The aliens were delicate, spindly things, bent at odd angles, twisted geometric absurdities hobbling about like some sort of origami gone horribly wrong. They came down in a ship with walls as thin as they were, shimmering in an ever-changing assortment of colors, bright and flashy in comparison to the occupants, who seemed to have a different shade of grey across every plane of their body. They were powerful, though - one pointed, and the barn went up, consumed by strange, blue-green flames, and another pointed when my cousin Jeb got too close, a bright beam of something cleanly severing and cauterizing his left arm at the shoulder. From my hiding place in the tool shed, I watched as they used their beams to butcher half our cows (and I mean really butcher them, like seasoned slaughterhouse workers), and chase the chickens back and forth across their pen with the terrible weapons. They were so engrossed that they didn’t even notice the clouds swelling up across the sky, although they started at the first crack of thunder. The rain came next, buckets and buckets of it, raining down on the corrugated metal roof in a frenzied drumbeat. And I watched as the aliens, caught unawares by the sudden aerial assault, shuddered and stumbled around as each droplet left a miniature crater, quickly soaking through whatever they were made up of. The ship sagged, collapsing in on itself like a wilting flower, even as the aliens broke for it. They stumbled more slowly, tumbling along as their extremities turned to mush, some of them folding inwards on themselves as their torsos gave way. Soon, they were beaten into the mud by the deluge, ship and all, a sodden, biodegradable mess. By the time the storm finally let up, an hour later, and I dared to venture back outside, the figures were gone, completely intermingled with a field of mud. But the barn was still burnt (a freak lightning strike during the storm, we said), the cows were still dead (we cleaned them up and took them to the local butcher, and no one’s the wiser), the chickens didn’t lay for the next three months out of jittery nerves, and Jeb still toils on minus an arm (which he claims was the victim of a freak thresher accident). It’s easier just to leave things the way they are, keeping it all in the family, and resting easy at night knowing that the biggest interstellar threat that anyone has ever seen still isn’t a match for good ole’ Mother Nature.