IT CAME FROM THE SKY: I'd Like to Report

I'D LIKE TO REPORT

by R. Scott Whitley

“I’m here to see Dr. Clarkson.”

“I’m Paul Clarkson,” I said, standing up to pull the door open the rest of the way to let the young man in my office. “I’m not a doctor. Just call me Paul, please.” He was timidly peeking inside, half hidden behind the door.

“Okay,” he said, and stepped back when I pulled the door open, gesturing for him to come in. 

My office was small, just one room. I had a large, red chair that I sat in, and a soft, welcoming couch opposite.

“Sit anywhere you’d like, but the couch is probably best,” I said with a chuckle that fell completely flat to the floor.

“Okay,” he said again. 

When he got in, I could see bruises on both of his cheeks, and bluish-green marks in the corners of both of his eyes. He could tell I was looking so he dropped his head and sat down on the couch. He was holding tight to his sleeves like his very existence was tied to them staying in place. He was wearing a single t-shirt fabric hoodie, long baggy jeans, and when he sat down, he immediately crossed his ankles.

I walked over to my chair, attempting to get a better look at his face, but the light in my office, intentionally down and comforting, wasn’t giving me the best vantage. He looked to be late teens, maybe twenty, but it was hard to tell.

“You’re… Jason, right?” I said, opening a manila file with one single page of my notes. I wanted him to feel like I had received something from his regular therapist, but she had actually not sent me anything at all, just an hour long phone call, but no files.

He nodded and didn’t say anything.

I sat down, case file closed in my lap.

“How old are you Jason?”

“I’m twenty-two,” he said.

“Twenty-two. Good age. Are you in college?”

He shook his head.

“No? But you finished high school?”

“Yeah.  I went to two years of college, but that’s all.”

“Why did you leave?” I asked, but spotted bruising around his lips.  They looked like pinches, tiny little marks all along his bottom lip.

“I wasn’t getting the grades, so Mom and Dad told me to come home.”

“So, you live at home now?”

“Yeah.”

“Only child?”

“Older sister,” he said, “but she lives in Michigan.”

“You close?”

“She’s eleven years older, so not really.”

“All right… so … Jason… do you know why Tilly sent you to me?” Tilly was his regular therapist and she had contacted me because Jason was convinced he was being abducted by aliens, a counseling niche I had carved out over the years. I was relatively successful in breaking the abduction construct, getting folks back to their regular therapists in a better position for ongoing treatment. 

Tilly had been his therapist since he was fourteen and he had claimed for years that he was being abducted from his bed, from late night walks, and once from a chair in his living room. She would work with him on what sort of life events were making him feel that separation from self, and creating a need for external attention for internal trauma. She told me that she had being working with Jason on exploring the abduction experiences as being a feeling of separation he was having because of tensions in his home, tensions created by his being at home. 

“She wanted me to see a specialist,” he said, “and you’re a specialist.”

In the past nine months, Jason had begun to show physical signs of injury when he came to his therapy sessions. At first, it was bloody fingernails, then various cuts, cuts he was purposefully calling incisions, along his ankles. 

When he had first seen her, he had just started self-harming. Tilly theorised these were related to the stress of losing his job at Starbucks, but he said he lost his job because of his constant injuries and unsanitary appearance. Tilly tried to work out a timeline to show him otherwise, but he was unconvinced.

Four months ago, he showed up with facial bruising, but last month he came in with bloody injuries in the inside corner of each eye. Jason was too old to legally contact his parents, and when he had turned eighteen, he had rescinded any right to Tilly making contact with his mother or father.

His explanations were all increasingly intrusive and violent abductions, and it made Tilly very uncomfortable continuing on with treatment.

I’d met Tilly years ago. She’d mentioned this kid once, never by name, and I’d forgotten it until she emailed me.

“I’m a ufologist,” which was true only in the most broad sense, I only called myself that because I had to in order to be successful, “and I specialize in abductions. I understand you’ve been having abduction experiences?” 

That phrasing was important.

“Doctor Clarkson…”

“Paul… call me Paul.”

“Doctor… they’re going to end up killing me if you can’t help me,” he started crying, but tears weren’t coming out from the bruised inside of his eyes, “I don’t know what I’ve done that have pushed them to…”

“They… from the abduction experiences?”

“I have no idea what the fuck I have done…”

“Jason… let’s slow down…”

“It was never like this… not until recently… it wasn’t until….” he jumped up and started walking for the door, sleeves clamped in his fists.

“Jason, sit down, let’s…”

“Doctor, I… I have to go…”

And he broke into a run into the hallway in my little office building, popping the door open and running out across the parking lot.

“Tilly, hey it’s Paul.”

“So, whatcha think?” she said. Paul clearly heard her toss her pen and close a book over the phone. If I had to guess, I’d say she’d been waiting for my call.

“Well, I don’t know… he ran out.”

“Ran out? Like, you mean, actually ran out?”

“I mean he left and was running full tilt across the parking lot.”

“Well,” she laughed a little, “he never did that with me.  What’d you do wrong?”

“I thought you said he was younger,” I said, a little irritated with her flippant tone.

“I told you he was living with his parents working at Starbucks and we talked about his experiences.  I’m pretty sure I told you about his age.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did you look back at your notes?”

“Of course I did,” I rattled some papers for her benefit because I had only one page of actual notes, most were just jot downs of little things.

“Anyway, he’s twenty-two,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. That’s a problem. I can’t talk to his parents.”

“Were you planning to?”

“I thought about it. If he was nineteen, maybe twenty, I could still give them a call, maybe get a little unsolicited commentary on him. I can’t call at twenty-two. He’s a grown man.”

“There is no way that is a grown man. Wait until he talks about his parents…”

“I’m talking legally, but what do you mean?”

“He talks about his mom and dad like he’s a kid still. I’ll give you an example… a year ago, he told me about his mom and dad keeping their bedroom door shut at night. I mean… he was… like… seriously upset.”

“Tilly, he lives at home and he’s having abduction dreams, I’m sure he…”

“Hallucinations too… they aren’t just while he’s sleeping.”

“He might think he’s awake… but…”

“Paul, I read all the sleep paralysis stuff, it isn’t that. He left work without cuts on his chest, he got home and had cuts. His mom called me and told me. I couldn’t discuss it with her because legal reasons, obviously, but that’s strange.”

“Might not be hallucinations… he might be self harming for different reasons. It could be to get his mom’s attention, or maybe because he knows she’s watching and he’s trying to give her something to see. That doesn’t have to be as much of a conscious decision as you’d think.”

“Paul… I’ve studied psychology too…”

“You sent him to me.”

“Right, I sent him to you because I can’t get past this abduction construct he’s living in. I didn’t send him to you so you can tell me what self-harm is. My point was that he thinks it’s happening to him while he’s awake. I’m telling you, I think whatever is happening, it isn’t straight up cutting in the regular sense. That kid believes what he’s saying.”

“Gotcha.”

There was a knock and my door eased open…

“Doctor Clarkson?” 

Jason was back…

“I gotta go,” I said and disconnected.

“Were you about to leave or anything?” he asked, his tone much different than before.

“No, no, you’re fine, I have time,” I switched on a couple of lamps as it was late fall and getting dark earlier.  “however much you need.”

“Thanks.”

“Sure. Now, what brought you back?”

He adjusted himself in the chair and let go of his sleeves. I could see fresh cuts and some scars, young scars, months old, not years.  He moved to grab his sleeves then didn’t.

“I know Tilly talked to you,” he said, “if she hadn’t, you wouldn’t have agreed to see me.”

“We talked, but I’m interested in hearing more from you.”

“You’ve talked to other people before who’ve had this stuff happen?”

“I have,” I said, adjusting in the my chair and he nearly mirrored me, but it wasn’t intentional. “I know how traumatic these experiences can be.”

“I’m not doing this,” he said. “That’s not who I am.”

Not who I am was a way people sometimes answer questions that aren’t asked. ‘Not who I am’ is saying I’m not the type of person who would do this. You have to believe what I’m saying because a person like me is incapable of these actions.

“I believe you, Jason.”

“You do?”

“These experiences often come with bodily injury.”

“Like this?”

“Well,” I said, “I’ve not seen injuries like yours per se, but I’ve seen them.” 

Cuts weren’t uncommon in abduction cases. They were almost always referred to as incisions by the patients. Sometimes with unusual substances inserted.

“I don’t know what I did to make them so angry,” he said and ran his fingers through his hair, tugging a little before letting go. “They’ve been doing this since I was in high school… but they suddenly started… this…”  He tugged up his sleeve and revealed long, deep gashes from his wrist all the way to his armpit. It looked like the skin had been pulled open and then sewn shut, but there weren’t any sutures.

“Have you let a doctor look at those?”

“Just you,” he said.

“Jason, I’m not a doctor, and I’m certainly not trained to…”

“They hurt… but I’m not going to let a doctor look at it…”

“You should… those are… I … what if they became infected?” I was worried suddenly that I might need to have him committed. These types of injuries, as extensive as they were, weren’t normal in any type of abduction hallucination.

“And then these,” he lifted his shirt up. He had a long, twisting scar across his stomach where the skin had be sutured, or cauterized, or knotted in someway. “They opened me up. I saw my insides… it was… like… fuck… they slice me open and seal me back up, over and over again. Every fucking night.”

“Jason, what’s …”

“I didn’t do this…”

I’d never dealt with anything like this before.  This level of self injury was beyond anything I’d ever read about and I wondered if Tilly had known these injuries were this serious, and if she had, why was she sending him to me and not to a mental health treatment center?

“Jason, why don’t you tell me about what’s going on here?”  I was so shaken that I couldn’t figure out where to start. This kid was mutilating his body and it wasn’t something I was prepared for.

“When I was fourteen… that was the first time. I had just turned fourteen,” he said and he crossed his legs tight. “I was… it was just when I was hitting puberty or whatever. I mean… they came… I was in my bedroom. I woke up and it was 3:17. I remember because I was staring at the clock. It was dark and the red numbers were really bright.”

I picked up his case file still sitting out, opened it, snatched up my pen, and hid my hand that was shaking. Those scars…

I scribbled ‘puberty’ down, but it’s really all I could manage.

“OK, night time, correct?  That’s what you said?”

“Yeah,” Jason replied. “And I was in my bed. I couldn’t move at all, I was just staring at the clock. I fought and struggled, but I couldn’t move at all.”

Sleep paralysis was common. The feeling of not being able to move upon waking up was a big part of abduction cases. It happens because the brain wakes up enough to imagine surroundings, placing things mostly where they should be in an intense dream. The body is not awake to move, but it is awake enough to feel frozen. It is a dream state, not an actual waking state.

“Had you had that experience before?”

“Of sleep paralysis?”

“Well…”

“I’ve read all about this. I know what you’re thinking about. Sleep paralysis…” he started picking at a loose thread on the couch. “It wasn’t that. It’s never been that.”

“OK, keep going.”

“I could see them coming down my hallway. I could move my eyes, and I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. I tried to scream for my mom, for my dad, for anybody… but I couldn’t”

“You said ‘them’. What do you mean by that?”

“The beings… the aliens… they were coming down the hallway. They were small, gray …like, chalky gray. They weren’t wearing any clothing. They had no visible anything other than thin legs, thin arms…” he swallowed hard. “And long fingers. Their fingers scared me… still scare me.”

“How many?”

“Six. There were six. They had massive heads, slit mouths, and large shiny black eyes… eyes that took up most of their head.”

I jotted down, Betty and Barney Hill… this wasn’t some revelation I had, but something to just give me a thing to refocus my head. 

Betty and Barney Hill were the first, famous case of abduction recorded. The eyes were a strong focus of their abduction experience.  

The eyes were described under hypnosis, but hadn’t been at any point prior. The problem?  The eyes, the aliens, the description all went back to episodes of The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone that had aired over the weeks prior to their hypnosis.

I took a breath, remembering them.  I breathed out remembering the injuries this young man had given himself.

“Six beings in the room with you,” I said, “and what happened from there?”

“Do you mind if I step outside for a minute?  To have a smoke?”

“Absolutely, absolutely… I’ll be right here.  Take all the time you need.”

He walked outside and I could see him from the window in my office, lighting his cigarette and breathing deeply with each drag. I added to my notes, making little sketches of his injuries, scars that looked surgical. They were awful, awful things.

In the case of Betty and Barney Hill, there was an abduction with Betty being taken onto a spacecraft, some invasive exams conducted.  Their descriptions became the model for abductions. Over the years, the stories evolved as science fiction evolved.

Betty and Barney Hill were an interracial couple in the 1960s. They had both faced enormous pressures, both externally and internally because of it. Some of the recounted experiences from the their initial encounter even lead me to question if there had been some sort of attack on them, sexual assault potentially as Betty’s dress was damaged in the abduction.  Their car had been stopped by uniformed men who Barney initially described as looking like Irishmen, or Nazis before they became alien in appearance.

Their experience has been the subject of years of debate… and even a movie. The society had the seeds sown, and abduction cases took off.

This young man, Jason, his experience was not theirs. His experience was unlike any I’d ever heard of, certainly any I’d ever seen. Self-mutilation played a role in some of these, but the level of injury this kid exhibited… it was terrifying.

I leaned over in my chair to look at Jason, still outside. He seemed to be talking to someone just beyond my view.  I heard him scream and he started running again, just as he had the first time I’d seen him. Lightening fast, I scrambled to the window, but by the time I got there, he’d rounded the corner of my office and was out of site.

“Tilly, do you have a contact number for Jason?”

“I have an old one, but he’s always called me.  Did something happen?”

“The cuts on his arms and stomach, did you see them?”

“That’s why I sent him to you.”

The medical profession, and to a greater extent, the counseling/mental health profession, is full of poor practitioners. There are a lot of people who weren’t cut out for doing the job we do. It’s not like treating an infection, or fixing teeth, the treatment of mental health through non-medical means could be particularly subjective and difficult to measure.

My head was tip toeing around the obvious, Tilly should have referred this kid to be placed under protective health services. He was a danger to himself. It was obvious.

“Tilly, if we can find him, I’ll need your help. We have to make sure he can’t harm himself.”

“He says he isn’t doing it though,” Tilly replied. “How do you do something with…”

“Tilly, it’s obvious he is. I’m sorry if you didn’t take the right steps to protect him, but I have to, it’s part of…”

“Fuck you, Paul. You’re the expert on this kind of stuff, this alien stuff he’s talking about, if all you’re going to do is get him locked up so he can’t hurt himself, I could have done that!”

“You SHOULD have done that. He could be off slicing himself up right now! He is too far along to…”

“I’m not going to let you sit here and trash my treatment of this kid. I tried to help him. I sent him to you. If you want to have him locked up, you can do it on your own.”

And with that, she’d hung up.

I spent ten days trying to find Jason. A twenty two year old troubled kid who had lived at home for most of his life, had minimal employment and only a short stint at college, left very little trail to follow. He had no social media accounts, at least, none I could find.

It took ten days for his Dad to talk to me, and that came because I’m pretty sure he accidently answered my call. 

“Hell… shhhhttt… hello?”

“Sir, I’m trying to locate your son, Jason. I have treated him and am concerned he might be in danger.”

“Well, we haven’t seen him,” he said.

“I was under the impression he was living at your home, but I’m not sure I discussed it with him. Do you have another address for…?”

“He lives here, but we haven’t seen or heard from him. I gotta go…”

“Sir!” I yelled before the receiver could be slammed down. “Jason might be in serious trouble. I’m concerned for his safety.”

“Listen… doctor…”

“Paul. My name is Paul Clarkson.”

“Paul Clarkson, I don’t know where he’s gone. I don’t know anything about him. He’s had… there’s been too much with that kid. I don’t know anything about anything that’s going on.”

Jason is an adult and sharing treatment sessions with his parents really wasn’t legal, but I was worried about him physically harming himself which made it gray, so…

“Sir, did Jason ever go missing while living at home?”

“What the hell kind of doctor are you?”

“I’m a psychologist. He came to me because of a particular problem he was having.”

“No, he never went missing. He never was… he never… look, he broke all the windows in my basement. He destroyed his mother’s shrubs and rose bushes. He keyed the hood of my truck.  No, he never went missing, but the bullshit he did have going on was destroying my family and my goddamned house.

“So, no.  No, Paul Clarkson, I have not seen my son. I have not seen him, and until he quits his bullshit, I don’t really want to see him.”

“Again, I’m afraid he’s a danger to himself,” I said quietly.

“He’s not, he likes the attention too much.  Give him time, he’ll come back around. He’s done it before. He’d go missing, show back up and claim he didn’t know where he’d been. You quit worrying when you get tired of the bullshit. Paul, I have to go because I have things I have to get done. Have a good day.”

And his father hung up on me.

That night, I sat down on my back deck and thought about that call with Jason’s dad. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and it was crystal clear, so I could see every star, every space of black, the cloudy strip of the Milky Way.

My call with his Dad had bothered me, it had bothered me so much that I had to skip dinner, and didn’t eat anything until I came out to my back deck, and even then it was just a ham sandwich. His Dad’s tone and dismissal of his son’s mental struggles disturbed me. How could anyone possibly be so hateful towards their child?

Then I started to think about the missing time.  Jason would go missing, then show back up saying he didn’t know where he’d been.  Abduction experiences had these in some cases, the ‘I was gone for several minutes’ with no explanation. It was a staple in sci-fi, and yet again, Betty and Barney Hill can be thanked for it.

In their case, their experience occurred while driving in rural New Hampshire while on their way from Niagara Falls to Portsmouth, Virginia.  Betty had seen an unusual object in the sky, and she thought it was a UFO because her sister had talked about seeing one a few weeks before.

After an unusual, and rambling ‘chase’ they encountered an object, and through binoculars, Barney saw beings in the windows who were dressed in black with black capes and they were telling him to keep staring. At that point they lost time, but when they realized what was happening, they were driving, but 35 miles away from where they remembered being, but it was what Barney remembered under hypnosis that made me think that Jason’s Dad might be right.

The next day, I was sitting in my office, waiting on my next patient, when there was a very light knock on the door.

“Doctor?” Jason said, sticking his head into my office. The entire right side of his face was a mass of misshapen swellings, purple, green, red, burst capillaries under the skin caused little rivers of red all across the bruises. His eye was blood red, but I could only see it through a tiny slit because the skin, the upper and lower lid, were swollen and mottled like a nectarine hand replaced a third of his face. He looked inhuman.  He was so beaten that he himself now looked alien.

“Jason… my god… please… come in.”  I got up to let him inside and get my door shut before he decided to run again.

“Thank you for seeing me.”

“You’re getting treatment for that, right?” I nodded toward his face, tentative, like somehow the gesture might hurt him.

“No. I mean, I’ve not been.”

“You’ve not gotten treatment? My god, Jason. Let me call the emergency…”

“Doctor… I… I just got back here,” Jason interjected.

“Back here?” Beads of sweat ran down my neck. “Back from… where?”

“I’m not sure. The last thing I remember was they came after me while I was out smoking at our last session.”

“You’ve been gone for eleven days.”

“Uh… has it been eleven days?”

With his one open eye, he looked away from me and licked his lips. I tried to give him a pass on that because they were slightly swollen, but it was a reaction still. I let the quiet sit there for a second just to make him a bit uncomfortable.

“Yeah, I’ve been very worried about you,” I said. He was wearing the same clothes, but they weren’t eleven-days-worth-of-wear dirty.

His lip was bleeding and swelling.

“I didn’t go on purpose. I didn’t…”

He was swallowed hard, and I wondered if he’d had teeth knocked out. His tear ducts were swelling. Jason looked like he had been in a flight and barely escaped with his life.

“Tell me what happened? Who is doing this to you? Can we discuss that honestly?”

“They did it… they grabbed me from the parking lot. I remember hours of constant beating. Doctor, they had me in the corner… the room… it was blinding, but I could see them… they were small, but they didn’t use the instruments…”

“Jason, because of the level of injury you’re experiencing, I would like to get you in somewhere that we can protect you. I want to make sure they can’t…”

“They can get me wherever you put me.  They will come at any time of day. The only thing they require is that I’m alone. The next time… next time… they’ll…”

“Well, I’m still going to call and see if I can get you in, at least in the short term, just to make sure.”

I turned and walked over to a bookcase behind me, and was literally turned away for no more than 5 seconds, when I heard my window shatter. I spun back around, and again Jason was gone. He’d jumped through my window, shattering it. The window was thick glass, not easily broken.

I ran to the window, leaning down, careful not to get too close to the shattered pane. He was gone. I couldn’t see him. There were glass shards scattered across the grass. A couple of folks from other offices ran outside, and came over, looks of horror and confusion on their faces.

“Did you see where that child went?” I said, ‘child’ felt more right than saying ‘man’.

“No. I just heard screaming, and the sound of shattering glass,” an accountant from down the hall to my office said. He had hair that looked like he had stepped out of the 90s, and his askew glasses had come straight away with it.  He jerked them off looking at me like I’d done it.

“What’n the world!” a massage therapist down the way ran out in socked feet, a long shirt over her white leggings made her look like a fortune teller.  Her office smelled like sandalwood.

“Paul had one run out,” the accountant said.

“Oh,” she said looking down at the glass.  “Hope he didn’t cut himself.”

“Me too,” I said.

“Make sure you get that cleaned up,” she said to the glass and started walking back in more irritated at me than anything.

“You need any help Paul?”

“No,” I said. “Thanks though.”  

I stepped back from my window.  I picked up my phone, looked at the screen.

“If you call,” I said to myself, “they’ll lock him away. It might not be what is best for him.”  I knew I had to call 911, but I hated it. They’ll treat Jason as a criminal.

Then I saw a red spot on the carpet near my door.

His blood.

I tapped in 911.

“911, Police, Fire, or Medical?”

“Police.”

“What’s your emergency?”

“I’m a therapist… I have a patient in immediate danger.”

It was chilly outside, enough that I could see my breath every few times I breathed out.  The sky was crystal clear again, and I was feeling extra philosophical. Three Bloody Marys, and now four beers had my head all over the place. It had been the longest day I’d ever had and I started drinking the minute I got home.

I had Jason’s file on my patio table. I looked at it, but didn’t really want to read it again. I had read it all day. I had read it to the police. Parts of that was breaking the law technically, but at the moment, Jason was a danger to himself, and there was also somebody beating him near death and he wasn’t willing to tell me who.

The police listened as I told them about his self-harm – self-mutilation – and his injuries today. How he’d showed back up after first fleeing my office, how we talked for only a few minutes before he dove through my window.

Cardboard covered up my window now, I had nothing of value in the office so I hoped nobody got in, but if they did, self-help books might help them not break into places again.

“The fuck happened to you?” I put my finger on the corner of Jason’s case file and slid it back and forth on the tile-topped table. My table was uneven and rocked back and forth a bit. The tiles just rested in little squared openings, and they wobbled when the table rocked. The whole thing rocked back and forth with each shift of the file.

I opened it for a second, then slammed it shut rattling the table around, not wanting to bother again. Honestly, I’d probably had too much to drink to even see the page without closing an eye to look at it.

“Tilly’s probably gonna tell you you should’ve called the police too, just to piss you off, you know,” I said out loud.  “Bitch.”

I laughed a little. When I called anybody ‘bitch’ I’d had way too much to drink.

My chair rattled as I pushed it back on the concrete so I could stand. I arched my back, stretched my arms up, and looked down at the case file.  

“Fuck.”

The tiles off my table suddenly sounded like they had exploded. Tile pieces shot up, the edges of the metal table curled in as something hit the very center of my patio table like a splash in a still pond. It was like both fast motion and slow motion were spinning around each other, going down a drain in the center of my table.

I jumped back, and was so drunk I just fell straight back onto the grass, pieces of the tiles landing on me, the dust of my broken table everywhere.  I looked up and saw a single quick flash of light over me, away from my house, almost like someone had tossed a spinning flashlight high up in the air, the light ceasing at the top of the arc.  

I pushed myself up, stumbling a bit, but getting to my feet. My tabletop was like a squashed spider, lying flat on the ground, the legs broken and splayed out from underneath. Every tile was shattered to bits, but there, in the mess was Jason’s body.

He was a bloody, beaten, broken mess.

His face was black, barely recognizable, hair matted and stuck to the blood on his face. He looked to be missing his right ear, neck broken based on the angle his head was at.

Only six fingers were between his two hands, curling entrails were hanging from below his shirt. The tile dust sticking like sprinkled salt on what was left of Jason’s stomach and bowels.  Jason’s jeans were blood soaked, long cuts exposed each leg from crotch to ankle, and his legs underneath barely looked like human flesh.

I looked around.  There was nothing.  There was nobody.  My watch said 2:13am. I didn’t hear cars, trucks, motorcycles. I didn’t hear anything but the quiet of the night, but there he was, body destroyed, laying in the remains of a table that looked like it had been hit by an explosion.

I looked up.

“You saw a light,” I said very much out loud, “didn’t you?”

I looked back down at his body.

Maybe it was a flashlight.

“Did you just jump off my roof?  Down on my table?”

I was drunk enough.  Maybe I wouldn’t have seen him.

But his body.  He couldn’t jump from anywhere with his body like that.

I looked back up.

“I definitely saw a light, right?”

My words were loud in the stillness.

I pulled my phone from my pocket, the screen lit up.

Do I tell them I saw a light?  If I say I saw a light, does that sound crazy?

“You can’t say you saw a light.  You can’t.”

I keyed 911 on the screen.

“911, Police, Fire, or Medical.”

I looked up in the sky.

I’d seen a light.

“Police.”

“What’s your emergency?”

I looked up, then looked over at Jason’s body in the mess of my destroyed table.

“Hello? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“What’s your emergency, sir?”

I looked back up.

“I’d like to report… a suicide.”

Bio:  R. Scott Whitley is a native of CLT and writes sci-fi, horror, and stuffs.