The Visitor
Laura was tired, but she couldn’t sleep. She could hear the rain pounding against her window pane, and every now and then, thunder clashed loudly as bolts of lightning flashed across the sky, illuminating her whole room in a blaze of white light. The noise and disturbance from the storm made it hard to fall asleep.
She started counting the seconds between the flashes of lightning and bolts of thunder, hoping that it would help her fall asleep. Her science teacher, Mr. Finkle, said that anyone could determine how far away lightning was by counting the time after lightning struck and before actually hearing the thunder because light moved faster than sound. “1 -2-3…” she counted.
Suddenly, her entire room was bathed in a strange, green light. She knew the light definitely wasn’t from the lightning. Curious, she crawled out of bed and walked over to her window. Outside, a peculiar-looking object hovered just above the ground. The object was round and about the diameter of her family’s dining room table. Strange, green lights were flashing from the object as it floated to a clearing in the middle of her backyard. There it stopped, and the green lights stopped flashing. As Laura watched, a panel on the side of the object slid open and a strange-looking creature crawled out. The creature was a yellowish-orange in color and looked like a squid with four tentacles. The creature stood and scooted around on the tentacles like legs. As Laura watched, the creature seemed to sense her presence and lifted its squid-like head towards her. Its large, oval-shaped, dark eyes stared at her like two pools of black tar. Laura ducked, hoping that the creature didn’t see her. She waited for a few seconds before peering over the edge of the windowsill to see if the creature was still there. Two black, oval-shaped eyes and a pair of tentacles stared back at her. The creature had affixed itself to the glass of her window pane! She started to scream, but was afraid of waking her parents up so quickly covered her mouth with her hands.