By: Sri Ram

The midnight looked ignited with slight snow outside, yet, Penelope could not sleep on her cot. She tried music for some time, Stephen King for some more, rose up from bed and walked within the four walls, and tried many such tricks yet, sleep was quite far from her. She thought, walking outside under the snow, would be something different to try. She wore her night suit and her slippers and instead of taking the hall-way, she opened her window and jumped out.

There was not much wind, which kept the temperature bearable. Penelope walked here and there on the lawn and even tried walking in bare foot to feel the wet grass. An owl stared her silently from a nearby tree. There was no one in the street and behind her home, was her father’s paddy field with densely grown crops. Penelope’s father Brando was a farmer in that part of the village in Colorado, where he lived. 24000 square feet of land was in his name and in all that, he has been farming for the last 10 years. He was a self-taught botanist and has been exporting paddy to some of the notable firms like Nestle.

Penelope was proud looking at her father’s achievement that spread across in front of her. Suddenly, out of nowhere from the dark sky, three balls of light descended slowly over the field. While Penelope watched them, with her eyes wide open in surprise, the balls of light began to move here and there, all over the paddy fields. The very scene of light hanging in the air and moving here and there on her father’s paddy field sounded mystical. Penelope ran into her home through the open window and pulled her father from deep sleep and took him to the attic at the 2nd floor.

As Penelope and Brando looked at, from the 2nd floor of their home, in just 20 minutes or so, the three balls of light suddenly stopped moving and arranged themselves in a triangular form and ascended rapidly at a speed, no man-made object has ever moved and vanished into the dark sky. In their paddy field, there seen a number of images, most of them circular, elliptical, hyperbolic and so on, made by bending the paddy crops.
“Father! We should call 911” Penelope said.

Brando, having given up or tired of trying to catch those lights in dark space, looked around in 360 degrees once, now turned to Penelope and said, “Pene, Looks like we are the only ones who have noticed this thing. Don’t even utter a word about this to anyone, you hear me?!”

“But why Father?” she asked. Much of her expressions in her face said that it was pure curiosity.

“Ours is a 24000 Square feet of fertile land, which is the only wealth that we got from our ancestors, Pene. Crop Circles are a curse to Colorado and the fucking aliens. If we tell this to the world, then our land will no longer be ours.” he added.