Not white like the skin colour. Snow white.
It was 1:52 in the morning when the phone rang at home. He had already texted that he was on his way back from work, so a call meant something was wrong. On the line there was silence, then a shaky question: could he be heard? He said he didn't know what had just happened, that he'd seen something, and that he was about to lose signal. Would his spouse please be waiting for him?
His spouse stood at the front door watching for headlights down their long driveway. He came in looking stunned.
On his drive he takes an old one-lane road that links two bigger roads and crosses some abandoned railway tracks. Nobody lives out there. It was raining. Standing by the tracks were three very tall figures, one of them a woman. They were white, he said, but not white like skin colour. Snow white. The woman was holding something that his brain could only compare to a trash bag with a light inside it. He knew that wasn't what it was. They noticed him at the same moment he noticed them, and a wave of unease came over him. He just needed to get out of there. Whatever they were, he said, they weren't human.
While his dinner was reheating, his spouse thought of the stories about the so-called Tall Whites and looked up some pictures. He scrolled until he stopped on one: yes, that's close.
The next morning they drove back. Beside the road, right by the tracks, was a black scorch mark on the ground, as if something had burned there. It had been raining the night before, while he was driving past, and they live way out past the edge of a very small town. It didn't look like anyone had built a campfire there.
As they walked back to the car, an old man in a beat-up Ford pulled up and asked what they were up to. They said they were just looking at something. He got out, chatted a bit, and then asked out of nowhere: did they believe in aliens? The couple looked at each other and said yes. He told them he had lived over that way his whole life, and that he and his late wife had seen plenty of strange things out there. The scorch mark, he said, was from them.
He invited them back to his farmhouse, built by his grandparents in the 1800s, and from a little shed he brought out five old Polaroids his father had taken. Every one showed a classic flying saucer. He said there were more in the house somewhere.
It may have been the start of a new friendship. But neither of them is sure what he really saw out by the tracks.