to face the window looking out over the quiet street.

    The sky was speckled with stars, and satellites moving slowly across the vast expanse. The air that night was thick, and hot. It felt like trying to wade through soup. There were crickets outside, and frogs they called peepers. The birds had gone to sleep. What was left was the sound of night. Sarah’s skin stuck to her sheets and her tank-top. Ever so often she would adjust the fan on her bed to point in her direction. It was a night too hot for sleep.

Across the road, the porch light on her neighbors house, flickered, and went out. And then she saw it, out of the corner of her eye at first, so she thought it wasn’t there.  And then she looked again. For twenty seconds at least, it glimmered brighter than any star, spiraling down out of the sky. There was a crash, louder than a gunshot, the sound of snapping tree limbs. It was close by. Sarah could tell by the way the earth thundered, and the foundation of her house shook under the blow.

    As soon as it had started, it was gone.

    “What the hell was that?” Sarah whispered.

    There was no noise. Her parents and her older brother were still asleep. It was as if the entire world had gone silent, save for this constant ringing in her ears.  She rubbed them gingerly.

    “Mom!” She bellowed. Her stepmom Margie opened Sarah’s bedroom door.

    “Yeah May what is it?” Sarah’s middle name was May and her family had taken to calling her that sense she was a very little girl.

    “Did you feel that?”    

    “What?”

    “N-nothing I must have fallen asleep. Been dreaming or something.” She muttered, turning back to the window.

    “Oh, ok sweetie. Have a good sleep.” Margie smiled, closing the door.  She walked back to her room, wondering what was wrong with her daughter.

    “What did Sarah want?” Marcia, Sarah’s biological mother asked.

    “She felt something strange.” Margie said climbing into bed with her wife.

    “What was it?” Marcia wondered aloud.

    “I’m not sure, she didn’t say.”  And they went to sleep.

    Sarah climbed down the step stool, and leaned against her bedpost. What was that? Why hadn’t anyone else felt it? And why was she suddenly getting the urge to go out there and look for whatever it was that had fallen out of the sky?

Quietly, she pulled on a pair of denim cut offs, and pulled the straps straight on her loose cotton tank-top. She grabbed the hoodie her dad had given her for christmas off the hook, and walked as quietly as she could down the bamboo staircase.

    Her old yellow lab tossed in her sleep at the base of the back door. She rubbed Lila’s head gingerly, and opened the sliding door as carefully as she could. Her gray Converse rested on the edge of the the porch railing, and she slipped them on quickly, searching her pocket for the keys that had the LED flashlight attached to them.

    As soon as she had them, she took off through the field in back of her house, grass she had sheared short with the lawnmower earlier that day already wet with dew. The trees around the house creaked as they swayed, but nothing seemed to be different than it had been earlier that day.  Even the barn, the animals, lay still, and silent. This was Iowa at night. Their farm house loomed importantly in the moonlight. She scanned the grass, walking farther and farther away from her home. She reached the sledding hill the elementary school kids liked in the winter. As she got closer and closer to the top of the hill, the grass started to die out, turn black as if it had been burned.

    She scanned the ground. There it was. A crater the size of a house, at least twice as deep. Sarah stared at it, her heart racing, the blood thundering in her ears. Slowly, she made her way down the crater.

    “Shit!” She yelped, as she slipped on a piece of rock, sliding a quarter of the way down. Her keys slipped from her hand, and landed in the charred earth at the bottom of the pit. Now she was cast into darkness.

    Yet this was the first time she realized, that there was something there, at the bottom, letting out a gentle blue glow. She slid the rest of the way, landing next to her keys. Taking them up again, she lit the small flashlight, shining it on the source of the light. It was a small round object, egg shaped, carved in what seemed like a million different ways, and still glowing.

    Now this is the part where you scream and tell Sarah not to pick it up. Not to touch the glowing rock. Trust me, I wish she hadn’t. I wish she had listened to reason. But it was human curiosity that drove her.

    Her fingers grazed its surface. The flash lit the forest like a searchlight.