The clock on the nightstand read 2:13. The streets outside were silent. Because it was so quiet, every creak of the house felt like a threat. 

Adare imagined that a low rumble downstairs—probably the fridge making ice cubes—was a feral, otherworldly creature pulling the sliding door open along its track. Each squeak and scrape of the house settling, each soft whistle from the radiator, sounded like a stealthy footstep upon the stairs. And then there was the bedroom itself. Was there a shuffling in the attic above her?

These intrusive thoughts ran rampant whenever Adare’s husband was out of town. But tonight, they were even worse. 

Because of what she’d seen in the sky. 

Because of what she’d seen online. 

It seemed impossible, but there, again. 

Was that another footstep sliding along the stairs?

Earlier that day, when she was driving home along a highway that unfurled in wide curves around marshy grass and slim strips of trees, Adare had noticed something strange in the sky. What she’d assumed to be a plane cast thick white contrails across the cloudless blue. But while the lines started out straight, they eventually shifted off at odd angles, pivoting and pivoting and pivoting again. 

Were contrails supposed to do that? Adare asked herself. And for that matter, would a plane change course so dramatically? 

She watched it out of the corner of her eye as she continued along the highway.

And then, in her periphery, she saw another one. Another plane leaving contrails laid out in jagged lines. And as she rounded a curve, a third.

She watched as two of the planes seemed to turn toward each other. Instead of colliding, however, the white streaks streaming out behind them crossed over each other in a sloppy X. A tightness in Adare’s chest loosened at this near miss.

What is that? she wondered.

With all of those white zigzags spilling out across the vast expanse above her, it looked as if the sky was falling.

Later, when she was home, she searched the internet to see if anyone else had noticed a strange something in the sky. 

Several YouTube videos had shown strings of blinking lights that were clearly communication towers. “Did you see strange lights in the sky???” the video titles screamed.

“Strange lights? No, they’re not aliens,” claimed another YouTuber, trying to ease a worry she hadn’t even realized she was carrying. 

Folks on Quora, meanwhile, asserted that anything odd in the sky was likely the result of SpaceX satellites. Brief explainers on a handful of local news sites said the same.

But then there were the Reddit threads, some of which had been posted within the past hour. One had an accompanying photograph that looked much like what she’d seen. 

“The aliens have landed,” wrote the original poster. “This will be the end of all mankind.”

“Probably a classified military operation,” wrote one commenter dismissively.

“Where’s your evidence??” another demanded.

“Be careful what you wish for,” wrote someone else, along with a picture that at first glance seemed a blurry closeup of overgrown grass and weeds. But when Adare squinted, she discerned a small, humanoid shape, almost merging with the murky greens around it. The photo was dark, but she could swear she saw the hint of an open mouth. A slick accumulation of needle-thin teeth, all crowded together. She shivered.

Now, in her bed, in the dark, Adare tried to push away the word “alien.” The idea seemed ridiculous. But then— 

Was that a shifting of the wooden beams up above her?

The radiator gasped. Adare curled to her right side, squinting to make out the landing outside her bedroom doorway, straining to see if there was something solid there. Something watching her. 

If she closed her eyes, she told herself, none of it would be real. 

But when she closed her eyes, she felt worse.

Before retiring to her bedroom that night, Adare had placed a set of meat claws beside her pillow, the same claws she used to shred full chickens, ripping out the carcasses and putting them aside for stock. Part of her thought the claws were probably overkill. But they made her feel safer, them being there. 

Adare opened her eyes and reached for them now, clenching her hands around their wide handles. As she pulled them closer, the tines—each filed to a sharp point—scritched across her sheets. She shifted to lie upon her back. 

When the floor groaned again, Adare refused to look toward the doorway. Instead, she stared resolutely at the ceiling, at shadows within shadows, at subtle movements in the dark. There was a muted shuffle of something in the space between the ceiling and the new roof, but Adare knew it was filled with nothing more than insulation and dead air. Still, across the ceiling, in a rough grid, were holes that had been cut out for new high hats, which were to be installed next week. And in the deeper slicks of shadow that comprised these holes, Adare imagined she glimpsed movement. 

Suddenly, in the midst of all that strained silence, something chittered in the space directly above her. She adjusted her grip on the meat claws. Her breath was ragged.

And then, where a moonbeam lay across one of the holes in the ceiling, there was a shift. A pair of eyes—immense and black and alien—opened within the swirl of shadows. Someone—no, something—was looking back at her.

Her breath seized. There was more movement. A wet clicking. The sound of something sliding.

Adare pressed her spine deeper into her mattress. As if she could make herself disappear.

And then, the space above her darkened. Something squeezed through the hole. Something moved toward her, fast, and the last thing she saw was a flash of teeth.