It Glistens in the Light

The impetus for this story was actually inspired by a real life event. One day my wife Lucy was out running errands and when she exited the store and came back out to the parking lot, she noticed something hanging from the underside of her car. It hadn't been there when she went into the store, at least so far as she knows, but it was there now and it was very, very, strange.

When she got home we both spent a long time looking at the thing, which was dangling off a shard of rust from the slowly disintegrating rear driver's side rocker panel of our '02 Corolla.

One side of the thing was dark and dirt-encrusted with what might have been matted hair or fur, though it was difficult to tell. The other side was slick and stained red with a substance neither of us was eager to identify and which seemed to turn oddly iridescent whenever the sunlight hit it in just the right way.

Needless to say we were both rather disturbed by the thing and the inexplicable nature of what it was and how it had gotten there. I don't remember which one of us removed it, probably my wife, but we continued to talk about the thing in the days and weeks that followed. At some point I wrote down the title of the story, which I'd originally called "It Glistens in the Sun". I later revised it to the title above as not to exclude our good friend the moon and other light sources from the fun. Also, I felt the original title was a little too close to the name of a popular song, and despite really liking that tune, I didn't particularly want people humming along with it in their heads when they were reading the story.

So here's what came of that little encounter with our car and the unexpected passenger that hitched along for the ride.