Sandra Sebring was feeling a bit upset. But with several things on her mind, she was trying to sort out which one was bothering her most.

            As the daughter of First National Bank’s longtime president R. J. McBride, Sandra Sebring had believed most of her life that she had a family reputation to uphold. She felt the same way about her brother James, his wife Mary and their kids.

            But her sister-in-law, Mary McBride, who lived four houses down from Sandra and her husband Jack on Beechcrest Drive, was embarrassing the entire family with her nutty behavior--—among other things, Mary’s proclivity for watering her lawn---in her negligee, no less---in the rain. On her way home from the grocery store, Sandra had just driven by Mary’s house during the worst of the afternoon’s downpour. Sure enough, there was Mary standing in her front yard, in a powder-blue, practically see-through nightgown, hand-watering her flower beds while it rained buckets. Sandra knew people in the neighborhood talked about her sister-in-law.

            “...about what a nut she is,” Sandra thought.

            But Sandra also knew that while Mary was a little “off,” there were plenty of people in this city who made Mary look normal. So, in order to save family face, when playing bridge on Monday nights, she tended to casually defend Mary by dropping lines like, “Oh, Mary’s a little eccentric, I guess”; or “That Mary is so colorful.”

            “And besides,” Sandra mused, as she unpacked her groceries, “so what if Mary watered in the rain? The only harm is flooded flower beds at the least, and, at worst, root rot.”

            Having mentally reduced Mary’s behavior to nothing to be much concerned about, Sandra moved on to something else that had been on her mind this last week: her golf game. It was off. And not because she was doing anything wrong. Her stance on the green was better than ever. She was addressing the ball better than ever---in fact, addressing it as if it could talk back.

            Problem was, lately it had talked back. But because she always played alone, there had been no one else to hear it. Therefore, she wasn’t sure if the bumpy, white Titleist ball had actually said what she thought she had heard.

            “Don’t hit me. Please, p-l-e-a-s-e, don’t hit me!”

            She’d frozen in mid-swing, the driver poised in mid-air. Dr. Armstrong and the doctors at the state hospital had told her to ignore these voices. They had said that when things like pictures on the wall, people in photographs, her dog Pixie, or things like bananas started talking to her, to just ignore the voices.

            “They’re just in your head, Sandra.”

            Hearing the doctors’ voices in her head, she took comfort in their words. Relieved, she had addressed the ball again --—“Alright, buddy, no sand trap this time!”--- and had followed through on the swing, slightly squinting her eyes and wincing, just in case the ball screamed .

            It hadn’t. Or if it had, the sound was lost as the Titleist soared through the air, straight down the fairway.

“Per-fect!” Sandra said out loud.

            Shoot, for a drive that good, she thought, I could take a chorus of screams from all the balls in my bag.

            No, it wasn’t Mary’s watering in the rain that had bothered Sandra in recent days.

            It wasn’t even the talking Titleist that gave her pause. (Shoot, just last month, she would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that the little man on a can of Chef Boy-R-Dee ravioli had given her tips on how to improve the sauce.)

            No, what really had been on her mind was that someone ---some thing--- had been... watching her. She could feel it. It was like that feeling of someone looking at you, that feeling of eyes on the back of the neck. No, it wasn’t quite that feeling. It was more like eyes on the top of her head.

That’s right. Something was above her, looking down.

Looking down...at her. And it seemed to be just above her head, straight up.

            Last week, last Wednesday to be exact, just as she’d been on the verge of making a putt on the fourth green, on a perfectly calm day, not a breeze in the air, she had felt herself suddenly wrapped in a swirl of air, like a swirling cloak of air, a cocoon of air spiraling from the top of her head down to her exposed ankles.

            She had quickly looked up, expecting for the briefest moment to see a room fan hovering above her head, whirring on “high”, plugged into nothing at all, but going full tilt.

            But when she’d looked up, there was nothing, except the ever so slight rustling sound of...of...silk skirts?

            Is that what she heard as she stared into a cloudless sky?

            With her arms dropped to her sides, her putter lax in her hand, all she saw was a tiny white feather, no more than a fluff of a feather, floating down, then hanging for the briefest moment right in front of her eyes, giving her a good look, before coming to rest on the very tip of her upturned nose.

            She felt it.

It tickled.

            But, stifling a sneeze, when she tried to brush it away, it was so lightweight that it swirled away on the air current stirred by her hand.

            What she couldn’t get out of her mind, though, was that she had seen the color of the feather---not exactly white but more like a white background overlaid by a pearlescent sheen, like the colors inside an oyster shell.

            “What bird has feathers like that?” she wondered.

            And Sandra Sebring knew from birds.

            There were mockingbirds and grackles. There were jays and chickadees.

            There were cuckoos.

            And there were loons....