Laraleigh and I sipped our morning coffee as we sat on the front porch of our farmhouse. The sun peeked over the Ozark mountains and songbirds chirped merrily, but our attention was on the sky to the south of us. There, three enormous ships hovered just below the clouds, as they had for several weeks.

 

“What do you think they’re doing here, Benjamin?” Lara asked for the umpteenth time.

 

“Not sure.” I slurped another swallow of the hot brew and continued, “I talked to Harlow down at the store yesterday, but I don’t trust much of what he told me. Said they were aliens or some such.”

 

“Do you think they’re moving closer to us?”

 

“Don’t think so, Sis. Looks like they’re probably parked over the cities. Little Rock. Conway, maybe. Probably a lot of others, too.”

 

Our elderly dog, Ese, struggled to get to his feet and wander over to rub against my sister’s legs, one ear erect and the other bent down in the middle. Lara patted his head lovingly and repeated an old endearment our father had begun years before he left us.

 

“Oh my!” she said in mock alarm. “Your ear fell, Ese!”

 

I smiled and said, “Harlow told me things were pretty terrible in the cities now. The aliens have turned off the Internet, cellular networks, and pretty much every other form of remote communication. People have to come out of their isolation cubes and actually talk to each other now.”

 

“Ouch,” Lara said. “That must be causing problems. Those folks had forgotten how to do that. It’s why our parents moved us to the country in the first place, wasn’t it?”

 

“Yep,” I replied, “to get away from all that. But it was hard, even for us, remember?”

 

“Of course I do,” she rolled her eyes at me, but I could tell the memories still hurt her. When Mom died and Dad a year later, Lara was sad and lost. It affected her much more acutely than me, a trait I admire about my little sister — her capacity to feel things deeply. We had all nearly forgotten how to do that, stuck for so long in our own work-from-home, social media, streaming entertainment techacoons.

 

“People are hurting each other in Memphis, killing and looting, even more than before,” I said.

 

“Well, at least they have the police to control things there.”

 

“Harlow said they’re the worst now. Said they’re pulling people out of their cubes for no reason, beating them up, even killing them in the most horrible ways.”

Lara’s eyes became glassy and her face lost expression. I kept forgetting how sensitive she was — how she felt pain and joy that were not even hers to feel. It was mysterious and rare.

 

I touched her hand and smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Sis. They can’t bother us here.”

 

We finished our coffee and got to work on the day’s chores. Spaceships or not, there was work to be done around the farm.

 

Ese followed Lara wherever she went that day. They had grown up together. He was a stray who adopted us as soon as we moved to the farm. By our best estimate, he was eighteen years old or thereabouts. The dog’s old hip bones protruded prominently and his whole rear end seemed to move of its own accord, sometimes almost getting ahead of the front of him. He was nearly blind and his hearing was gone, or maybe just more selective. A brief memory of his younger days as a pup, chasing deer full speed through the forest and “protecting” Lara from the cows in the pastures, caused the tiniest stutter in my heart.

 

In the evening, as I cooked supper, my sister called me from the front yard. I quickly dried my hands on the threadbare dish towel and went out to see what the trouble was. Lara was kneeling on the ground with her hand resting on Ese’s chest, which barely moved.

 

“Something’s wrong with Ese,” she whispered through tears that left trails on her dusty cheeks.

 

The old dog lay still on the ground, his eyes calmly shifting between my sister and me. We watched silently, knowingly, as the life passed out of our loyal canine friend. After a few minutes, I stood and put my hand on Lara’s shoulder, which shook from the deep sobs wracking her body.

 

A blue firefly hovered close to my sister’s head as she continued to cry in the dusky twilight. In a lame attempt to comfort her, I said, “It was his time to go, Sis. I’ll bury him in the morning.”

 

A second firefly appeared and hovered next to Lara’s shoulder. Then a third. The glowing insects didn’t blink like normal lightning bugs, and they were slightly larger than usual. When I raised my eyes and looked toward the trees at the edge of the yard, there were others, hundreds of others, all glowing with a cold blue light. As I watched, they slowly moved toward Lara, surrounding her in a silent cloud. Startled, I removed my hand and took a step back. The luminous swarm readjusted itself and formed a perfect, protective halo around my little sister, their hues slowly warming from blue to orange.

 

“What the hell are those?” I gasped. Lara looked up at me. She had stopped crying. An expression of profound calmness had replaced the grief, and she cocked her head slightly as if she were listening to something I could not hear.

 

“It’s okay, Benjamin,” she said quietly. “They’ve come to help us.”

 

“Help us do what?”

 

Lara smiled and replied, “They’ve come to help us all feel again. Like I do.”

 

The alien swarm left as quickly as it had arrived, briefly hovering above us, then streaking with great speed into the distance, toward their hovering spaceships.