It happened one day when I was walking home from the bus stop. Mickey was barking at something from inside the fenced in backyard. I was seven years old. I tried to calm him but he insisted on barking long into the evening. At first, I could not tell what it was he was barking at, until about dusk when the moon rose higher, the bugs would begin to sing and the fireflies would start their nightly summer dance. That’s when I saw it, just as I looked out my second story window as my father shouted out to the dog to be quiet; the glowing bubble the size of a large beachball. I rubbed my eyes as if mistaken but there it was, hovering inside the branches of the walnut tree just outside the house, right above where Mickey had been making such a racket. He was now slinking away due to my father’s angry reprimand but now it was I who was causing a fuss. It had started to bob around as if held by an invisible string. I called down to my mother frantically who took my proclamation as a symptom of exhaustion and ushered me to bed dragging me away from the window from which I pointed through.

       The next day I told my friends about it and they walked with me home to see it. When we arrived the dog was not barking, apparently bored with the bubble. As I pointed up into the branches where I could just make it out, now about the size of a volleyball, my friends would scrunch up their noses in a squint and moved all about the base of the tree trunk to get a better view. They asked me questions like; what color was it, how big and if it was moving as they searched every angle finally asking me if I was pulling their leg. No matter how much I protest or tried to get Mickey to confirm my story, they simply could not see it and brushed me off, saying he must have been barking yesterday after a squirrel and left to go home.

       As I walked up to my own front door I glanced back one last time before going inside just as the bubble came out of the branches hovering over the fence line and shrinking down to the size of a basketball. I ran back to the street trying to call my friends back just before they rounded a corner and were gone, likely joking with one another on having been “gullible” enough to believe me.

       Time passed and though me and Mickey knew the bubble was there we stopped trying to get others to see it but was still comforted by its presence. I started growing up, noticing the floating basketball above my fence less and less and started noticing girls much more. Once having the luck to be assigned to a group with one I had noticed a lot. We were looking through a microscope to determine various plant parts, seeing if we could name all the mysteriously small near invisible to the naked eye elements of the world when I heard her laughing. I asked her what it was and she said that I was wearing my shirt inside out and I realized that others in the room had made the observation known to her, laughing at it and other apparel choices that matter more to them than they had ever meant to me. Walking home that evening I noticed the bubble had moved yet again to the outside of the fence, still high in the air and had shrunk even smaller, now about the size of a bowling ball.

        More years passed and my family had planned to go on a camping trip to one of my favorite places. I loved camping being able to get out into the world and feel the open air, the open schedule and the open absence of everyone, just for a moment. I went into the back yard to get Mickey ready to go and found him laying next to the fence. I thought he was sleeping. I hoped he was sleeping. But I knew. I knew he was not. I looked up and found the bubble there hovering as it always had just over him now and once again as my cheeks filled with tears from my open eyes it shrunk to only the size of a baseball.

        Many, many years passed by and I had nearly forgotten about the bubble. I had married, moved back to my old house after my parents had both passed with my children, having worked the same job for 20 years. It was on the day when I was driving home from being laid off from work, having zoned out, lost in the thoughts of how I was going to break the news that I caught a glimpse of it. It was refracting light from the sun just above my house and back fence now over so many years barely the size of a golf ball. I sighed as I parked in the garage knowing this was going to be the last thing my wife wanted to hear since we had not been on the best of terms recently. When I entered I called out and didn’t receive an answer. I walked through each room that seemed emptier than they had been before I had left. Then I reached the kitchen and through the sliding glass door, I could still see the glint of the tiny bubble. It was shining down on something on the table. It was a note. And I knew. Looking back to the bubble I was just a moment late to see it …