“The aliens were everywhere that summer . . .”

For several very formative years of my life, my family lived in a house at the end of a dirt lane surrounded by cornfields. Our “neighborhood” consisted of two houses: ours and the farmhouse about a quarter-mile up the lane. I was an only child for the first few years of our time there. Luckily, the family up the lane had five kids, who quickly became my co-conspirators in all manner of adventures. Our imaginations fired by 1960s TV shows and the 1950s movies that aired on the weekends, we created narratives so vivid to us that we fooled ourselves into believing they were real. It’s a trick I’ve been trying to relearn ever since.

Years later, I returned to the site of those childhood games and saw the ravages time had wrought upon the scene. “The Aliens,” published by the good folks over at Hobart, tries to capture that experience in the compressed form of flash fiction.