“Too smart for his own good,” Jackie Osgood’s father once said of him, “but not smart enough to leave town.”
Mr. Osgood never doled pure compliments to anybody. After all, Pride was a deadly sin. Praise came with a bite; no one was smart, they were too smart for their own good, no one was strong, they were stronger than they looked, the Lord never just giveth, he also taketh away. From the time Jackie was born to his sixteenth birthday, he had always been too smart for his own good. After impregnating his high school girlfriend at sixteen, Jackie became not smart enough to leave town. The straight-A student lost his academic edge. His father’s new quote stung every time his Mr. Osgood uttered it because all the boy wanted to do was get out of Oklahoma’s backwater Kiowa County.
Locals called Kiowa’s fields “Gold Grass” as a way of saying “ain’t shit growin’ here”. They joked that Kiowa was in the middle of a ‘passing’ hundred-year drought. Rain that did come flooded the parched desert, killing off what little grew. Jackie’s desperation to leave began on his eleventh birthday when he begged for a trip to Disney World. Being prohibitively expensive, he may as well have begged for a flight to the Caribbean. Instead, Mr. Osgood booked his son a tour of their tumbleweed town from above in a little two-seat Cessna airplane. Kiowa was even more depressing from the air; a series of sparse green desert oases kept barely alive via rusty golf course sprinklers. Jackie got thirsty just looking at it, a dry town of dry people.
Two oil rigs and a potato chip factory employed most of Kiowa. Neither required a high school degree, leading to a very low graduation rate. Those who couldn’t work on a rig or in a factory participated in Kiowa’s underground employment: drugs and prostitution. Weed was still illegal, but fentanyl had better margins. A nearby truck stop paid the most for company, but seclusion bred violence. As Jackie’s mother would say before her passing, “The only thing flowering in the desert is desperation.”
One August night four years after not graduating high school, Jackie saw bright amber lights in the sky. He drank Miller Lites in the bed of his two-seat pickup truck, his now-wife strung out in shotgun while their toddler slept in the middle seat. A plane in low orbit flew a curved path across the horizon. The amber light was unnaturally bright, with occasional flashes of electric yellow sparks bursting from within it. It emanated from the back of the plane like a rear tail light or thrusting engine. Its curved path came all the way around until it headed towards Jackie’s truck.

The police weren’t interested in Jackie’s description of the alien vessel he saw on August 19th. They were more interested in the location of his wife and child, reported missing on August 23rd by a neighbor who hadn’t seen Jackie’s truck in days. The sheriff stumbled onto an old two-seater pickup gathering dust in the desert. Its driver suffered severe dehydration and psychological trauma, babbling incoherently about fire in the sky and something about aliens. His hospital recuperation turned into an arrest when police discovered his wife and child were missing. Small traces of blood in the shotgun seat belonged to the wife, testing positive for HIV. She was a known seller at the truck stop on weekdays. Jackie tested positive for high levels of methamphetamines during his hospital stay but refused all accusations of drug use. He had never done drugs, he said, and aliens abducted his wife and child.
Sheriff Ferguson remembered Jackie’s father. They drank at the local dive on Margarita Mondays when the dance floor opened up and a few people managed to eke out a few shuffled steps to the tune of Ritchie Valens. Old Osgood had nothing but good things to say about his son. To groups, he’d call the boy too smart for his own good. To friends, he’d say the kid was gonna be a CEO someday, or maybe the President. Ferguson looked down at his notes.
Fire in the sky.
Gray metal cylinder.
Terrible blue light.
Jackie went on to say he needed to go back out to the desert to pick them up, the aliens would return soon. Ferguson had seen many strange things living in a dying desert town in nowhere Oklahoma, but he never saw an alien. He saw desperation, drugs, and misery. He saw old women kick heels on the dance floor of a tiny bar, and old women sell their company at the truck stop. He saw men give up belief in God for belief in advanced beings flying in secret through the sky. Perhaps, he reasoned, there were parallels there. Ferguson wished badly that they were real, these green men in these alien spacecraft, because if they were he wouldn’t have had to visit Jackie Osgood’s dilapidated ranch house. There wouldn’t be two corpses lying there near a dime bag of white powder, and a dehydrated man spouting hallucinations in the interrogation room.
If the aliens were real, Ferguson thought, people wouldn’t be killing themselves.