Molly Gutman | 15
Molly Gutman
Little Green Men
A marked difference in the air, more of a rustle than a buzz, stirs among those of us hunched at the edge of the camp, as if tonight—after all our waiting—it will finally, finally happen. Some of us wear sweatshirts around our waists; others have our work plaids rolled up past the elbows; still others feel our overlarge tees (some tie-dyed, some from a former organization with I Believe! printed in garish lime) rippling in the breeze. Anita wears around her shoulders a kelly-colored afghan she says her mother crocheted for her. Joseph cracks his knuckles toward the fire we’ve kindled in the dirt. We sit around it, an awkward amoeba of lawn chairs, flanked on one side by a modest cluster of tents and recreational vehicles and on the other by the vast, brown expanse of the American Southwest desert at dusk.
We wait for conclusive confirmation. The kind that lucky others throughout history have certainly had; how could Egypt have shaped such massive stones into as smooth and precise angles? From where did our first concept of numbers come? When first did a human being look at another and think, Surely something has made and now governs over the two of us unless something closer to the heavens paid a visit and planted the idea?
In this purple fog of almost-night our eyes stretch farther than they’ve ever stretched, past warm dirt and through the atmosphere, past the glow of the sun darkening as it dips its toe below the edge of the planet, and into the deep black of everything which suspends the stars on invisible cords. One day, we know, the Milky Way will become its neighbor, the two swinging back and forth past each other like a mother dusting flour off hands.