In the languid hush of a late August evening—twenty-ninth day, nineteenth hour—Vernon, British Columbia folded itself into that curious silence that only lakeside towns know. The sky lay steeped in bruised lavender, cut here and there by trails of dying gold, while Okanagan Lake lapped at the shore like some vast creature tasting the air. I stood on the back step, hands still cool from rinsing supper dishes, when the dusk cracked open.
Across my peripheral vision slid a thing white as grave-stone yet shining like new tin: cigar-shaped, steadfast, fifteen measured feet from tapered nose to blunted tail. At its prow rose a narrow cone, smooth as the ossuary spires of forgotten New England churches. No rivets, no seams, no exhaust—only an alabaster skin that swallowed the last of the sunlight and gave back nothing save a faint pearlescence. Twenty feet above the cedar-shingled corner of our modest lakeside house it simply ceased all forward motion—slipped from a bullet’s trajectory into perfect immobility with neither lurch nor whisper.
Four seconds. A single heartbeat shy of human certainty. Long enough for the air to thicken, for cicadas to choke upon their own humming, for my skin to tighten like parchment left near flame. Long enough, too, for the object to broadcast a mute command: behold.
Then it went. Southward, gone—so violently swift the only record is the memory of an after-image burned against my retina: a white streak that threatened to engrave itself into the undiscovered bones of long-drowned prospectors who sleep beneath Okanagan’s dark water. No sonic rip, no wind-rush; merely absence where presence had towered an instant before.
I remained on the step until night congealed utterly, ears ringing with a silence louder than thunder, tasting iron where no blood had been drawn. Somewhere downshore a loon cried once—whether in mourning or prophecy, I never learned.
To this day the cedar shakes on that corner of the roof curl a little lighter, as if bleached from above. And on late August evenings, when heat lightning hovers over the lake like the phosphorescence of old gods, I feel the peculiar certainty that something up there remembers the night a quiet British Columbia hamlet tilted imperceptibly toward the abyss.
If you walk the shore path after dusk, gaze southward. Keep watch. Should you see a white flicker skid to impossible stillness above your roof, count slowly—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—until the fourth. By the fifth, it will already have claimed another fragment of the world’s composure.