Free Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg

immediately, saying, “Okay, Ron . . . I don’t have to go.”
    “R-Roy,” she said, “that was Grimsby, from the Department.”
    “Huh?”
    “You’re fired, Roy.” Ronnie was really sobbing now and she collapsed into his arms, cheek against cheek, tears and lather. “They . . . he wouldn’t even talk to you. What are we going to do? You got fired? What’s going on?”
    “Jesus!” Neary said, stunned. He just stood there, razor in one hand, face smeared like a real bozo, his wife sobbing against him, looking at everything in the mirror and seeing none of it.
    “Roy, what are we going to do?”
    Neary, still stunned, didn’t really hear her. His eyes, fixed in space, finally focused on a white object that he saw through the open bathroom door in the bedroom. It was a pillow on their bed. It had been left in a pushed-together, lumpy shape just like the shaving cream earlier.
    “No,” Neary muttered to himself. “That’s not right.”

13  

    H e’d gone back the next night. Of course. And when none of the strange objects or colors appeared, he swore he was going to give up the whole idea. But the night after that he returned again.
    The people he found there were getting to know one another. Old friends. The farmer in his pickup, with his pint bottle of whiskey, was on hand. So was a lady who had brought along a rocker and sat there doing needlepoint, to fill in the time before the next appearance of what everybody had taken to calling “the night things.” Another elderly woman had an album of photographs of “them,” the by-product of other nights in other places. A sound made everyone look toward the northern skies. Jet aircraft could be heard passing in the rarefied distance. “We’ll be here all night if that keeps up,” one of the elderly people complained. Roy knelt down by a lady who was eighty if she was a day. “Are they coming over tonight?” he whispered gently. Those words were like magic, for her very pressed face blossomed years off her, as though Neary had told her the meaning of life. She became teary-eyed, saying, “Oh, I hope so. Don’t you?”
    “Yes,” he answered her in all seriousness. The old lady measured his fervor, blinked an eye and hefted to her lap a leatherette volume-sized photo album. She opened it to the first page.
    “I took these myself,” she said smartly. “Out by the parochial school.”
    Neary looked at her six color snapshots, a splash of yellow, a slit of white, a blur of out-of-focus blue. Anybody who didn’t know how to use a camera produced mistakes like that for the first few rolls of film.
    It wasn’t that they were kooks, the kind of crazies who were always sighting flying saucers. It was just that, except for her, Neary didn’t sense in any of them the same yearning need he had to find out what had happened. They seemed content simply to witness it, like the crowd at the circus who watches the fire-eater spew great sheets of flame but doesn’t care how he does it.
    The second night after the “night things” had appeared, quite a crowd seemed to have collected. There were people Neary couldn’t remember seeing before. And, for the first time, he noticed the young woman and her little boy whom he’d pulled from the path of the wildly careening police cruisers.
    Neary nodded to her over the heads of the crowd. She took her boy’s hand and came over. “You do remember us?”
    “How can I forget?”
    “Jillian Guiler,” she said, shaking his hand. “This is Barry.”
    “Roy Neary. That was some night, wasn’t it?”
    “It doesn’t feel like it’s over.” She touched his cheek. “You’re sunburned.”
    “Hoping to tan the other side tonight.”
    “It got my face and neck.” She opened her blouse to reveal the upper curve of her breasts and the hollow at the base of her throat.
    She watched as Roy’s cheek turned a shade darker. “I’m sorry,” she said, buttoning up. “I just had the feeling you were my oldest