Excerpt From a Developing Novel

Clarista told Grau about an interview with an old cowboy she’d conducted back at the cattle mutilation site, a man who’d worked his whole life on ranches.
He’d bedded down on the ground and his fire had collapsed to embers.  A clear night sky let warmth fly.  In the cold, one of the cows came to lay beside him, snuggling against his back.  He half-woke, smiled, then screamed as the light slammed down.  He felt the cow struggle to get on its feet, then go still, bleating in terror as it began to rise into the air.  He rose, too; both floated upward.  He yelled and struggled, fell from a height of maybe ten feet, and landed with a grunt.  He lay stunned.  The light went off.  The cow was gone.
He lay panting, terrified, confused.  Despite the bright light, no after-image affected his vision.  It was still night.  He could see normally, as if he’d simply wakened in the night to take a piss.  He’d done cowboy work his whole life and did not know what to think.
As he lay gathering himself, a loud thud sounded near him in the dark.  He felt the impact and juked far too late, a delayed reaction.  Hands shaking, he got a flashlight from his pack and saw in its light the cow.  Its legs were broken from a high fall.  Mutilations he’d heard about, whispered like ghost tales around camp fires, showed bloody in his trembling beam of light.
He switched off the flash.  Walking, he found the rest of the herd clumped and nervous near some salt licks.  His presence drew them.  Soon he had a small group following him as he checked the pasture.
He walked through the grass by starlight, eyes adjusted to night, flashlight dark in his hand.  Without meaning to, he walked wide around the fallen, cut-up cow.
Hurry, dawn, he thought.
As he walked, he gathered enough dried stalks of timothy to get his fire flaring again.  He fed it fresh chunks of cottonwood he’d gathered earlier.  He tended it until the sun rose, kept at it as he heated water for coffee.  When the jeep came, he got in and said nothing.
Back at the bunkhouse he gathered his stuff and walked off that boss’s property without offering explanation.
He had none.
He abandoned his last pay check, figuring it was fair trade for the cow lost during his watch.
He knew only that he never wanted to experience it again, what ever it was.  He felt like a man who’d avoided being hit by a train, truck, or speeding bus he’d never seen coming.  He felt like the guy who hears the bullet whiz past his head in war.
That feeling never faded for him.
Friends called him broken.
Only once, when his wife finally asked, did he say, “Light.”
“Lightning?” she asked.  “You got hit?  Was there a storm that night?  There was no storm.”
He said no more.  What was the use?
Thirty-seven years later, having carried it in himself all that way, all that time, he opened up and told his story for pretty little Clarista, just the once.  He did this, he told her, because he did not have much left and he wanted others to know so they wouldn’t blame themselves.
He did not explain what he meant by blame.
He died that night in his back yard, Clarista told Grau with a tremble in her voice.  He was laying spread-eagle on his back, looking up.  His wife had no idea when he’d gone out, nor why.  “Tell y’one thing,” she said.  “He ain’t never comin’ out there naked like that, but look how I found him.  Not a stitch.  Look on his face like maybe he was finally happy for a second before his heart give out.”
Clarista had thanked the poor, shriveled woman, who’d driven out to tell her in person, as if the cowboy had mentioned Clarista, as if it might be important.  Maybe the wife wanted to see the one in whom her husband had confided instead of confiding in her.
Clarista offered condolences, feeling fraudulent, exploitative, and inarticulate.  She could not explain anything for the poor woman.  No one could.
Grau made a mental note to arrange with Asher to make sure the old woman would be well cared-for.  “These experiences change lives.  Ruin some.”  This summation struck even him as inadequate, yet what could be said?  He hugged Clarista and kissed her forehead.  “You’re a good person.  It’s good anecdotal evidence.”
    “It’s just another story.”  She shivered in his arms.
Every light in the house cut off and that shocked half-echo power-cuts often leave made everyone freeze, listen, and perhaps brace inwardly for the arrival, finally, of the apocalypse all Americans seem indoctrinated to expect.
Thinking this, Grau held Clarista tighter.  “Duck and cover.”  He muttered this, remembering ridiculous public service spots on TV and the classroom practices.
When no flash came, no blast of destruction, they untangled and stepped apart, Grau taking the lead, holding her hand to lead her toward the center of the house, where an artesian well of investigators’ voices burbled.
The lights snapped back on.
Standing in the parlor doorway, Grau blinked at bright glitter.  He thought at first the floor of the parlor had been covered in chunks of ice, an indoor, warm-weather tableau straight off Titanic’s deck.  Blinking, he saw investigators standing around an array of doorknobs.  One young woman held an EM meter outward without seeming to realize, another gaped, drool running onto his chin.
Being an antique itself, the old Victorian house had glass and leaded crystal doorknobs, along with brass doorknobs bearing intricate embossing, mostly of the floral persuasion.  All these now lay on the parlor floor in a snowflake’s fractal, a beautiful display that would have taken considerable time to accomplish.
“It happened instantly.”  This from the girl with the EM meter, which she now lowered.  “This floor was empty, the lights cut, and when my eyes adjusted to the dark I saw glittering. Reflections from the streetlights outside, I think. Then the lights came back on and there they all were.  Are.”  She gave a short giggle, cut it short, and looked at Grau with a tinge of guilt in her expression.
“Nothing,” snarled Carl.  He stood at a door, hand on the now knob-less brass doorplate.
“Same all over the house.  All the doorknobs.”  This report from a breathless young man in an Oz-Fest tee shirt.  His footsteps had been audible as he’d dashed from attic to basement, then back to the ground floor, checking on doorknobs, all of which were apparently now on the parlor’s floor, arranged in a snowflake pattern.
“All in the proverbial blink of an eye.”  Grau glanced at Clarista as he said this.  “Another anecdote, hm?”
“No way to prove it,” she replied, shrugging.
He heard the frustration in her voice.