An excellent story with some lovely touches. How about this for a sentence in the opening paragraph to introduce the ‘visitor’ to Earth : “It has existed forever, in one form or another: it is vague, malleable, even diffuse; a pilgrim by nature, a traveler by birth”.
It ends up in a cornfield in rural America, both it and it’s ship subsumed into the circle of charred Earth left from the impact. As it fades, the creature reaches out to the living creatures around it. It is in pain, lost and suffering. And whilst it has little impact on the local menfolk, three females have the empathy, and the shared pain, loss and suffering to attain some level of contact. For two of them, it has fatal consequences, for a third it gives her the insight and the wherewithal to leave the tight-knit community and head out somewhere, anywhere, with the life she has been carrying in her belly bearing a trace of the visitor.
Powerful and impressive, the constrained lives of the three woman coming across beautifully.