~ The Deck ~

It was starting to get dark.
It was starting to get dark and there was still nothing that made sense in any of this.
Everything is so strange. Yeah.
My family were not the sort of people who ended up interviewed on alien abductions in the Daily Sun, next to a picture of Elvis filling up his car in Tupulo, Missouri; yet here I was, sitting on the back deck mulling over… what?
Muddy, barefoot footprints all around the back door. Drag marks out to the shelterbelt behind the house that vanish with no trail. Smears on the windows that look like finger marks but that don’t have any prints. This is the kind of crap I used to think up.
Mom slid open the patio door and stepped into the gloom. “You want anything to eat, bud?”
I shook my head. “Why’d you call me out here, Mom? I mean, I’m glad to be here and help you out, but what…” I let it go and shook my head again, slouching back into the deck chair. It was quiet for several minutes except for the sound of absent-minded bug swatting.
“I thought–” she started, then stopped. “I thought you might be… that you might know something.”
“About this?”
“Something that might help.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Eventually, she went back inside.