1AM. At half past the hour, a small object of no particular shape falls from the sky and into an empty field. No one is awake to see it fall. In the distance, a dog barks.

     2AM. A rabbit, making its way through the grass, happens upon the object nestled into the dirt. The animal circles the object with wary interest, sniffing here and there to determine its potential as a meal or mate. A few moments of inspection prove it to be good for neither, and the rabbit moves on, kicking a disdainful spray of dirt over the offending thing as it retreats. The object glimmers faintly in the moonlight, its irregular outline visible from a distance.

     3AM. In the topmost bedroom of the house that looks onto the field, Kate wakes suddenly from a dream, panting and damp. The novel she was reading before she fell asleep is still open on her chest. She lies still and stares at the ceiling, waiting for the beating of her heart to slow. After a moment or two she realizes that what she hears is not her heartbeat, but a throbbing hum drifting in from her open window. Wincing as her joints crackle and pop, she rises from her bed and looks out at the swaying grass.

     4AM. Dawn is a long way off, but the darkness already looks washed out, black watered into sullen grey. Kate stands in the field by herself, listening to the object. It gives off a faint light, pale and pearlescent, and if she looks at it long enough and hard enough she thinks she can see flecks of gold moving beneath the surface, like little fish swimming through the murk of a river.

     “Well, ain’t that a thing,” she says aloud. Her voice, usually a powerful boom that commands attention and respect, sounds suddenly thin, weak. A thing is the only way she can think to describe it.

     In time, the humming starts to sound like a song. She begins to hum along.

     5AM. Bernard doesn’t know why he pulls over onto the shoulder, scattering gravel. He doesn’t know why he gets out of the car. He is on his way to a job, his first since hurting his back two years ago, and as he trudges through the weedy field, burrs clinging to the hems of his jeans, he knows that if he does not turn around and start driving, he will probably lose it. He does not turn around.

     Kate is standing over the object when he arrives, the edge of her nightgown clotted with mud. The wide span of her body beneath the flimsy cotton makes her look enormously solid, like a chalk cliff. She looks at him for a moment before granting him a single nod, courteous and cool. Her stern, square face registers no surprise.

     “Take a look,” she says, and he obeys.

     6AM. The sunrise is beautiful, gold-edged, framed with cloud. Bernard and Kate ignore it completely. Their focus is on the object, its imprecise shape, its insistent hum. Kate tries to harmonize with it, swaying gently back and forth with its oscillating tone. Bernard is silent, kneeling. His lips move soundlessly, mouthing something over and over again.

     "What is it?" he asks at one point, his voice already hoarse and rough from all the things he'd been murmuring under his breath. It is the first thing he has said in over an hour.

     She looks down at him, then at the thing on the ground.

     "Beautiful," she says at last. "It's just beautiful."

     But the word feels inadequate. She despairs.

     7AM. Carmen used to be a sleepwalker, would wake up in strange places and in strange positions with no recollection of how she had come to be there. On her seventh birthday, she woke in the middle of the woods, shivering in her nightgown. At a slumber party in fifth grade, she was shaken into consciousness by a classmate's angry father, demanding to know why she was in his bedroom. As a teen her eyes would snap open at the edge of swimming pools, on top of steep hills, in alleyways she'd never seen before.

     Now, in college, she takes little blue pills that keep her in her bed for eight straight hours and wakes up with a thick head in familiar surroundings, except this morning she swims up out of a muddled, violent dream to find herself on the side of the highway, looking out into a field. Her head is clear, clear as a bell—isn’t that the saying?

     There’s a sound, too, nothing like a bell. More like the sound of a radio two rooms away, playing a song you hear once and then can never find again. She stands utterly still, listening, and then her leg is over the guardrail before she’s even made the choice to move. There is painful gravel under her feet and then cool mud, the prickle of dead grass. The sound is coming from the middle of the field, and so that is where she must go.

     She is not the last to come. More are on their way.

     8AM. Kate is trying to find the words to describe the object, her mind going over every book she has ever read, every magazine, every bit of copy in every advertisement. Bernard is taking notes on his arm with a felt-tip pen he found in his coat pocket. Carmen is on her stomach in the dirt, her hands cradling her chin.

     In the distance, a wave approaches: children and adults, old and young, men and women and others, too. They have all woken up and heard the humming. They all feel the pull of the object in the field, the rising need to be beside it, to see it with their own eyes.

     “Luminous,” Kate says, and Bernard nods and scrawls the word across his arm, smudging the ink almost immediately. Then: “No, opaline. No, dappled. No…”

     Bernard keeps writing. He is running out of space.

     Carmen reaches out with shaking fingers to touch the earth that has been disturbed by the fall of the object. Once her fingers have been darkened with soil, she brings them back to her mouth, sucks desperately and swallows. The taste is not like dirt, but coppery, like a penny, sweet, like a fig. A laugh boils over her tongue.

     “Deslumbrante,” she whispers around her fingers. Kate does not hear her.

     9AM. They come from miles around, by car and by bus, on foot and on bicycles. A mother brings her three young children, their sticky hands clasped prayerfully together. Two police officers march in tandem, their hands hovering, out of habit, over the butts of their guns. A woman holding an elderly dog picks her careful way across the field, one foot in front of the other, humming that note in the back of her throat.

     Now there are many surrounding the object, pushing at each other to get to the front, to see. Kate takes it upon herself to take control of them, using that bellow of a voice to urge them backwards.

     “Space,” she shouts, “we need space!” And then: “What word is it? What is it called?”

     Bernard, on his knees, reads what he has written on his arm, his voice flat and without emotion, his eyes fixed on the ground. Carmen remains on her stomach, her hands only inches away from the surface of the object. Her fingers have not yet made contact with it, but she can feel it beyond the barrier of her skin, can imagine what it might be like to close the space between them. She thinks it will be cool to the touch. As a child she once swallowed one of her brother’s marbles, can recall even now the remarkable slide of it down her throat, the slippery feeling of something chill and alien making its way into her body. 

     It will feel like that, she thinks, when she touches it.

     The rabbit has not gone to bed. It makes its way through the woods and over the fields, driven on by some instinct it does not quite understand. From one of its enormous ears comes a slow trickle of blood.

     10AM. Two children have crept to the front of the crowd. A boy and a girl, dirty blonde hair, less than ten. Siblings. They hold hands tightly as they look at the object. The girl begins to cry.

     “I want to go home,” she says, grasping her brother’s hand very tightly. “I want to go back to Mom.”

     Her brother strokes her knuckles with his thumb, but otherwise ignores her. A hum buzzes in the back of his throat, matching the sound coming from the dirt. Kate leans over him, her expression desperate.

     “What is it?” she asks him. “What is the right word? How can we describe it?”

     The boy considers the question, then shrugs.

     “It just is,” he says. “It’s just that.”

     His sister weeps, but does not leave his side. The sun shines thickly down upon them, making their hair gleam gold.

     11AM. Someone in the crowd gives Kate a dictionary, but she does not find what she is looking for between its covers. In her frustration, she begins to pull the pages out and eat them, one by one. This act ought to remind the crowd that it is almost lunchtime, that their bodies will soon need food, but it does not. No one is hungry. No one tries to eat.

     At the back of the crowd, rumours have begun to brew about the object’s origins. Space. Another dimension. The edge of the earth. Heaven. Hell. A woman at the edge, wearing the severe grey wimple of a nun and the narrow, squinting expression of a skeptic, prays to her God, hoping against hope to hear an answer.

     If ever I needed You, she thinks, it’s now. Come on. Prove me wrong.

     12PM. Bernard’s arm is full. He removes his shirt and begins to write on his stomach, his chest, his shoulder. When those are full, he hands the felt pen to the old woman with the dog, whose dog has long since run away, letting her record the words that Kate shouts out into the sky. She guesses at spelling, first cautiously, then with abandon.

     “Resplendent,” she cries, “coruscating, lucent,” and the old woman writes RESSPLENDANT, CORASKATING, LOOSENT.

     1PM. A man at the back of the crowd finds a rock. He begins to hit himself in the head with it in time to that beautiful hum, striking himself in the same place over and over until he finally falls to the ground. His wife, standing beside him, does not notice. She is keeping time, too, stabbing herself in the arm with an enamel pin, until her arms are covered in little red wellings of blood.

     2PM. Their ears begin to bleed. Bernard is pleased by this, as his pen has run out of ink. He has the old woman dip it into the blood, using it to write upon his shins. He is almost naked now, only the sparest inches of flesh left empty. 

     I am becoming a book, Bernard thinks, and smiles at the thought. He has never cared for books, never liked reading, never given a damn about words. Now that is all he is: words, and ink, and blood, and that lovely humming rattling around in his skull like a headache.

     The field is crowded now, dozens of supplicants pressing forward to view the object. It continues to hum, to glimmer, to be itself.

     3PM. Five miles away, in a yard without a fence, the unlucky rabbit is cornered by a terrier with a deceptively friendly face. The dog can hardly believe its luck as it snatches the unfortunate creature by the neck, shaking it with furious joy. The rabbit dies almost instantly.

     For a moment or two the dog gnaws at the rabbit’s belly, but beneath the fur the flesh seems to be strangely spoilt, soft, like rotten fruit. After a few bites the terrier gives up and trots back into its kennel, disappointed in its meal but pleased with itself. It rolls onto its back and falls asleep, content.

     4PM. Bernard’s body is full. He stands before Kate, rotating slowly, so that she can read his body. It is not enough. Kate is unsatisfied. She opens her mouth and begins to scream. Her tongue with its deep fissures is visible, an unsettling pinkish grey.

     “I don’t know!” she screams. “I don’t know the word! What is the word?” 

     As the crowd watches, the tongue twitches, shivers, like a dog scratching a deep itch. The seams in the pale flesh split, the muscle rupturing. It falls apart, the tip of it tumbling into the dirt, the rest remaining in Kate’s mouth. Kate blinks, shuts her lips. Chews. Swallows.

     No more words, she thinks. The taste of her own flesh is sweet, like a fig.

     5PM. The brother and sister creep closer to the object, to Carmen. She watches them closely as they draw near, their eyes gleaming. Foxes in the dark, she thinks.

     “Do you know what it is?” the sister asks, and Carmen shakes her head. The boy shuffles closer, his hand hovering in the air.

     “Don’t,” his sister says, and begins to cry again. Her brother pulls back, drapes his arm around her shoulder. His gaze remains fixed on the object.

     “Are you going to touch it?” he asks Carmen, and he does not sound like a boy when he says it. He barely sounds like a human being.

     “Not yet,” Carmen says. She thinks again of that marble slipping down her throat. So hard, so cool. The tip of Kate’s tongue is gone, absorbed into the dirt.

     6PM. The nun, after so many hours of silent prayer, receives an answer. She pushes to the front of the crowd, swaying and dizzy, and kneels in front of the object.

     “I hear Him,” she says, and begins to weep, to remove her wimple and her habit and her severe underwear. She reaches for the dirt at the base of the object, takes fistfuls of it and rubs it on herself. She paints herself with its shadow. She mortifies her flesh.

     One by one, the others line up behind her to do the same. Carmen is unmoved by their closeness, the accidental nudges and kicks from their feet. Her place, she knows, is there, on her belly, her hands so close to the object. No one has dared to touch it yet. She will be the first.

     7PM. Naked, painted, they begin to dance. Kate leads them, her mouth gaping and empty. Bernard follows, and then the old woman without a dog, and then the nun, the two police officers, the mother and her three young children, a long line of others than have come to the field over the course of the day. The brother and sister make up the tail of the procession, she still crying, he holding her hand.

     Dusk is falling. The light on their upturned faces has turned from gold to orange and pink. The light of the object has not changed.

     They dance in time to the humming, and Carmen watches them. She can feel herself growing soft, joining the ground. She can no longer tell where her stomach ends and the earth begins. 

     8PM. The nun collapses first, putting a halt to the dance as she falls into the dirt. Her body seems vague at its edges, blurring with the earth and the growing darkness. From her mouth comes a hiss of pain, and a word.

     “Transubstantiatio,” she whispers, and then nothing else. Kate kneels to touch her, and her hands slip into the softened flesh, leaving indents.

     One by one they fall, the old woman and the police officers, the mother and her children, the brother and sister. One by one they stop moving.

     9PM. Bernard is the last to fall. He feels only elation as the dirt kisses his skin, only joy as his body softens and grows shapeless. He gasps, just once, for air, and then stops moving.

     Words, he thinks, and then nothing else. Clouds have begun to gather overhead. It looks like rain.

     10PM. It is dark. Only one heart beats. Only Carmen remains. Her head is filled with its melodious hum, her teeth rattling with the joy of it.

     Now, she thinks, and reaches forward to touch.

     It does not feel the way she thought it would. The object is soft, not hard and unyielding like a marble. It gives slightly under her touch. Her fingers fuse to the surface, as though they are her tongue, the object a block of ice. If she tried to tug them free, she would find that they would not budge, but she does not try.

     Carmen smiles, closes her eyes. She can feel herself falling apart. She has never been so happy.

     11PM. The rain begins, pattering softly onto a field where nothing moves or breathes. The bodies are little more than soft mounds of something that used to be flesh. The object lies in the dirt, its hum slowing, softening. The little golden glimmers begin to fade, the fish no longer swimming in the dark river. The light fades. Its edges begin to dissolve, its shape softening until it, too, is part of the earth. The hum fades under the sound of the rain.

     12AM. Five miles away, the dog wakes up to a strange feeling in its chest. Struggling out of its kennel, it gasps for air in the darkness. The night presses down upon it, crushing the breath from its lungs. Its ears begin to bleed.