Kirsty settled into her steamer chair next to the small pond in her garden. It was late Friday afternoon, and she liked to relax for an hour or so before the turmoil of the weekend burst upon her, normally heralded by one or other of her, now fully-fledged, children bursting through the door with news of their exciting week.
She had finished all of the chores necessary for their home to be as spick and span as it could be for the homecoming. Her husband, Michael, was tapping away at that infernal computer in his study at the front of the house. She had hoped that, after a lifetime as an international salesman, his new job that allowed him more time to work at home would give her more access to him, but the lure of the Windows Desktop had proved as strong as the call of the road.
She loved her garden. It was small but fashioned in her favoured cottage-style over the many years they had lived here. The borders bristled with colour, attracting the many bees and butterflies that flitted between the myriad of blooms competing for their attention.
Of course, it was not all her own work. Michael had stretched the canvas by building the conservatory, laying the patio, digging the pond and then linking it to the small stream via a water feature. But she had flourished the brush that painted the shapes and colours, softening the harsh lines of edging bricks that defined the terraced lawns and borders.
She lay back in the chair and looked at the sky. It was as clear a blue as she had seen all summer, with not a cloud to break the continuity of the backdrop. It was another blank canvas awaiting a picture, she thought, except for the small shape of a hawk circling high above.
She had seen this bird for several weeks now, gently gliding around in a regular pattern as if it was scanning the ground beneath. Occasionally she heard its distant cry, as if it was calling to her to let her know it could see her. ‘What must it be like to be as free as that?’ she thought. To simply wander and observe from afar. She closed her eyes to try and imagine it.
Suddenly, she heard the cry again, but this time it sounded much closer, as though the bird was in her garden. She opened her eyes and was greeted with an amazing sight. Several hundred feet below her was her garden, and her home, and the rest of the houses on the estate, stretching out like one of the manic doodles that appeared on her writing pad when she was daydreaming about something other than her work. She focussed, and now it was like looking at Google Earth, but this was no computer screen. She could feel the wind on her face as she moved through the air. This was real!
There was the cry again, but this time it was coming from her, as she lazily glided across the view beneath. She looked down at her garden, and the steamer chair next to the pond. It was empty. She did not know how to react. Her emotions were a mixture of fear and excitement, wonder and uncertainty, all at once and in equal measure. But overlapping all of them was an immense calm that held them all at arms length.
She began to survey the road; the voyeur within her momentarily took over. ‘I wonder what the neighbours are doing’ she thought. Normally the fences and hedges kept everyone private. Not here the friendly comings and goings of her childhood in her parents’ home, where the doors were never locked, and it seemed like the entire street wandered in and out during the course of a day. Her mother knew everyone, and everyone knew her mother. All of the ladies of the street shared not only the fruits of their labours in kitchen and garden, but also their hopes and dreams.
She had expected to fulfil a similar role when she became a wife and mother, but suburbia did not offer the same opportunities. Here you kept yourself to yourself, unless the formal invitation to a dinner party or barbecue was issued. So she had submerged herself into her family and her home, making as much as she could of the fleeting encounters with acquaintances while she was out and about, but taking more pleasure from her regular girlie evenings and excursions with her old school friends, who all still lived within easy driving distance.
Not that the neighbours were stuffy in any way, far from it if the wild goings-on at the Hensons’ annual garden parties were anything to go by. But other than the social occasions, the demarcation lines were drawn around each family entity, and hers was no exception. But now the blinds were about to be ripped open, the hedges trimmed and the fences flattened. She could see it all, and nobody would have the faintest notion that she could.
Two doors down, there in the Bradshaws’ back garden was the seven-inch gauge railway track that Gordon used to test his steam engines, perfect miniature replicas of bygone leviathans that he created from sheets and bars of metal in his workshop behind the garage. Some of them had taken years to assemble, each part painstakingly researched and fashioned by hand. They were the star attraction every year on carnival weekend, when the local council allowed him to set-up a portable track in the park and be an engine driver for the day, taking kids of all ages for rides. Looking at his face on those occasions, it was easy to tell who was enjoying the experience the most.
Across the street, there were the Johnsons, the young couple who had moved in last year, next to their pool doing…..Oh! Well it was easy to see why they were so keen to buy the house with the tallest and thickest leylandii in the neighbourhood!!
Next door to them, there was Doris, her best friend in the road, chasing around trying desperately to organise her four kids into some sort of grouping, presumably for the latest activity that she had dreamt-up for their entertainment. They were wonderful kids, unsurprisingly as Doris was the most patient and inventive mother she had ever known. But they were free spirits and rarely stayed still for much more than a few moments. An outsider might view them as an unruly bunch, but they were simply the lumpy mattress that had become their mother’s life’s work to smooth and flatten.
She raised her gaze from the ground and looked out across the main road at the fields lying beyond. As she did so, she banked to her right and caught a thermal that took her higher and out of the confines of the estate towards them. She glided effortlessly across the patchwork below her of endless shades of green, interspersed with the brown of ploughed fields, the bright yellow of the cale, and the light sandy hue of the cornfields. Within minutes, the bustle of the estate had been left far behind her, and now she was consumed by the still of the countryside.
She then became aware of some movement in one of the cornfields below her. At first she thought it was a shadow, but then she realised it was not moving across the field, but growing within it. She banked again, and dropped quite rapidly several hundred feet towards the field, levelling out above it. There in the middle of the field, the corn was laying over in a circular pattern. It was a crop circle, and this one was forming and growing in diameter as she watched.
Crop circles were not unusual in this area, and she had often taken the kids to see them when they were younger. These trips would lead to endless family discussions when they returned home, about what caused them and why. Michael had even bought several books on the subject, and joined-in merrily bantering with them as their theories became evermore sensational. But to actually witness one in the making had been the holy grail of the subject, an esoteric mystery that was never likely to be revealed. Until now, that is.
As the diameter of the circle grew, there appeared to be something moving rapidly around the circumference. It was very small, and at odd points there would be a small glint of light as the sun appeared to reflect from something shiny. Just as she focussed-in to see if she could distinguish what it was, the movement stopped, and the circle grew no more. It must have been fifty feet across, twice the size it was when she first swooped down, but now eerily still.
Then, all of a sudden, another shape began to form next to it. This time it was a block, and the movement appeared to criss-cross it. Then it stopped again. Then another small shape formed to the other side of the circle, then another, and another. It was as if there was an unseen artist with a gouache knife, smoothing and shaping the corn in swathes across the field. But it all appeared to be haphazard, there was no obvious pattern.
As she pondered the shapes, she caught another thermal and began to soar upwards again. She gained several hundred feet in a spiral before levelling out. She searched the landscape below for the same field, and when it came into view she could see the shapes again, and the picture they formed. It was the head of a hawk, drawn in an Egyptian style like the head of the god Horus. Very simple, but obvious. As she gazed in wonder at it, she became aware of the sunlight reflecting off of a shape moving rapidly up from the field towards her. In the flicker of an eye it was upon her, and as quickly as it had moved, it now became stationary in front of her.
It was a sphere of brightly-polished silver metal, no more than three inches across, and without a mark on it. There were no openings, no seams, just a solid ball. It rotated slowly as it hovered ahead of her, matching its speed to the speed of her glide. She heard a slight fluttering sound, and it reminded her briefly of the Quiddich Snitch from the Harry Potter stories, but without the wings. It was as though it was checking her as she surveyed the picture in the field below, standing back like an artist to compare his subject and the finished canvas. For the first time she caught her reflection in the ball. It was a mirror image of the picture below.
Then as quickly as it arrived, the sphere shot off horizontally to her right and disappeared from view. As it did, she was aware of her name being called. She closed her eyes briefly to gather her thoughts, then opened them again to see Michael standing in front of her chair in the garden holding a glass.
“Hi there sleepy” he said, “Thought you might like some squash.”
“I wasn’t asleep” she replied “I was just watching that hawk up there”
He looked up, but there was nothing moving across the clear blue skyscape above him.
“Can’t see it” he said. She looked up again, but only saw the empty blue canvas she had started with.
“Must’ve flown off somewhere else,” he said, matter-of-fact as ever.
“Or” she answered quietly with a knowing smile, “maybe it’s just perched somewhere nearby”