The Only Ones Out There

The Only Ones Out There by Sydney Claire Thomson

Issue 2.19 | Fiction

Cover Art: L. Erickson

Wonderland is the road that cuts through everything—each concession, each bisection of cornfield by perpendicular dirt road. Behind the cornfields and at the far reaches of what one can see off of Wonderland are stretches of dense woods framing the bottom of the sky, and in those dense woods are purple pitcher plants—turtle socks—big enough to eat salamanders. I used to wonder what lay at the end of the long stretch of powerlines along Wonderland. It was a compelling mystery when I was eight, and less so now, a decade and change later. When I left for college, I drove further than I ever had in one direction along Wonderland which seemed to continue improbably far toward the horizon.

Eventually, the road does end, after any number of intersections and traffic circles, at one of those street signs with a thick capital ‘T.’ At the edge of Wonderland, left or right only, and in the distance, the powerline substation, chicken-wire fence holding in its metal animals.

If you don’t go that far you can pretend that Wonderland, and the straight, unbroken path of powerlines, go on forever. Growing up means knowing that they don’t.

When I went home last summer, I drove out along Wonderland with my mother— not nearly far enough to break the illusion and reach the end of the road—to Bernard’s field, because, really, he wouldn’t mind us tramping through it to see the meteor shower.

We passed the spot where Archie from the football team had his car spin out four winters ago. He still swears to this day (last I checked) that he heard a howl. Anyone with common sense knows you need the proper tires when the black ice starts appearing, but when he looked me in the eyes in U.S. History and told me with utmost sincerity that he was sure something else was out there, he’d swerved to miss it, I nodded along sadly and acknowledged that, yes, it was a full moon that night. He wasn’t the quarterback, and no one really paid him much attention before he almost died. No one paid him much attention after, either. I see his mother visiting that spot sometimes, as if paying respect to a memorial that isn’t there. He didn’t die; he perhaps just came out of it a little different. I wonder sometimes what she is mourning.

My mother and I parked at the spot on the road where the shoulder broadens, one of those spots where high schoolers still go in their own cars on their own dark nights. The streetlights, spaced out as they were, meant there was a noticeable difference in light and dark when the car’s headlights switched off. One of those dirt roads, indistinguishable from the dozen or so others we’d passed, veers off at a right angle, unmarked by the polka-dot patches of light from the streetlamps on Wonderland. I avoid looking at this dirt road whenever I drive by, nowadays.

We chose to go to the only spot in the field for one to go on such an occasion as this– the middle. The crunch of pebbles underfoot was no louder than the nightbirds and night insects, which are louder in the late summer than any other time of year.

Every so often, one of our flashlight beams snagged on a cricket or some less discernable life form in the fields, like a sweater caught upon the irregularities of some surface before being pulled loose, leaving a thread or two out of place, and passing onward to the long dirt road ahead. One of these snags caught harder than the others (a field mouse of some sort, maybe), and so our beams were pointed toward it when we became aware of an additional presence on the road, something larger than a cricket or mouse.

My mother gave a small, audible gasp. I managed to keep mine silent. There were two old women sitting in folding campsite chairs off the edge of the dirt road, almost inside the tall stalks of corn.

Later I would be unable to say exactly what I saw that made me think they were old women.

“So sorry!” one said. “We didn’t think anyone else would be out here.”

My mother said, “That’s the same thought we had.”

Our flashlights remained pointed away. To shine them in the eyes of the old women would not only be rude but would also make it difficult, if even only momentarily, for their eyes to readjust to the darkness, harder for them to see the meteor shower. After a moment, we turned the flashlights off altogether to preserve the dubious remaining battery level. (Neither one of us could say when we’d last switched out the batteries in them, which meant they could die out on us at any moment.) And so their faces, their bodies, remained in shadow. They could likely see us better than we could see them, half-shrouded by the stalks as they were.

“What a beautiful night!” one of them said. I could guess it was the one who had not yet spoken, but their voices were remarkably similar, and their bodies very near to one another, making it harder to differentiate them in the night. It was too dark to see the movement of their mouths when they spoke. That’s what I told myself at the time.

“I don’t remember the last time I saw a meteor shower,” one or the other of them said.

Each time one of them spoke, they said exactly the most expected, obvious thing to say when strangers meet each other in the middle of a dark field on a night when a meteor shower was due. Despite the mundanity of their words, I would later recall this conversation as being enthralling, though what kept me so entranced by them was anyone’s guess.

“There was one a few years ago, but it was cloudy that night,” my mother said conversationally. “Hopefully this one makes up for that disappointment!”

There was a pause in the conversation, just a beat too long to feel natural to me.

“Hopefully,” one or the other of them said.

My eyes slipped over their shadowed features, skipped across their forms. I wonder if my mother’s eyes did too.

We didn’t switch our flashlights back on until we were a short distance away from the old women. We found that, when we did, they were suddenly too bright, our eyes having adjusted to the dark during the brief conversation (though seemingly not enough to have seen the old women’s faces). Flashlights off was fine. All the better, really. It meant we were more likely to find them still functional when next we went on a nighttime walk, both of us still refusing to replace the batteries, because what a hassle. Unlike the old women, we hadn’t brought chairs, just a couple of old beach towels to sit on, spread on the least pebbly spot of dirt road that we could find, about halfway between either edge of the field. I never expect much from these sorts of celestial events because I’m usually disappointed. Back in high school, a layer of haze and cloud blocked out the once-in-a-lifetime solar eclipse.

There was more to see this time. Not overly magical or anything, but more than I’d expected and almost as much as I’d hoped.

We walked back, our flashlights off to avoid disturbing the old ladies’ observations of the sky—in which the frequency of meteors had petered out—until we passed by them. But we didn’t pass by them. At the point when it felt we’d gone too far toward Wonderland for them to still be ahead of us, we turned on the lights. There was the road up ahead, right there, and there was the car, and here was the empty stretch of dirt with no sign of anyone else having trod down it that night. Not even a sign of trampled corn stalks from the old women’s chairs.

“I guess they left,” I said, and neither of us put more importance on it than it was due, thinking also that perhaps I understood Archie a little better. And we left, too, back down Wonderland, away from the field, away from the other visitors. Wherever they’d come from, they’d returned.

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Sydney Claire Thomson writes poetry and prose. Her short story “The Snake Oil Salesman” was published in The Evening Universe. Her poems have been published in Boats Against the Current and Kennings Literary Journal. You can follow her work on Instagram (@sclairethomson).