The Light and the Little

A couple nights ago I took my dog out to do her business around midnight. When she stopped to piddle, I looked up at the stars, like I usually do at night during her last walk of the day. There was a large blue light in the sky. I have no idea of how far away from me it was other than it was over my head enough to see it was in the sky, not just a few feet off the ground. It appeared to be about two inches in diameter if you could take a picture from my eyes and measure it. I watched it for just moments before it shot across the sky in a trajectory that appeared to be towards the ground, but a neighbor's trees prevented me from seeing further. When it moved it left behind a very bright and very narrow tail, in the same pale blue color.

I assumed it was a meteor, although the narrowing on the tail didn't make sense to me. She finished up and we went back inside, but I still had the light in my head, something just wasn’t right about it. I went down to the basement to get my pajamas, and noticed a bright blue light flicking off and on outside through one of the windows. I assumed it was just the lights from our neighbor's house, they happen to have a floodlight on the driveway side of their house that’s about a quarter of a notch below being the sun, and sometimes it looks kind of blue to me. On my way to bed, I notice that flashing from my sons’ room, which faces the the road instead of our neighbor. I go to their door, expecting to see one of them sitting on top the entertainment center either playing with a nightlight or the power strip they’re plugged in to. No one's there, everyone is in bed. The light kept flashing, apparently coming from the corner where my youngest son’s bed is.

My heart stopped for a second, he’s sitting up in bed with the light coming from behind him. There’s nothing there to be making the light, and when I take a few steps into their room, I can start to make out something that vaguely looks like large bugs climbing up the front of him and into his mouth. In my mind, the only sensible thing to do is go investigate the light and whatever is crawling on him, but when I get almost close enough to pick him up, the light stops flashing and its intensity grows brighter. I lean in closer to see the little black things are humanoid in appearance, and when I try to pull one out of his open mouth, they all stop. Every tiny little body stops in its tracks, and the heads rotate around, staring me down with one large light blue eye each. I’ll never forget the look he gave me with those glowing blue eyes, like he was just a bigger one of the things invading his body. He was drooling a thick blue liquid, like dyed syrup.

I ripped one from his mouth, it latched onto my hand, and the others started skittering off of my son and up my leg. Their limbs felt like beetle or spider legs climbing up my skin. I grabbed and squeezed one after another, each one instantly turned to a fine blue dust with a single hard squeeze. I think I squashed a hundred of them before the blue light faded away, I looked down at the carpet, all the dust was gone. The blue liquid was gone, but it looked like he’d been chewing on a blue marker. I gathered up both boys and took them back to bed with me for the night.

The next morning, I go to wash the blue stains off of my youngest son’s mouth and notice that his eyes are blue. His eyes were green before, everyone else tells me that it does happen, and eye colors change on a great rare occasion. I pulled his bed out and searched for a way in, or a light source. I even pulled the carpet in that corner up while everyone was gone. He’s too young to ask about it, but, I don’t think he’d give me a straight answer anyway. Ever since that night I’ve been catching him up on the counters, eating salt and sugar by the handful like he’s craving it. I even caught him eating bacon grease from the jar. I don’t think this is just him being a young child, but no one else will even humor me. When I peek in at night, I can see little beams of light poking out from under his eyelashes on certain nights. The other kids don’t really want anything to do with him anymore, especially since he went from being the most laidback kid in the world to being a little hothead literally over one night. What’s happened to my family?