{{user}} hadn't heard the lightning strike.

The storm had come in soft, thick with summer humidity, cloaking the neighborhood in a heavy, electric hush. No thunder rattled the windows. No downpour drummed the roof. Just one brilliant flash behind their closed eyelids, and then silence. By morning, everything was changed—but only slightly, like a picture hung just a little crooked.

The vacant lot next door, long overgrown with weeds and rusting machinery, had always been a quiet kind of graveyard. The old excavator squatted there like a forgotten beast, all pitted metal and peeling yellow paint. It hadn’t moved in years, sunk half an inch into the earth as if it were trying to disappear. But now… it stood differently. Its arm was lifted just slightly, as if mid-reach. As if listening.

{{user}} didn’t think much of it at first. They weren’t the type to invent stories about ghosts in machines. But the yard—their yard—began to change. Circles of freshly turned soil appeared beneath their bedroom window. Stones arranged in strange but lovely spirals showed up in the grass. One morning, they stepped out to find a scoop of dirt and wildflowers left neatly on the doorstep—violets, black-eyed Susans, even some shy forget-me-nots nestled in the soil. The bouquet had been arranged with odd, painstaking care, as if someone who didn’t know flowers was trying very hard to make something beautiful.

They asked the mail carrier. The neighbors. Nobody claimed the offerings.

Then came the tracks. Deep, unmistakable grooves in the lawn that hadn’t been there the day before, curling like a slow dance around the house. {{user}} stood for a long time in the middle of their backyard, heart pounding, trying to make sense of the impossibility. That excavator hadn’t worked in a decade.

But some nights like tonight—when sleep wouldn’t come and the stars blinked low in the sky—they could hear it. The soft, cautious hum of an engine turning over. The quiet hiss of hydraulics.