Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind
Every July, we bring you four great, free, Sunday Morning short stories! This is our fifth year of a whole month of free goodness from The Sunday Morning Transport — by Aliette de Bodard, Marissa Lingen, James K. Morrow, and Zoe Bellerive. We hope you love these and all our stories as much as we love bringing them to you on Sundays.
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For July’s fourth, free to read and share, story, Zoe Bellerive returns with a very close encounter. ~ Julian and Fran, July 26, 2026
Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind
by Zoe Bellerive
Wayne Gallo dragged the cursor back to the beginning of the trail cam footage for what must have been the thousandth time, turned up the volume, and hit play again. For a moment it was only an empty trail in the woods with a bunch of insects screeching. Then, the sound of footsteps crunching pine needles into sandy soil. His own footsteps, growing closer until his shape came into the frame. The camera pointed in the same direction he was heading, deeper into the woods, so you only saw the side of his face for a second before it was his short gray-streaked ponytail and the back of his brown jacket retreating up the trail.
He hit pause at 02:02. This was it. At two minutes, four seconds into the clip, he would disappear.
It wasn’t like he was going to see something this time that he hadn’t seen any of the million other times he’d watched it.
Play.
One, two, three loping steps farther down the trail, then a fourth and fifth, slower, then he wasn’t there. Not moved out of frame, not got too far away to pick out—just vanished.
He sat back with a full-body sigh.
At least it was real, for all the cameras could tell him. They saw the same thing he felt when it happened. He was suddenly no longer present in the location where he’d been.
So many strange compulsions came with the job, so many mental lapses. But if these were side effects of something real, maybe he could accept them.
He considered the seven dented, rusty vintage teapots in a pile on the counter, which he could not now fathom getting rid of.
Quitting remained an option.
But then he wouldn’t get paid, he reasoned with himself, and if he didn’t get paid, he would never be able to redo the guest bathroom that had the weird smell and the dingy stains on the walls and the shower cube that trickled rust. When his daughter, Billie, first saw it, she’d said it looked like someplace the Jersey Devil would squat. Now, whenever she visited, she insisted on traipsing through his tiny bedroom to use his en suite instead. She always left it full of mysterious hair devices and pots of goo.
#
At first his old company had allowed him to work from his new home most days and only travel up to Montclair once or twice a week. Then it was 2020 and they had to allow everyone to work from home all the time, like it or not. Then they discovered that business was bad, and if none of these people were needed in the office, maybe they weren’t needed at all; and then came the rotten day when Wayne got laid off and sat on the front stoop of his house, teary-eyed, at the same time wondering if the rash on his leg was shaped like a bull’s-eye.
Stella Crawford, who was retired and lived half a mile up the road, power-walked past in her purple zip-up jacket like she did every sunny day. Skinny, all shoulders and elbows and knees, but for an octogenarian, she could move.
She saw his face, slowed down, called out, “You okay, honey?”
He shrugged.
She came up the walk toward him. At first she stopped a safe regulation six feet away and planted veiny hands on her hips.
“Got laid off,” he said, hoping she wouldn’t make him talk anymore.
“Oh, sweetie!” she cried. “Let me come give you a hug, is that okay? I mean, I know, social distance and all, but—I haven’t died yet, have I?”
He did not think this was a good idea, but she did not give him much choice in the matter. Her arms were around his shoulders and she planted a grandmotherly kiss on his cheek. Gripped his hand.
“How are you feeling? Are you gonna be okay?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking of Billie, and of what his ex-wife, Marjorie, might say about him in front of her. When they divorced, she’d said it was because he had lost his ambition. Which puzzled him, because he was exactly the same as he’d always been, working hard at his accounts every day. Eventually he came to understand that what she’d liked in him was not him, per se, but Potential. She’d imagined a glimmer of greatness or something and thought that all it needed was the magic spark of her touch and poof! he’d be working in high finance.
He wasn’t a high finance sort of guy. He could have told her that, if he’d realized what she was hinting at when she said Maybe a job in the city someday? The problem was, Marjorie thought every man was that sort of guy; it was just a matter of who chose to apply himself.
Stella was silent for a minute, still gripping his hand in her gnarled one. The look on her face waffled as though she were fighting with herself over something. She bit her lip.
“Listen. Take a week or two, try to sort yourself out. But if you get desperate, come see me?”
“I will literally mow your grass for twenty bucks,” he said, unsure if he was joking.
She laughed. Patted the back of his hand.
“I don’t have grass,” she said. “I have blueberries!”
Then jogged back down the walk and resumed her circuit.
#
He had walked to her property three weeks later fully expecting she would ask him to do some kind of shadowy work for organized crime. He wasn’t sure he would say no.
There was a two-story house on the property with a wide, welcoming front porch, but it was stuffed to the gills now with Mr. Crawford’s “collections”—total death trap. Stella lived alone in a gleaming Airstream in the yard. He knocked on its door.
“Leave it on the step, Jerry!” she yelled.
“Mrs. Crawford?”
Quick footsteps and the door opened. “Oh, Wayne! How’re you doing? Come on in, eh?”
The trailer was as immaculate inside as it was outside, full of houseplants in hanging pots.
“Have a seat! I’m just making some tea.”
He slid into one of the upholstered benches at the table, which reminded him of the setup of an Amtrak dining car but way more personal. There were two throw pillows on the inside corner, one orange, the other with orange and yellow sunflowers. A pothos plant swung next to the window.
The kettle screeched. Stella got down an extra mug and tea sachet and filled both mugs with steaming water. Wayne didn’t like tea—it all tasted to him like a handful of grass clippings thrown into some hot water—but she hadn’t asked if he wanted any; she just set it in front of him. The smell that arose from it was—strange, though. Like flowers but not perfumy, and it made him think of morning dew glistening in spiderwebs caught in the heather.
“There you go,” she said. “Are you hungry? I’ve got coffee cake.”
She didn’t wait for him to say he did or didn’t want any of that, either; she was slicing it before the question had processed.
“Is it . . . okay if I take the mask off?”
“It’d be pretty hard to eat coffee cake with a mask on!”
Feeling guilty—even though the restaurants were opening again, even though he hadn’t gone anyplace in weeks where he could’ve picked up any germs—he unhooked the elastic. She pushed a saucer of cake and a fork over.
“Thanks. You, uh . . .” It was harder than he’d anticipated to say the words out loud. “You said you might have some work that needs doing?”
“I do, sweetie. At least, I know someone who does. It’s kind of a local thing. I think they’d hire you, if you were interested.”
The tea was delicious. It calmed his nerves a little. “What—what sort of work is it?”
“Boring! Quiet. Administrative stuff for local blueberry farms and cranberry bogs, mostly.”
He tried to puzzle out what this could be code for. Stella grinned with the radiant serenity of an elderly sun goddess on the eve of the winter solstice, about to be reborn to the fresh youth of a new year.
He had never had such a flowery thought before in his life. Unemployment and isolation were affecting his mind.
“They’ll want to interview me?”
“It’s better to meet them out in the field. I’ll write down the directions for you.” She scribbled a little picture. “This is Nestor Road, see? You can park here and then walk up this trail. They’ll find you somewhere around here.” She poked the paper. “After you walk between the trail markers on the bald-topped hill.”
He didn’t like that she said They’ll find you and not You’ll find them. But he folded the sheet of paper and nodded. “What time?”
“Just go to the place I wrote down, and they’ll find you. Look, I know it sounds odd. If it’s too odd for you, don’t bother—nice young man like you, I’m sure you’ll find something before long. You don’t want to do this unless you think you can handle odd.”
Before long. How long? Wayne imagined the balance on his bank account whirring like a slot machine, coming up blueberry—cranberry—mobster face. Nothing.
“Who are these guys?”
“Around here, we just call them the woodsmen. I’d suggest doing the same. It’s better that way.”
“Better than what? Who are they?”
The mob. She’s going to say something that means the mob.
“People disagree on that. My opinion? Probably some kind of aliens, honestly.” She shrugged, but her eyes were keen, as if this were a test.
Wayne made a noise he’d never made before, like a Yorkshire terrier waking to the mail carrier’s footsteps. He tried to turn it into a friendly chuckle, because she was joking. Of course she was joking.
“I told you,” she said. “You gotta be good with odd.”
She had to be joking. Or confused. Or maybe mildly racist? “You said aliens. Like . . . people from another country?”
She didn’t confirm or deny. “Woodsmen is much better,” she reaffirmed with a sage nod. “Or voolids, some folks call them that—might even be their name for themselves, I don’t know. They pay well, that’s the important thing. Just show respect. And never, ever take anything that belongs to them. And don’t fall in love if you can help it.”
#
02:02. Play. There he was again, walking down the sandy path through the dark, tangled pine woods, up the shallow mound with the pillars at the top. It looked like a giant cracked-open egg with the top half missing. He was certain he saw it that time in the shadowy footage, a total change in the expression on his face—he could only see the side of the jaw, kind of from the back, but the muscles twitched and the ear raised a hairsbreadth as though something had happened in the eyebrow region—and then he was gone, nothing there but sandy path and tangled woods and deer, and nothing else would show up on the trail cam until that evening. The process reversed at 6:06 p.m. He wasn’t in the frame, and then he was. All of a sudden, like he’d beamed in from another dimension, with a look of wonder fading from his face.
All at once he became aware that the sound of brewing and the aroma of coffee had filled the kitchen. He did not remember scooping grounds or filling the water tank.
What more would hanging around the voolids do to his mind? And why didn’t it worry him more?
He slammed the laptop shut, unplugged the coffeepot halfway through its cycle, and went to bed.
#
He woke late and didn’t go to work, though to be honest, he missed it. His day felt pallid and chalky without the light and color of the other side. But he did sign the home renovation agreement he’d been sitting on, the one that would turn his run-down cottage in the woods into the paradise he was certain Billie would come to appreciate once she was in college. She would stay with him in the summers, bring friends, maybe a significant other, and the young people would relax in the Adirondack chairs, enjoy the fresh air and the sudden spungs of blue water and the stubborn trees. The beach was only half an hour away.
He signed the agreement and paid the deposit, which meant he was committed. He didn’t have to wrestle himself about it anymore. He just had to show up at his extremely strange job. Or else the little bags of shining, pure, soft, dentable gold coins would stop appearing on his windowsills. He would have nothing to bring to Alfie’s pawnshop, where such bags were understood very well, where they could be turned into cash or salable jewelry and used as deposits for home renovations.
Stella came by as he was measuring the eaves. “You look happy,” she observed. “I love to see it. The job’s working out?”
“You weren’t kidding when you said odd, huh?” Wayne frowned. “Understatement of the year. I can’t get over it.” He shook his head. “What are they?”
“You know, I’ve never seen them myself.”
Wayne felt betrayed. “What?”
“No, I only know about them because Jerry worked for them for years. Would never say much about the details, but I got the impression they were little green men. Are they little and green? Or more like the tall gray kind?”
Wayne’s stomach sank. Was it getting involved with this stuff that had made her husband go soft in the head and hoard newspapers until his house was full?
Don’t think about it, he told himself. You’re committed now, and you’ll stay the course. Gotta get this house into shape.
“On the shorter side,” he said. “But not green—not green.” His mouth worked. All the words that presented themselves seemed slippery and inadequate. “I guess they wear a lot of green. But if I’ve ever been sure of anything, I can tell you these guys belong to Earth. They’re the earthiest people I’ve ever met.”
There was a lot more knowledge than that in his head. The voolids came in two varieties. In his head canon he called them the movie stars and the devils. You’d see the devils first. They were at the gates, seven feet tall with horsey faces; ripped, leathery bat wings; hooves. They seemed to serve as guards, but they also spent time stomping up and down planks of wood with their red-hot hooves until they turned it all to charcoal, which they gathered in drums for the movie star types to use in their crafts. They never seemed to leave their posts—but they must, sometime, or where did all the Jersey Devil stories come from? Maybe they liked to scare tourists on their days off? Maybe they were free to wander the earth on All Hallows’ Eve. Whenever he passed by, they grinned and leered and muttered rude things about him in a clicky language he didn’t understand, then broke out in whinnying laughter.
Inside the gates, it was movie stars. Everyone you saw was gorgeous—flawless. Perfectly symmetrical. The girls wore stuff that he knew from living with Marjorie and Billie was crazy expensive. Silky gowns with tiny starry jewels sewn into them, cut so they draped over every peak and valley with jaw-dropping grace. And the way they moved! Barefoot in the Pine Barrens, where there were all kinds of nasty bugs and sharp sticks. But their skin never had bites or wounds, and their toenails were jeweled, and they walked as if they were floating.
“They’re kind of beautiful,” he said.
“Oh dear,” Stella said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“What? Come on. You got me into this.”
“I told you not to fall in love, is all. Go in, do your job, go home. Don’t fall in love.”
“What do you mean, love.” He scoffed. “I’m not seeing anyone.”
“You’re seeing them,” she said. “Collectively. That never ends well, either. Could’ve sworn you didn’t seem the type to get starry-eyed or I never would’ve suggested this.”
“I’m not the type, and I’m not in love, but once I pick a lane, I stick to it,” he said. “It’s working out. I’m grateful.”
“I like your optimism,” said Stella. “Just hang on to your noodles, okay?”
She jogged away and left him to imagine a bouquet of floppy noodles in his hand.
#
He was really dying to go to work by the time he got up the next morning. Eager, energized. He didn’t shower, just threw on clothes and headed out into the dense, close woods. The sun was behind clouds, and the space amid the trees felt airless and heavy. Gnats swarmed. Everything looked wintry except the trees that weren’t pines had a reddish blush around the ends of their branches, a haze of swelling buds, leaves about to be.
A normal day walking on a normal trail.
He always tried to pinpoint the moment when his surroundings changed, but the nature of the change was such that you got lost in it.
It came sometime after you passed between the standing stones on the bald-topped hill. (They were standing stones, not trail markers. He knew that much. Prehistoric-looking, like a miniature Stonehenge.)
Then the forest around you suddenly became more. Or you started to see more in it—there was no way to tell which. If it was you that was changing, or the forest. The trail cams hadn’t clarified things.
He passed between the stones, and the hair on the back of his neck frizzed, then calmed. He started down one of the paths on the far side. Didn’t seem to matter which one he chose.
He reminded himself about the payment schedule for the contractors doing the renovations and what shape the house would be in when it was time for Billie’s next visit—he’d have to get her a hotel room if there was too much dust everywhere. Then the forest itself yanked his gaze upward and there was a sharp catch in his throat, and all at once he saw—more. The gray sky brooded, a cauldron of waiting rain, and the wind was in the east. A chickadee wheedled a pensive minor third. He knew, not how many clock minutes would pass before it started raining, but in a numberless sense the time that would pass before the sand of the path turned to rivulets of grainy mud. There was a break in the trees to the south where he could see a slight fog over the fields. Beyond it, distant forsythia bushes flamed yellow in the yard around a clapboard dentist’s office, and beyond that, where the woods closed in again, high lights shone in the crystalline windows of a mansion atop a hill too high to exist in the Pinelands.
When he turned back to look where he was walking, a devil was emerging from the woods onto the paths. He’d never seen one of them before he reached the gates of the pavilion. Never seen them wandering the forest. He tried to remember if it was a holiday, but everything in his brain to do with dates felt clogged and musty.
The devil blocked his way, stood over him. Stuck its horsey teeth in his face and brayed so loud, it hurt his ears. He clapped his hands over them. The devil gave a couple of strong meaty flaps to its wings, and the smell of burning charcoal filled the air. It didn’t occur to Wayne to be scared, though—he was good with odd now—until it opened its hand and showed him the crushed remains of one of his trail cams.
He stared so long without a single word in his head that he didn’t see the green maiden until she was right next to the devil. It was her gown that was green, fraught with a net of burgundy lace like the spring buds of trees. Her skin was deep olive, her eyes faceted emerald shot through with a million lights. She looked up at him, fierce.
“You stole from us,” she said in a voice like the music of a running stream.
He looked down at the trail cam and back at her again. Guilt racked him. He hadn’t thought it would be an offense to them, but he should have known. Obviously he should have known.
He found his voice. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, I promise,” he said. “And it didn’t work! No pictures. I don’t have any pictures. I didn’t take anything.”
“You tried. Tried to steal the image of us. With your . . .” She looked at the remains of the camera, which the devil was dangling from its claws. “Clever-lensed, oil-cased, cheat-refraction light machine. The work of charlatans. I should kill you where you stand.”
He did not at that moment think about his daughter, or the money he needed to make the dingy little house into a peaceful woodland retreat with a yoga room—a place Billie would beg to visit more often, bring her friends to, maybe introduce him to the significant others she would have in college, maybe spend whole weeks with him in the summers.
He did not think about his credit being ruined if his income dried up and he couldn’t pay the next installment on the renovations; did not think about what would happen if anyone official started poking around to find out where the money really came from.
He just thought about the heartbreaking music he could hear a little further into the woods, right at the edge of hearing: song that went on all hours of the day and night, while he worked in his simple hut with its roof of fragrant pine boughs and did all the bookkeepy things the voolids were too ethereal to do.
He would die if he never heard that music again.
He avoided the maiden’s eyes and their rageful lightnings, and looked instead at the soft golden light that glimmered around her.
Well, he had to give Stella that; maybe it was too late to avoid falling in love. But to steal, he had not meant that; it was an honest mistake, which had to count for something.
Show respect was the other thing she’d said. The first thing.
He knelt down on the path, then lowered his torso to the ground. Pressed his face into the dirt and reached out to touch the jeweled toes of the fair one in supplication. He did not look up, did not say anything more, just begged with his hands against her feet.
She pulled one foot back out of his grasp, then the other. The devil brayed. The remains of the camera fell in the dirt next to his face, and then the woodsmen were gone.
He wept. Cried his eyes out for a long time before he was able to sit up and look around. The misty rain off the Atlantic had begun to fall and his whole back was damp. The forest around him was dull and silent, no mysterious music or winking lights in the distance. Bugs had bitten his ankles where they touched the brush.
Where the maiden had stood, though, something glinted. A small copper basket woven in a sphere shape, linked to a silken cord. He reached for it, scarcely daring to believe his luck. He picked up the cord, let the circular cage dangle like a pocket watch.
Inside floated an hourglass, dropping grains of glittering sand from top to bottom. No matter which way you turned the cage, the hourglass inside stayed upright and dripped sand. One grain at a time.
His heart leaped. He had cataloged these on the other side. They were devices to measure a time of banishment.
They had forgiven him! He was not exiled forever!
He clutched the sphere to his heart and shouted. “YAHOO!” He jumped up. Pumped his fist in the air.
He ran all the way back to his house, tearing down and stomping on the rest of the trail cams as he went. He trailed sandy mud across the kitchen floor to hang the sphere from the little hook over the sink. He watched it sway.
The sand in the floating hourglass didn’t seem meaningfully lower than it had been twenty minutes ago, but it made sense that this would take time.
“What a friggin’ treasure you are,” he sobbed, stroking the cage with one trembling finger.
It hung there. For the whole of a very empty month, and then another, he brought ancillary treasures to keep it company: beads and bottle caps, key chains and Zippo lighters.
It was autumn when at last the final grain fell.
Wayne took a full, deep breath—his first since the spring—and raced out to the bald hilltop, singing.
#
Thank you for joining our journey this week.
Zoe Bellerive (they/she) is a writer, editor, and Clarion West alum based in the Philadelphia area. Find their Substack, mothwings & lamplight, at zoebellerive.substack.com.
“Close Encounters of the Ethereal Kind,” © Zoe Bellerive, 2026
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What an unexpected and delightful story!