Ways to See a Ghost

expect.
    Except, she could see now, here in real life, that they weren’t just blobs of floating light. If she concentrated, she could see other shapes hidden inside. The dazzling rays lengthened into beating wings. Shards of colour grew into heads, beaks and fluttering tails. No longer drifting, the light-birds were flying upwards, circling. A flock on the wing. Gleaming like stained glass, they filled the heavens in a vast, rising spiral. Singing in a deafening cloud, piping out their songs as she watched them for a heartbeat, for a lifetime.
    Then, all at once, they dropped like stars tumbling from the sky. A chaos of falling, their silver wings missing eachother by the smallest ruffles of air. The sky emptied, as the great, shining flock plummeted into nothing…
    Isis gasped in the sudden darkness. Cool air filled her lungs, her hands were clutching the wire fence. She was back on the ground again, the grass soft-brushing against her ankles.
    In the field, Cally was a black silhouette near Gray and Gil. She turned around, waving at Isis.
    “Come on,” Cally called. “What are you waiting for?”
    “Uh…” Isis swallowed, tried again. “I’m just coming.” Her voice sounded strange and wobbly, but no one noticed.
    She checked the fence for barbs, then carefully gripped the wires. They gleamed molten between her fingers, the field pulsing into a headachy orange-red. Looking up, Isis saw a huge ball of light growing out of nothing.
    She saw it explode.
    Streamers of silent fire flew outwards, engulfing Gil, Cally and Gray, dissolving them into orange-sparkling vapour. Isis tried to scream, but the light poured through her, past her, carrying her voice away. Yellow haze swirled and blew in the air. It flowed between her ribs, streaming from her fingers and out through her eyes. Now ribbons of light drifted and tangled in the dark, pouring upwards,collecting together into a vast, single shape.
    A bird.
    A creature out of myth, with dazzling wings wider than the sky. The light-bird swooped above the fields, covering the world beneath with a golden shadow. Its thundering wingbeats seemed to sweep up the stars and it lifted its head to let out a silvery cry. A single booming version of the flock’s piping chatter. The sound echoed across the wide, flat wheat fields, and for a moment Isis was sure she was standing amongst the greys and greens of a sparkling marshland. She heard the chuckle of water, smelled the saltwater scent of an incoming tide. Then the bird called again, and the ghost-marshes dried to bare earth, the sea smell turning to sewage and smoke.
    “I don’t understand,” Isis whispered. The enormous, shining bird flapped with slow, sad wingbeats into the night and let out a last lonely cry, telling of death and the distant wash of time…
    “ISIS! Where are you?”
    She gasped, trying to remember where she was. Her hands were still on the barbed-wire fence, the metal biting into her palms. She unclenched her fingers, she’d been clinging on so tightly they were almost numb.
    “Isis!” Cally shouted again.
    She tried to answer but she couldn’t get her tongue to make words, instead birdsong filled her mouth. She put a hand to her face, but her mouth was the same as normal. She just couldn’t remember how to speak.
    A sound was creaking and crackling all around. The stems of the wheat were snapping, folding over as if a scythe were cutting through them, falling into widening patterns of circles.
    Opening and shutting her mouth, Isis managed some gasps, and then eventually two words.
    “I’m here,” she croaked, desperate for someone to hear her, to come over and check if she was all right.
    But Gil and Cally were running across the field, chasing the waves of toppling wheat, while Gray stood filming, his face blue-lit from the camera screen. As Isis watched, the crop fell into silence. Gil ran to a stop, surrounded by the pattern of the crop circle, punching his arm in the air.
    “Did you see that?” he shouted. “Did you see that? We’re going to blow things wide open! We got it all this time: the UFO and the crop circle it made! No one will say crop circles are hoaxes and aliens don’t exist, not after this!”

It must’ve been four in the morning by the time we got home, but it didn’t matter. Everyone just bundled inside, all talking at once.
    “I’ll download the film,” I said, heading for Dad’s computer.
    “Who wants a drink?” he asked.
    “A cup of tea would be