My Grandmother Called Them The Neighbours And Set A Plate

My grandmother was not a soft person. She could gut a fish in nine seconds and she once made a tax inspector cry.

Every Thursday, after dinner, she put a plate on the back step. Bread, salt, sometimes a boiled egg. In the morning the plate was empty, which proves nothing, because we lived where foxes live.

She called whoever took it "the neighbours". Not the fairies. Not the dead. The neighbours. When I was eleven I asked her which neighbours and she said, without looking up from her mending: "The ones who came down the hill in your grandfather's time. They are quiet. They keep their arrangements."

That was all. She never said another word about it in thirty years, and I did not push, because you did not push my grandmother.

When she got sick, she got frightened for the first time in her life — not of dying, she was rude about dying — but of the plate. She made me promise to keep putting it out. I said yes the way you say yes to a dying woman.

I did it for a while. Then I moved to the city and the house went to my cousin, who is an accountant and thinks the whole thing is peasant nonsense.

In April he called me at midnight, which he has never done, and he was doing that breathing that men do when they are trying not to be the sort of man who calls someone at midnight.

He said there were three of them at the treeline. Tall. Thin. Standing the way people stand when they are waiting for a bus and are not angry about it, only patient. He said they were grey in the porch light, and that they did not come closer, and that they stayed forty minutes.

He said: "I put out the plate."

We have not spoken about it since. He puts out the plate. He is an accountant; he keeps a spreadsheet of it, which is the funniest and worst thing I know.

Am I telling you that my grandmother fed aliens for forty years? I am telling you what she called them and what my cousin saw and that he is not the type. Make of it what you like. I have made nothing of it, and I sleep fine, and when I visit, I do not look at the treeline.