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What I Saw in the Skies Over Upstate New York (Excerpt)

Writer's picture: James YearyJames Yeary

Updated: Apr 24, 2021




Look OUT!” I heard from over my shoulder. In an instant I felt myself snap out of it, my wonder melting into terror as my eyes registered the sudden twist in the empty road ahead, a line of tree trunks staring down the headlight. I reacted, struggling to stay on the road, the fireball racing away from us in the corner of my vision as we slowed down. The field to our right seemed to go on forever, broken up only by a small dirt path that was illuminated by the object’s fiery trail. The rough farm road ended at the edge of a dense forest far in the distance, and that was where the streaking path of light finally hit.


The impact was a quick silent flash of red and violet, punctuated by a steady pulse of searing hot blinding white; I could just make out several trees being thrown outwards by the roots as the object tore into the earth. For a moment, there was only the sound of the engine in the darkness as we slowed to a stop at the head of the long dirt road. The shock wave swept over us not a moment after I’d put my feet down; a raging wall of heat that blasted our eardrums in a peeling crack of tenacious energy. Even from a distance, we could see the haze of twisting colors hanging over the area where the fireball had struck the earth, along with small glowing discs dancing through the treetops all around.


From out on the edge, it looked like someone had broken a handful of glow sticks in the middle of a pitch-black gymnasium—a gleaming cauldron of electrified color against the rolling shadows of the farmland and the speckled light of the stars overhead. Out there, against the low idle of the engine, we didn’t say anything. That petrified silence that we were trapped in seemed to go on and on as we watched the multicolored smoke rise from the ravaged tree line.


In spite of what we had just experienced; our eyes seeing something that they’d never seen before, our ears ringing from the explosion, our minds racing with questions—for that collection of long, cold seconds there was absolutely nothing to say.


To be continued in What I Saw coming this October.



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