(By Hugh Blanton) On March 13, 1997 at approximately 8:30 PM, actor Kurt Russell was flying his private plane on approach to Phoenix when his son Oliver spotted an odd formation of lights in the distance above. There appeared to be four unblinking lights in a row moving together. “Pa, what is that?” he asked. Russell studied it for a few minutes and said, “I don’t know.” He reported its position and course to the air traffic control tower at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
They didn’t know what it was either.
* * *
Suzy Eynon’s new novella Terrestrial (Malarkey Books, May 2026), opens in a small town called Mountain Lake, Arizona where a teen girl, Daisy, is skipping class. She’s not hanging at the mall with friends, she’s not loitering around a liquor store trying to get someone old enough to buy beer for her—she’s hiding in the Saguaro Shade High girls’ restroom. This is in fact Daisy’s “superpower,” the ability to disappear. She does it on this day by squatting with her feet up on the toilet seat to keep prying eyes from noticing the stall is occupied. Daisy is pathologically shy and introverted—it’s not even a class she dislikes that she’s skipping, it’s her favorite (English): “her stomach churned at the thought of sitting through class behind closed doors and without windows, her classmates whispering about her clothes just loudly enough that she could hear their insults.” As she’s squatting there she hears the door open, the sound of a book slapping the floor or counter, and she holds her breath hoping they’ll leave. Minutes later they still haven’t left and Daisy decides she has to emerge from her hiding spot. There’s nobody there. Daisy looks around, checks the stalls. Nobody. On her way out she sees a note bubble-gummed to the door. Written in bright blue ink it says: do you believe we’re alone.
* * *
In March of 2026 US President Donald Trump ordered the release of federal files related to UFOs and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). It’s unclear exactly when the files will be released, but Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense intelligence during the Clinton and Bush administrations, says that the trove of documents is massive and there are even photos and videos, including clear satellite photos of craft above the earth that are obviously not man made. Mellon is not optimistic about the release though: “I have a feeling bureaucracy is going to react slowly and I don’t think they’re gonna put the best stuff out quickly, if they do at all.” In Neal deGrasse Tyson’s upcoming book Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Your First Alien Encounter (Simon & Schuster, May 2026), he writes, “In science, skepticism is foundational to our profession, so we uphold standards of evidence that some interpret as disinterest or even denial. Don’t take it personally, it’s how all objective truths have ever been established in this world.” Tyson doesn’t believe the upcoming document release is going to prove extraterrestrials have visited us, yet.
* * *
Daisy tries to compile a list in her journal of people who may have written the mysterious note. 1. Sister. 2. Secret Admirer. She does not write Alien. She puts it aside and then the next day the journal goes missing. She starts getting hangup calls. What exactly does the note even mean? “Did the note writer, whoever they were, mean alone as in, alone in the restroom? Alone in that room together? Did they mean to say we’re alone, or were they asking if they were alone? Who was we? Were they asking Daisy, or informing her? Do you believe we’re alone! Can you believe it?” As she’s finishing up class in Computer Lab one day she clicks on the notepad. There’s the usual prank notes students leave each other, “But then her eyes fell across the words I saw you in the restroom.” Daisy hasn’t told anybody about the note, but finally decides to tell her friend Anna. Anna dismisses it as a joke. Daisy starts thinking about how she could escape Mountain Lake if she needs to.
Daisy herself had always been a skeptic. There were stories of a UFO crash years ago in her hometown, maybe it was all true:
“She side-eyed those who believed in the supernatural or those who sought a guiding spirit or ideology, but she also didn’t feel it was outside of the version of reality to which she clung to discover that the town in which she was forced to come of age housed soil glittering with evidence of not-so-ancient alien carbon. The coincidences of life, like song lyrics as spoken messages from the radio or a connecting fiber between circumstances or people for whom there should be no connection, were evidence enough to Daisy that nothing that could be conceived was unconceivable.”
Daisy finally decides it’s time to escape Mountain Lake. She loads up her backpack and sneaks out of her home at night, walking along a road away from Mountain Lake out to the desert hills. She sees lights in the night sky up ahead, too close to the Earth to be stars: “The lights were high, unblinking, a staring row of eyes calling out to her among everything else which slept for the night…They were in a line, three—no, four—total dots of light.” A car approaches from behind her: “then pulled off several feet ahead, sliding its way into the dirt. Daisy watched, gathering her breath, as the car’s door opened and a man emerged.”
Originally from Arizona, Eynon now resides in Seattle. Arizona desert life provides a great canvas for Eynon’s power of description: “front porches marked by a metal wagon wheel or hung with strings of dried peppers or guarded by a cluster of painted pink wooden coyotes, posed mid-howl, wearing kerchiefs.” Ivy Grimes of Writing Thoughts asked Suzy Eynon in a February 2026 interview if she believed anything or anyone existing outside the terrestrial: “I think I do, yes. I want to believe! I think there are things that can’t be explained, that life is weird and there is an order to things I cannot grasp, and that there must be something out there which we simply can’t see or understand.”
Terrestrial
by Suzy Eynon, 90 pages
Malarkey Books, $15.00
TERRESTRIAL
by Suzy Eynon
In Terrestrial, Suzy Eynon’s fiction debut, seventeen-year-old Daisy wishes to escape the small desert town of Mountain Lake where she’s grown up for the “big city,” but the closest city is only suburban Phoenix. She finds a message at her high school and though she’s not certain she’s the intended recipient, she wants to find the sender in hopes of connection. Every message has a sender. Then she starts to see unexplained lights in the desert surrounding the housing subdivision where she lives. A chance encounter during a runaway attempt leaves her more confused about the boundary between real and imagined, seen and unseen, as she questions her assumptions about the town and her location on the physical and metaphorical outskirts of it. Daisy tries to convince others what she’s witnessed-in the sky and at school-in this novella inspired by the Phoenix Lights phenomena of the late 1990s. Terrestrial explores themes of isolation, communication, place, and the desert as both a home and a questionably inhabitable environment.
/Literary and General Fiction
Available in Kindle and Paperback
Hugh Blanton‘s latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
