When she heard the boom, Millie set aside her knitting. Through rain cascading down the dark living room window, she could see flames reaching up above the trees. The fire had to be extraordinarily hot to burn in this storm. These crashes were becoming more common and usually there were no survivors.

She flicked light switches and poked buttons on her phone, more to rule out any possibility of outside help than because she thought the power or connectivity would work. The washed-out bridge at the end of her driveway meant she couldn’t drive for help. For a moment she considered picking up her knitting and waiting until the morning to visit the crash site. With her husband gone for two years, she was alone in her forest. Her old dog lifted his great brown head from the worn rug in front of the wood stove. He whined at her, but didn’t lumber to his feet; his old joints were arthritic. She used to rely on him to jump up barking to warn her of strangers coming down her long driveway into the forest, but he was past that.

“I guess it’ll have to be me then,” she told herself sternly. “I can’t decently leave anyone out in this storm.”

She moved stiffly to the cold mud room and pulled on her boots and raincoat. She filled her pockets with candy and grabbed her big flashlight.

The storm pushed needles of rain into her face and her feet slipped across dark flows of mud. The trees moaned and reached in the wind and she couldn’t hear anything above them. The tree-topping flames had died down, but she could see a glow above the field by the river. She didn’t hurry; she wouldn’t be able to help anyone if she fell and broke her own leg.

She came out of the forest and saw a dozen large and small figures silhouetted by the flickering orange glow.

She waved and called, “Hello! Do you need help?”

The figures turned towards her, and she pulled down her rain hood and angled her flashlight upwards to cast a glow onto her own face to show that she was just an old woman. She sensed, rather than saw, the figures tense and move closer together.

She couldn’t tell if they understood, but she kept up a low stream of comforting nonsense as she moved towards them, as if to calm a nervous animal. “It’s OK. I live up the hill. You can come in out of the rain. Here, I have some candy.”

She held out jellybeans on her palm. A tall figure stepped forward and took the sticky, wet candy. He (or she, Millie couldn’t tell) sniffed it, and handed it to the small figures who stuffed it into their mouths.

Close up, Millie could see that some of them were shivering, and they had scrapes and cuts showing glistening blood through rips in ragged clothing. The rain poured down on them. Millie gestured back towards her house, not sure if they would understand. But when she turned to walk back up the hill, the group stumbled after her, some carrying others.

Inside the house, the huge dog rose with a growl. “Settle down, Angus,” Millie said and the beast came over and sniffed the strangers. He waved his stump of a tail and lay down at their feet.

Millie gestured to the couch and pushed more logs into the burnt-down fire. She gathered mounds of blankets from the hallway closet. She stretched out a faded blue blanket decorated with bright cartoon trucks and wrapped it around one of the smaller figures huddled into himself in the corner of the couch. She thought he smiled at her with his eyes and she remembered wrapping the same blanket around her small son decades ago.

She bustled into the kitchen and grabbed crackers and cereal and nuts; anything that didn’t need to be cooked. She couldn’t imagine what the strangers ate. She remembered a pan of left-over soup; it would be all right; the fridge had only been dead a few hours. She put it on top of the wood stove to warm. The strangers were still huddled together so she moved over her knitting and spread the food out across the coffee table. They came closer and talked among themselves, and their language sounded to Millie like the twittering of birds.

She sat on an armchair and watched as they consumed all the food she had put out; they must be starving. She went back to her pantry and opened cans of pineapple and tuna; they ate everything, except the Spam, which they wouldn’t touch.

When nearly all the food was gone, the small figure wrapped in the truck blanket came over and leant against Millie’s legs. His huge dark eyes looked into hers. She picked him up and sat him on her lap and she had an image of her own son, now over six feet tall. The small stranger snuggled against her chest and put one of his seven fingers in his mouth under his beak. Millie smiled and stroked his grey cheek, his skin slightly sand-papery, like a cat’s tongue. Two sets of eyelids fluttered down over his huge round eyes. “Aren’t you a sweet little one?” she said.

His stranded and lost alien family spread out their arms and bowed their heads at Millie in a simultaneous gesture. They twittered in their own language. Millie had no hope of understanding the words, but she felt their gratitude and warm approval. The child put his small head on her shoulder, sighed and went to sleep.