It was almost midnight when I glanced out the window. I couldn�t believe my eyes. They were walking straight across my front yard. At first I thought that a party somewhere down the road must have gotten out of hand and teenagers were streaking. But they weren�t running. They were walking confidently through my front yard completely naked.
I didn�t know what they were� they were tall, too tall, most looked well over seven feet, and slender. One passed only feet away from my window and I ducked back behind the curtain. I got a good look. It was a she and she had long hair down past her waist, not quite to her knees; her face was odd as if it should have been brighter somehow. It took me a few minuets longer to realize that the people outside my window were shades of gray, remember it was night, and things look that way anyway in the night. These people were honestly gray.
I know I probably shouldn�t have done what I did next, but it�s not everyday you see a heard of seven foot tall, naked, gray people walking across your front yard, and I couldn�t just dismiss them as a figment of my imagination. Maybe it was almost midnight and maybe I was a little sleepy and maybe there was something wrong with the glass of water I drunk about an hour ago, and that�s an awful lot of maybes but there were more gray people than maybes so I slipped on some shoes and walked out my back door.
Carefully I slipped around to the front yard, moving down the row of houses keeping to the suburb-style bushes everyone insisted on planting in front of their houses. There were more gray people milling about now, but they all seemed headed in the same direction. Every now and then one would stop stare down at the ground like it saw something and bend down to poke at the grass. I wasn�t sure what they were finding, but they would pick something up and hold it in their hands and keep walking the way they were going.
One woman stopped in front of a brick house, she knelt down on her knees and crouched down to look at a space on the house about two feet from the ground. I was close to her � hiding behind a bush because I couldn�t move on with her right in front of me. Her finger nails scratched at the mortar frantically as if she was trying to dig the brick out of the wall, but it wouldn�t come out. She began to cry, and I didn�t know whether she had scraped her hands on the bricks or she was angry because the brick wouldn�t come out. Finally she stood back up and looked down with sorrow in her face at the brick before walking on.
I crawled to the brick she had been scratching at and looked at the wall, there were gouges in the mortar but I had looked at her fingers and they were short and stubby and must not have been able to reach far enough to pry out the brick. Her stubby fingers hadn�t matched her tall form, but she was also a disturbing shade of gray and I didn�t think I had any reason to protest the illogicality of anything to do with this whole situation so I just kept moving, following the gray people.
Up ahead I saw them all began to stop in front of the edge of the road, one at a time they hesitantly crossed. I didn�t know why they looked so fearful; even if a car was to come along they would have ample warning: the rode stretched straight in either direction for quite a distance. But one at a time they slowly crossed. A man stopped almost at the other side and bent down pounding on the road with his fists and scratching with his fingers. Apparently he had better luck than the woman had had with the brick because he picked something up from the road and continued walking across.