 If you ever make your way over to Crowsville in Northern Alabama, be mindful of the light. For some towns, there are nightly curfews. For ours, no one is allowed outdoors during the daytime. If you tried to come in by road during the day, you'd be stopped by gates and traffic spikes. The government is building elaborate fences around our town, but they still aren't speaking to us and they refuse to acknowledge what has happened. Some scientists make up some excuse for being here when we catch them poking around with their instruments. Excuses like measuring trace gases in the air or studying invasive wildlife species. Their suits did not protect them the first time and after that, they always came at night. Always with an entourage of soldiers. The first to see those things went blind. After that, we tried wearing welding masks during the day. We found that going blind is a better alternative. We've become like a town of vampires sleeping during the day with blacked out windows. Some of us even sleep in coffin-like structures and rising at night to do our work. It hasn't been this way for very long, but already it feels like forever. They arrived about a week ago. We aren't sure if they came from far away, from our own sun or from something on this earth. A couple of local science teachers believed them to be made of photons of light. I used to teach math over at one of the only two high schools we have and I've kept in touch. That first day, the day of their arrival, I was just waking up. The sun was hitting my forehead with its checkered warmth. When I heard screams outside, they sounded like they were coming from just down the road. My wife told me to go check on it. It's probably just the neighborhood kids messing around again. I said, Well, she said, I'm already up for work anyway, so I'll go check on it. It was both of us that ended up stepping outside. We don't have any children, and there are times that I'm thankful for that. Three people were rolling around in the street holding their heads still moaning and crying out. They'd gone blind. These three blind men became prophets for what was to come. They and others who'd gone blind told of bright, tentacled forms, some of their tentacles resembling wings. They had hexagonal or other prism bodies covered with many eyes. They flew and floated and crawled, sometimes the accounts differed with different shapes other than the kinds we saw in our day to day lives. Some of those who'd gone blind refused to describe them. From there, the people in my town began wearing welding masks in case those things came back. The local police got in touch with state and national authorities who acted like they didn't believe any of it. Even though after we shipped out some of our blind to them, they began sending people in to investigate. About three days later, I was in my auto repair shop working on a 66 Chevy. When I heard something banging around near the entrance of the garage, my mechanics were on their lunch break at that time. Thinking it was just the cat who liked to come around our shop and who we probably fed more than we should have, I called out. It got quiet. I peered around the side of the vehicle I'd been working on. Beyond the lot, leaves danced in the wind. The breeze carried in the pungent, sweet smells of summer greenery, as well as honeysuckles and a hint of dead armadillo over the road. Too much light was spilling into the open garage. It seemed like it was eating up the shadows. I reached for the welding mask beside me. Since it was on my face, I felt a little bolder. I ventured around the garage. After searching around and not seeing anything, I heard a rustle from outside. Then I saw the corner of something and I stepped out. The concrete was too hot through my shoes. What I saw through the visor of my welding mask, standing there in the broad light of day, if I can call it standing, was something like what those others had described. It didn't have tentacles. The larger part of its body was like a prismatic shape. And I suppose I did see many things like eyes along its surface. It was so bright, I wanted to look away, even through my welding mask. It seemed to be biting into my eyes even from 20 or 30 feet away. I used to teach geometry. I'm telling you right now, the shapes making up that being were not in any of the textbooks I taught from. No 2D or 3D shapes could adequately categorize them. Everything is made of math. I used to like to say to students as we made angles and measurements of everyday objects. Seeing that thing, I quickly began to doubt whether mathematics, the ones we knew, could be applied to it. It swept towards me. While my mouth hung open, and I stood rooted, like a deer in the headlights. The cat leapt out of nowhere, in a hissing and deep-throated, growling mass of fur. I'm not sure how the cat could have impacted a being made of light, but he caused that thing to veer aside as it was approaching me. Hefty as he was for a cat, he was hoisted by a lone tentacle of the thing and flung aside. I gritted my teeth, bawled my hands into fist. I hadn't realized how much I loved that cat until that moment, but by then it might have already been too late. Before I could do anything crazy, someone pulled their vehicle around a line of other cars in our lot. It seemed like someone who needed their car repaired because it was stuttering and it was huffing black smoke out of its exhaust. I never found out. That thing of light moved over in an easy fluid motion, one of its tentacles kind of waved in the air. Then that tentacle went around like a vine growing in ultra-fast motion into the open window as that person was quickly trying to back out and away. The tentacle went into the driver's ear and the vehicle slowed to a stop. I could see from about 60 feet away that the body behind the windshield was spasming and I could even see their eyes burst to the cadence of their screams. As I sort of jogged over, there was a thickening in that tentacle of light shoved in that person's ear as if something was being pumped out. Not something thick and heavy, just something more like light. It was as if that being was converting the driver's brains into light, maybe by way of some kind of solar or thermal energy and feeding on them. I felt guilty for leaving, but I was also sure it was too late to do anything. I got out of there before the feeding could end and it might move on to me. As I was driving away, I called my mechanics and told them to not go back to the automotive shop. That night, though, even after hearing about all those other similar stories that had occurred around town during the day, I did go back there. The body of the driver was still there, it was a woman, possibly in her 40s. I told the police about it, but apparently no one had come for her. I found her identification and decided to try and contact her relatives. As I was preparing to leave, I heard a frantic yet weak meowing coming from the thicket of trees beside the parking lot and I found the cat. He was still alive. Using some stuff in the shop, I made a makeshift stretcher for him and lifted him gently into my truck. I held him the whole way back to my house. You were very brave, I said. I didn't even know who cared about me that much. Back at home, my wife and I called a vet who actually called back after closing time and offered to come over to our house. It's strange that during the worst crisis, people can sometimes be nicer and more accommodating than usual. Even though her office was long closed and it closed early because of all that had been going on that day, after the initial examination, we all drove over together and the vet unlocked her office and treated the cat. He had some broken bones, but it looked like he was going to be all right. I had conflicting emotions because at the same time an actual person was still rotting in a lot of my automotive shop and countless others had died that first day. We took the cat in like he was our own child and prepared to nurse him back to health. The cat's been like a silver lining to the storm clouds, bad storm clouds. The kind that can melt your brains, convert them to light and suck them out of your head. A science teacher friend of mine gave me a call yesterday. By that time, we were all trying our best to adjust to daytime curfews and blacked-out windows. It was an interesting phone call. I don't think they want to eat us, she said over the phone. Not with some of the behavior they exhibit, it isn't predatory. Obviously, these things are so different than us that it's difficult to tell. I mean, imagine the differences that would arise between life that evolved carbon-based like ourselves and life that was silicon-based. If intelligent forms of those two kinds of life ever came in contact with each other, they might be especially hard-pressed to understand one another. Now multiply that times ten or times one hundred for these creatures because their form of life is based on something else entirely. So what are you saying, I asked, that what looks like eating to us might be something else to them? I think, she said, that after they made their initial contact, getting a good look and allowing us a look back, they then returned a couple of days later to try to communicate with us. I don't know if they're even aware that they blinded people that first time. Wait, wait, hold up. Are you trying to say that they convert our brains into light so that they can eat them as some kind of communication? Well, we can't be sure without observing them further, she said. But we might see, if we did, that they absorb each other's minds in order to communicate. That might explain why their movement before they do eat ours isn't aggressive. And according to some accounts is actually the opposite. I don't know whether they understand that we can go blind from seeing them, but I wonder if we observed them enough, if we discover that maybe they didn't die when they consumed each other's minds, maybe they regenerate.