Narrator: Elena V. | New Mexico, USA
We had a sheet-metal shed behind the house where my husband kept a mower that hardly worked. I used to go outside to smoke where our daughter wouldn’t see me. Everyone knew. It was a stupid little performance we all kept up.
One evening I dropped my lighter behind the shed. When I bent to pick it up, I could see stars through a gap at the base.
The far side of the shed faced a block wall about three feet away. There was gravel there, an old hose, a bucket with no handle. But through this gap I was looking at a night sky. Not a reflection. Tiny white points, some brighter than others, hanging a long way off in blackness.
I moved my head and the view changed. There seemed to be depth to it. One bright point passed behind the edge of the metal.
I called my husband. He crouched beside me and went very still. He said, “Is that underneath us?”
That hadn’t occurred to me until he said it. We were looking slightly down through the gap, into what appeared to be open sky.
He fetched a broom and pushed the handle under the shed. It went in farther than the width of the shed allowed. He marked the handle with his thumb, pulled it out, and measured it against the outside wall. We did that twice without speaking.
Something tapped the far end on the third try. The handle moved in his hands, gently but deliberately, as though someone were testing whether he would let go.
He didn’t. He pulled it out so fast I fell backwards.
By morning the gap showed gravel and the hose. He took the shed apart the following weekend. The ground underneath was ordinary packed earth. He wouldn’t let our daughter help, which caused an argument neither of us explained properly.
We tell people a snake got under it. I suggested that excuse, and now I hate hearing him use it. We both saw something impossible. We both checked. A part of me would like to look again, and that is the part I don’t discuss with him.
