(This is a work in progress. Magical Realism in middle America.)

When the meteorite smashed into Peter Henchley’s farmhouse, he was already sitting up in bed staring at the exact spot on his bedroom ceiling where it crashed through the roof.

When he thought back on it, he was almost certain he had been awake a full ten seconds. He wasn’t one to actually believe in that psychic stuff, but ten full seconds did seem pretty convincing.

His dream had been about young Penny Asherton when they were both twelve and sat in the shade amidst the rows of thick corn stalks. The sunlight filtered through the razor-edge leaves scattering mottled patterns across their tanned skin. Warm August wind swayed the felt green husks against one another creating scratchy whispers like a murmuring congregation during Sunday prayers. That’s where they went to kiss, and touch, chasing the sunlight across unexplored skin. Still, when life’s tortures took him to the edge, he could be there in a moment just by closing his eyes.

This time, within those ten seconds, Peter realized he had dreamed of his patch of dirt in the planted field and he had never done that before. For no reason at all he had opened his eyes and sat up at exactly half past six staring into the grainy darkness where the familiar objects of the room were still amorphous dark blotches. The pressure of Penny’s kiss lingered on his lips, the flavor of her swam through his mind.

It was so quiet in his staid attic bedroom, the rush of breeze through the stalks was still the only sound in his ears. The roosters aren’t crowing, he thought. He glanced at the dim hands of the clock by the bed. They should be crowing at six-thirty. He looked up to the vaulted ceiling as if he would be able to see into the moonless night sky to check it against the accuracy of his alarm clock.

In that instant, a giant hole appeared, almost perfectly round, two feet across. Fine splinters twirled through the air followed by a fierce wind that blew the covers clean off, billowing them up like a dark cloud. Another hole smashed through the dresser and wall right by his bed.  The sound was sudden and deafening like cannonade fire on the Fourth of July, but cut short so quickly, his ears were left ringing at such intensity that he couldn’t even hear himself shout.

His wife, Jane, pulled her head from under the pillows, rolled over and mumbled, “The pigs got into the shed, again.” Peter couldn’t hear her as he stared up at the stars twinkling through the jagged hole. Jane’s hand searched for the covers but found him instead. She peered up at him, sitting like a doll, hands pressed over his ears. She was about to speak again when she followed his gaze into the heavens beyond the ceiling. A light dust swirled down from the opening.

Jane sat up and stared from the hole to her husband, then the splinters that had been her bureau. She gently pulled his hands away from his ears and angled his face to hers. Her lips moved, but all Peter heard was a high-pitched whine. He looked away from her to the new opening and followed its downward trajectory across the room to the exit hole in the wall. His eyes grew wide.

“The kids!”

In three strides, he was out of the bedroom and trampling down the attic steps. He flung open the narrow casement door and immediately collided with his fourteen-year-old son, Gavin. They spun around in a clutch rebounding off the wall and saved from going down by nineteen-year-old daughter Anne who grabbed her dad’s flailing arm as they bounced past.

“You OK?” he shouted at both. He saw them mouth affirmation, then their heads turn as wife Jane clamored from the attic doorway. Relief instantly erased the panic gripping her eyes as her arms flew around them all.

“What was that noise?” Anne asked of anyone.

Jane’s eyes skittered across their faces to a place further down the hall. She pointed and all eyes followed. The hole from the attic bedroom came through the upper hallway wall and continued halfway down the opposite wall. Peter broke from his family huddle and peered down through the opening. His face was grim when he looked back at the expectant faces.

“The pick-up.”

Peter clomped down the stairs to the first floor, his jaw set, as if he was about to make a reckoning with the town kids who had shot up his mailbox last fall. The rest of his family fell in behind, shooting glances to each other in silence. Peter stopped at the kitchen door. The entire contents of the cupboard, including the cupboard itself, was in bit-size pieces strewn across the linoleum floor. There was no more kitchen door to the rear porch.

He turned back to the shocked faces of his family. “Stay here. You’ll cut your feet.”

Peter grabbed up his grandmother’s hooked rug from the front hallway, and entered the debris-strewn kitchen swinging it back and forth like a broom. At the outside door he dropped the rug, gripped the molding with one hand and stretched out over the empty space where the porch used to be.

In those few minutes it took for him to reach this vantage point, the sky had lightened just enough to see what was no longer there and why the roosters weren’t crowing. Somehow, the hens had gotten loose, along with the pigs, and the milk cow, and every one of the damn critters seemed as if they were gossiping with one another as they ringed the edge of the thirty foot diameter crater where the Pick-up had been parked until five-thirty that morning.