A Light in the Night

Trying to draft the essay due the following Monday had become an impossible task for Lyanne. For the first time, she couldn’t come to terms with the assignment in front of her. Why can’t I concentrate? she kept asking herself, without finding a satisfying answer. Meanwhile, David, her partner, called her downstairs to have supper together. As she descended from her study, he looked at her with concern. “What’s the matter? You look… puzzled,” he said softly. She quickly dismissed his question, explaining that she was struggling to prepare an essay due in three days. As David poured the wine, he reminded her with a smile that going for a walk had always helped her clear her head adding “At least before you went abroad that year. Maybe tonight it’ll do the trick again.” Lyanne drank a little too much wine, but she truly enjoyed the meal David had prepared, nothing fancy, yet perfectly comforting. Pasta with mushrooms and salmon, and of course, copious amounts of garlic bread. They laughed together over silly memories, and for a brief, glowing moment, David felt that the Lyanne he missed so deeply was back. Lyanne, meanwhile, realized that throughout dinner her mind had wandered, not to her essay, but to their relationship. For the first time in a while, she wondered, “Am I happy? Hmm… perhaps best to say I’m feeling at ease was a better description.” Nonetheless, she drifted into deeper thoughts about David, her work at the university, and the complicated life she had chosen. David’s voice snapped her back to reality. “Come on, go for a walk. I’ll finish up here. You need some fresh, well, cold, air, especially after all that wine and garlic bread. Maybe it’ll help you finish that bloody essay of yours!” As Lyanne stepped out of the house, the cold northern breeze hit her, sharpening her senses. The night was brisk and clear; despite the city lights, she could see Orion’s Belt glittering on one side of the sky and Venus shining brightly on the other. Since she and David had moved to their new home on the outskirts, light pollution was less of an issue, though not gone entirely. “The price of city life,” she thought. “At least I don’t have to drive. Even if the bus isn’t always on time, there’s still a bus.” As she approached the bus stop, she spotted Mariana, the young PSW who worked for the elderly O’Hara couple at the big corner house. Lyanne greeted Mariana, and they began talking about nothing important, the weather, how clear the evening was, how unusually cold the winter had been, and the lateness of the bus. At that moment, both smiled as if speaking about the bus had magically summoned it. Soon enough, they saw the city bus’s lights turning the corner. Lyanne thought about the soft sound of the diesel engine and the LED lights inside the vehicle and remembered the battered buses she had traveled on while volunteering abroad. Moments later, the bus rumbled away with Mariana in it, disappearing into the night. Lyanne welcomed the distraction. Sitting on the cold bench, she thought of her essay again, or tried to. Her mind drifted elsewhere: to her life, to David, to Mariana’s work and her own work as a nurse and the volunteering she had done abroad. She felt frustrated that the essay, which should have taken precedence, seemed to keep slipping away. The cool night felt comforting; the darkness was familiar and somehow strangely safe. The concept of small-town charm began to grow in her mind: the lights of a big city didn’t necessarily offer safety, and here, the darkness did. Being outside was having the effect she had hoped for. The outlines of the essay had begun to form in her scientific mind. All of a sudden, the darkness around her blazed into blinding light. The glow was strange, unnaturally vivid. It felt as though the light was beyond what human eyes were meant to perceive. If that light is infrared or ultraviolet, why am I able to see it? she wondered, panic rising. Sounds followed, overwhelming her senses. They resembled some kind of music, but nothing ordinary, nothing she could recognize. The light and the noise should be creating havoc with the dogs in the neighborhood, she thought. “Why is there no reaction? If there’s one thing this neighborhood has plenty of, it’s dogs. They should be barking like crazy. What the hell is going on?” All these thoughts occurred in fractions of a second; her mind was moving faster than she could articulate or organize them. The silence, with the exception of the strange music, felt eerie. The only sound she could hear was the strange music, and at the same time, another surprising sensation emerged. The winter cold suddenly disappeared, replaced by a warm feeling that made her feel cozy and comfortable. Every instinct told her to be alert, yet the sensations she was experiencing, comfort and ease, dulled her natural defenses. “This isn’t normal. I should be afraid, and I’m not,” she said aloud, testing whether she could still articulate words. To her surprise, she couldn’t hear her own voice. She knew she had spoken, but the sound never reached her ears. The strange music seemed to smother it. And yet, she didn’t want to scream. She felt comfortable, relaxed, even. Her curiosity eventually overpowered her coziness, and she looked up, seeking the source of the light and sound. Relaxed as she felt, Lyanne tilted her head upward and saw an enormous shadow above her, from which a concentrated beam of light poured down onto her and the bench where she sat. “That’s impossible,” she thought “light doesn’t bend.” Yet the beam curved around a tree and an electrical pole before landing on her. As her curiosity increased Lyanne noticed that the light that illuminated her did not generate a shadow either, which was also impossible. Despite the strangeness of what she was witnessing, her body didn’t register panic; her heart didn’t race. Lyanne realized something else: “I know fear” she thought. “This should be terrifying me, and it’s not. Why? Think about these feelings,” she told herself. Her mind was working overtime. “Whatever this is, it’s making me feel artificially at ease. There must be an explanation. Come on Lyanne snap out of these feelings!” she said as loud as she could even though she couldn’t hear her own voice. “There’s no engine noise,” she noted “nor helicopter blades. The only aircraft that can hover steadily on air are helicopters, and this isn’t one. A plane couldn’t do this. Despite the sci-fi movies, there are no flying vehicles capable of what I’m seeing.” “A beam of light that bends around trees and poles, without producing shadows and those otherworldly sounds,” she thought. “That’s it, that is the logical explanation ‘otherworldly’ so close to a city!” “Yet it’s too slow to be a plane, and too huge to be a helicopter. In any case the sounds would give it away. What… what the hell am I seeing? It’s against any logic. Where did it come from?” she whispered, more to hear her own voice than expecting an answer. Once again, she couldn’t hear herself. Then she heard it, a distant voice softly calling something her mind interpreted as: “Honey… honey…” Lyanne blinked and gasped, and suddenly she was back in the living room, wrapped in David’s warm arms. “Hi, honey. I think you drank a little too much. The pot earlier didn’t help either,” he said gently. “It looks like you fell asleep while I was doing the dishes before you even reached the door. You must have been very tired because you fell asleep. It appears you were having quite a dream and kept trying to say something, but all I could hear were grunts.” He kissed her forehead, holding her close as reality settled back around her, familiar and safe once more. Lyanne reflected. Was that a dream, or was I beamed back home by an alien ship? Realizing that a clear subject for her essay had taken shape in her mind, she kissed David and returned to her study to write.