I've waited thirty years to talk about this. Thirty years. My husband thinks I should just let it go, but I can't. What happened to my mother, what happened to our animals, what fell out of the sky onto our farm that summer. It wasn't normal. And I know that because I touched it. I got sick from it. And nobody, not the government, not the scientists, nobody has ever given me a straight answer about what it was. This was August 1994. We lived on a twenty-nine acre farm outside Oakville, Washington. Little timber town, maybe seven hundred people. Rains there about two hundred seventy-five days a year, so you get used to wet. You don't think twice about storms. But the morning of August 7th, I walked outside and something was wrong. There was this stuff all over our black asphalt roof. Little blobs. Translucent, like jelly. Each one maybe half the size of a grain of rice. And they were everywhere. On the ground, on the trees, on the fence posts. Thousands of them.
I called my mother outside to look. She was living with me at the time, helping around the property. We both just stood there staring at it. I remember thinking it looked like someone had sneezed all over everything. That's the best way I can describe it. Like mucus. Like something alive had been shredded and scattered across twenty square miles of countryside. I picked some up. I know, I know. Stupid. But I was curious, and that's the thing, it didn't look dangerous. It was soft, mushy. You could squish it right through your fingers like Jell-O. No smell at all. Just this clear, gelatinous goo. I collected some in a jar, thinking maybe I'd take it somewhere and find out what it was. Within a day, my mother was sick. Dizziness. Nausea. Couldn't stand up without the room spinning. I started feeling it too. This bone-deep exhaustion, like I'd been awake for a week.
And then our kitten died. Just collapsed. One day she was fine, the next she was gone. I can't prove it was connected, but the timing was too perfect to ignore. A neighbor told me she knew of twelve animals that died after the blobs appeared. Cats, dogs, a frog she found with green film coming out of its mouth. A raven lying dead just a few feet from where the stuff had pooled. I took my mother to her doctor. He thought it was an inner ear thing, nothing to do with what fell from the sky. But I begged him to test the sample I'd collected. He sent it to the hospital lab. And that's when things got strange. The technician called back and said the substance contained human white blood cells. Human. In something that fell out of the sky. I remember just standing there holding the phone, not knowing what to say. They sent more samples to the state Department of Health and Department of Ecology. The health department found two types of bacteria. One was called Pseudomonas something, the other Enterobacter. The second one, they said, is known to infect the human digestive system. But here's the thing. The Department of Ecology said the cells had no nuclei. Which means they couldn't have been human white blood cells after all. So which test was right? Nobody could agree.
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