This is an attempt for National Novel Writing Month. It is not perfect. It's probably not even especially good yet. Xen is not going back to revise anything until he is completely done. So, deal with it.
Jasmine phoned home, wondering when her parents would pick her up from Annandale. Her room was packed up and, but for the boxes on which she sat, seemed foreign to her. No, it was worse than that, something that should have been familiar but now reminded her of nothing so much as an empty box, a cage suitable for an animal.
Chrys answered and assured Jasmine "the 'rents are on their way." Surprisingly, this was true. They arrived within the hour. After loading her worldly goods into the back of their boxy mini-van, Jasmine fell into a deep sleep, losing hours to the mechanical hum.
She awoke just outside of Pine Bush, the little town in upstate New York that seemed to grow new buildings every time she left for more than a week. It had been home since Jasmine was two, Chrys was born. Passing the Cup and Saucer Diner, Jasmine swore she saw her sister in the embrace of a scruffy man, but her mother turned the mini-van too quickly for confirmation. Chrys hadn't been the sort for boys when last Jasmine saw her and a semester apart wasn't enough to justify this alien sighting.
She unpacked into her room, feeling curiously like a visitor in the only home she had ever remembered. This wasn't unusual, she decided. She was only a year away from graduation with a bachelor's in (something), nearly an adult in her own right. Things would be different. But all throughout dinner that night, as she stared across at Chrys's seat left vacant as she palled around with some man Jasmine had never met, She couldn't shake the feeling that someone had abducted the familiarity of childhood and in its place implanted something in her that stung behind her when she thought of what she was missing.
After dinner, Jasmine cycled through her address book until she hit upon a high school associate who answered. It wasn't someone she liked especially, a sharp featured girl with ears like a mouse who seemed to have grown this odd-looking to suit her personality or vice versa, but it felt better than staring at her ceiling on this first day of summer recess.
The associate, Kathleen, seemed to have been frozen in time the day before her high school graduation, in maturity as well as physicality, but did not disappoint. She remembered Jasmine as she had been, the popular despite herself girl, the senior class vice president, the person for whom biracial genes translated to a glut of social currency that she was disinclined to spend. She was the big fish in this pond and, though then sweet enough about the status she had done little to earn beyond have batting thick lashes and growing up surrounded by nothing else to see, now was begrudgingly willing to indulge social bottom feeders to not feel like the tiniest guppy.
She arrived home after midnight, swearing to start her day fresh tomorrow and see how much more of her social accounts may have gained interest in her absence. She mounted the stairs to her room, noting all the lights were out. Her parents must have gotten boring while she was at college. She nestled into her bed when she noticed the faint glow coming from beneath her window shade. She opened it and saw something hovering over her commodious backyard, a lawn tapering off in a vast field of wild wheat. Without realizing what she was doing, she pulled her clothes back on and tip-toed down the staircase again, taking pains to mask her footfalls that she had not bothered with on the way up.
She slunk around the corner, managing to see the object in the sky for a moment. As though it could tell it had been spotted, it tipped to one side and extinguished all lights. When her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could not find anything in the sky, no absence of stars that could justify such a large, hovering object.
Jasmine exhaled slowly and she decided it was a strange atmospheric phenomenon of which she knew little. She thought she had heard things about swamp gas or wil-o-wisps. It was nothing that she should let worry her, she decided.
As she turned to go in, issuing commands to herself to calm down, she ran into someone. She jumped back, flailing, making contact with the person several times as her flight or flight response became confused as to conjunctions.
"Who the hell are you?" she managed to ask once she had knocked the person to the ground.
"Dylan?" he answered, like a question. "Who are you?"
"Jasmine, I live here."
"Jasmine? Chrys's sister? Cool, I've heard some about you."
"I've heard nothing about you. What are you doing in my backyard?"
He raised his eyebrows, both as indication of direction and incredulousness. "I guess the same thing you are."
"What?"
"The UFO. You saw it too, I watched you."
Jasmine backed up as though these words were blows from a blunt object. "I don't know what you are talking about. I don't know what I just saw."
"And it was flying," he said. "Which is why we call them Unidentified Flying Objects."
"Wait, you were sitting in my backyard looking for UFOs?" Jasmine asked.
Dylan finally rose from the ground. "Chrys told me it was cool."
"Why my backyard?"
Dylan crinkled his brow. "Seriously? Pine Bush is a UFO hot spot."
"You believe in aliens?"
He shrugged. "I don't know what I believe, but there are UFOs. You just saw one."
"I don't know what I saw, maybe it was light off a cloud. We are directly on the flight path of Stewart Airforce Base, you know."
"I do, actually, know that. I just think it's kind of cool, you know? That we are so close to the Roswell of the northeast. Mostly, though, I just think the people around here are good for a laugh."
"I don't think people in Pine Bush would approve of your laughing at them."
"You really don't know about the UFOs?"
"Of course not."
"Why do you think that your diner is the Cup and Saucer?" he asked, pointedly.
"That's really reaching, Dylan. Anyway, I think you should get out of here before my gun-toting father comes out to investigate all the noises."
Dylan looked up at the dark windows, angling his eyes exactly on Jasmine's parents' bedroom window. "Fine, I'll see you."
As she showed him to the edge of her yard to make sure he was gone, the object returned. In the light of the two streetlights, there was no question that this was not a cloud. Smooth and metallic, the floating triangle hover fifty feet above their heads without making a sound. Jasmine realized to her horror that she could hear nothing but her heart pounding in her ears and his breath coming in even gasps. Beyond there being nothing mechanical, there were no crickets chirping, no frogs singing their pick-up lines. The object tipped toward them. Jasmine thought she could see small windows and behind the windows were--
There came a bright flash, though Jasmine could not tell if it came from the object overhead. Within a blink, the object had vanished to nothingness.
Jasmine's breath returned in shallow bursts. She fell onto the grass, hyperventilating. Dylan sat beside her and rubbed her back, tentatively, until her breathing normalized.
"We need to call the police," Jasmine finally said.
"And tell them what?"
"That we... We saw a... an object."
"The UFO spotters see them all the time. The cops don't care, man. There is actually a law against 'sky watching' in Orange County."
"So what do we do?"
"Nothing. It's all we can do."
Dylan helped Jasmine onto her feet and led her to her door. She had no more words for him, not even a "thanks" or "goodnight". She locked the door behind her, crawling into her bed. She pulled the sheets over her head and wished without success for sleep to come.
Jasmine managed to forget enough details by morning that she was no longer worried. She had a coworker at college--certainly not a friend--who was obsessed with UFOs and ghosts. It might keep him occupied, but it was boring at best to Jasmine. It didn't bear further thought, just a waking dream because she was so tired and suggestible.
Chrys came down the stairs in tie-dyed pajamas, bob bouncing and a broad smile across her thin lips. While undeniably growing into her prettiness, she seemed exclusively composed of recessive traits. While Jasmine's hair was silky brown, almost black, her sister had a tangle of blonde curls that had been cut close since she was an unkempt girl and their mother got tired of trying to comb out Gordian knots. Jasmine had always thought she looked like a dandelion, thin stems leading to a puff. Even her nose was irrationally petite. Her eyes were dull blue to Jasmine's verdure, though she made up in size what she lacked in style. Jasmine reasoned that some man out there might want a puffball with eyes like a lemur. Jasmine still hoped that the puberty fairy would one day visit her little sister with a figure to match hers, but it seemed increasingly unlikely.
"So, I met a guy at the Cup and Saucer last night," Chrys said in lieu of a greeting to her sister as she prepared her cornflakes for consumption.
"Yeah, so I noticed."
Chrys paused mid crunch, the bolus of her breakfast on presentation below her bottom lip. "Wha?"
"Your boyfriend was lurking in our backyard last night."
"Oh," Chrys said, slicing a banana in the mush her cereal was becoming. "He's not my boyfriend."
"But you want him to be," Jasmine challenged.
"I dunno. Maybe? Wait, how did know he was in the backyard."
"I heard a noise. He was there. I told him dad would shoot him and made him leave."
Chrys laughed. "Dad is the least violent guy ever."
"I think he might change his tune if he met Dylan."
"What did he say about me?" Chrys asked, not bothering to disguise her twitterpation.
"Nothing. At all."
"Oh," she answered, her smile dropping. "Well, he's coming to pick me up in an hour."
"Where are you two going?" Jasmine asked over her yogurt, more out of a duty to conversation than any real interest in her sister's life.
"Dunno. Driving, I guess. Maybe to New Paltz, check out some of the shops."
"And you just met him yesterday?"
"Yeah, so?"
"Your funeral."
Chrys huffed and dumped the remaining cereal in the sink, the soggy flakes immediately clogging the drain. Jasmine finished her yogurt and tried to remain calm. Then, with a clenched jaw, she cleared out the sink and washed her sister's dishes.
Chrys galloped down the stairs when the doorbell chimed. She was freshly showered, smelling of orchids, honey, and patchouli. She wore an overlarge Suzie and the Banshees t-shirt that had once briefly belonged to their mother, though Chrys had cut off the collar so it exposed one bony shoulder. Her jeans were so frayed and torn as to provide far less protection from the elements than shorts would.
Jasmine got to the door first, glancing backward to stick her tongue out at her sibling. "Dylan, come in," she said.
"No, really, we have a big day ahead of us and-"
"You don't, Chrys, and I want to make sure Dylan will keep you safe."
Dylan subdued the argument by walking between the sisters and flouncing onto the living room couch.
Pine Bush is a serialized novel being written by Xen. It didn't happen to you, your best friend, or his cousin. Why? Because it didn't happen. All persons, living, dead, undead, or unliving are purely coincidental. Any real persons are used fictiously. What you are about to read is not a news broadcast. No portion of this book may be distributed without the expressed written consent of Xen. Feel free to rope your friends into reading it, though. Do it or I start shooting PuppyOrphans.
He is syndicated throughout the internet and will write for you if you pay him.
