Claire Wilcox

Introduction

Snow has already fallen and melted once this winter. The sky is solid gray and very bright. The damp weather has darkened the trunks of each bare tree so that they all look silhouetted against the light yellow grass and sky.

Modicon picks up on the things she might find now in mud and water. A trench runs up across the gravel driveway. Four days ago she left four plastic aliens inside it on purpose. Covered in a coat and hat and wearing rubber boots she heads towards the trench. She’s trying to walk steadily and not run, forcing herself to approach the scene this morning calmly. Her stomach lurches. Once she had met a boy at the beach and together they had buried the figurine of a turtle in the sand. It was his toy, and no one could recover it before it was time to leave. She hopes she has to look a little, to dig them out a little, and maybe even that she has lost one forever.

They are always discovering things here in the ground. Her father has collected the glass bottles he has found. They’re old, thick, opaque glass, and he’s stuck colorful feathers in them, and put them on her dresser. That’s next to the eggs in a glass box, resting on silk, painted with a landscape from China. She thinks, wouldn’t it be exciting to find this last alien in five years? To have forgotten the look and feel of the rippled plastic, and the second mouth you can push out with a button, and then suddenly to have it all rush back.

And then her brother has come out. He wants to play as well. He’s mad at first because they are his aliens, and he had lent them to her for only one day, and now they’re dirty and messed up. It would be really fun to tickle her a little until she screamed or maybe if they got into the mud and played there with the aliens. It’s not that cold today so he yanks his boot and sock off and sticks his foot into the mud. As he pushes down and it squelches he bursts out with a laugh and a squeal and catches her attention.