“It was a UFO,” she said.
“I’ve never seen one before, but I swear that’s what it was.”
She must be at least 80. The dog at her feet is an ankle biter.
The dog has spindly legs, a big belly, bulgy eyes, a pink rhinestone collar and a red nylon leash. Except for the leash and collar part, so does Margaret.
She has stopped me as I dump the week’s trash, bagged and heavy, with a thump on the curb.
“Where?” I look upward.
“There,” a gnarled finger points as the dog sniffs my garbage.
I look.
“It’s gone now.”
She looks at me and back up into the trees, then nods.
Her dog is squatting, leaving an anklebiting size pile of dog feces beside my garbage.
She looks away as if she doesn’t notice. I make a mental note. When I’m 80 I’ll ignore my dog squatting.
A neighbor who has just pulled into her driveway across the street sees us talking and joins us. Me. The crapping dog.
“Hi Margaret,” she says, ignoring the dog.
Margaret nods and continues recounting a movie she saw once about abductions and anal probes. We all look up into the wet, black limbs of the oak tree on the corner and past it into the night sky.
The glare from the street light is all we see.
No aliens here.
Yet another couple stops and looks up with us.
What is it?
“Aliens,” the elderly woman begins her story anew.
We all nod solemly.
And for the next ten minutes we recount our own first UFO sightings. We have bonded over the sharing of a mystery.
We all check the tree once again to ensure the UFO hasn’t returned and become lodged there while we were talking.
The dog is finished and kicking ankle-biting sized pieces of wet grass over his deposit.
“Well,” she sighs, looking first at her dog, then at the tiny pile beside the garbage bag.
“I’ll get it,” I say.
She smiles.
The walking after dinner for the exercise couple laughs and strolls off.
“No aliens tonight,” Margaret says, and totters off.
My neighbor watches her walk away.
“Do you really believe she saw a UFO?” she asks.
“Of course.”
She looks at me for a minute, her eyes narrowing.
“I don’t know if I do or not.”
She crosses the street and gets in her car, backs up and stops for a minute to let the traffic go by before pulling and backing in so she can pull directly into traffic in the morning.
I turn to walk back in when the lights in the sky catch my eye and I stop.
There. And again. I rock back and forth, back and forth.
If you stand just right there are UFO’s – the reflection of the neighbor’s car lights on the windows of the unlit upper story house behind the tree.
The neighbor pulls back out and the lights disappear.
I watch them disappear into the night.
The stories we tell each other.
Oh, the stories we tell each other.
