Everyone Moved to Atlantis

February 17, 2018May 17, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

Alli decided to walk through the park, with the statue of Farragut on his horse, although she remained afraid of bums. The tiny local square stood still, peaceful under the roiling orange clouds. No bums were asleep on the benches or under little tents of newspapers in the grass. As Alli passed Farragut on his prancing, green copper horse, a spear of lightning rent the sky from east to west. Then the bolt of lightning winked out; it was dark and there was nothing.

The rain fell on Alli’s face. She stopped looking upward and continued through the square toward the dry cleaners with its winking sign on 6^th Street.

Alli descended the dim street, with rainwater rushing along the sidewalk. The leaves swirled in little whirlpools over the gutters. She passed through the gate, past the trash cans and the garden, to her door. Entering the hallway, she mounted the steps to her flat. Alli entered her apartment, flicking on the lights to the kitchenette.

The rain ran down in rivulets splayed against the cold bay window of the breakfast nook. The apartment upstairs had a balcony that let down a waterfall.

Eventually, Alli got up, turned off the TV and walked across the carpet toward the bathroom, to brush her teeth and shower before going to bed.

She lay down under the cold covers. The room was dark, the apartment outside the bedroom door darker still. A peal of thunder grumbled in the distance. She shut her eyelids and fell asleep. The lightning cut the sky again and the thunder answered. Rain poured down.

***

Æon walked through the Temple of the Sky. Grey marble columns rose up along the main path through the edifice, and other carpeted halls branched off, full of fountains and shafts of light coming from small windows on the upper levels. She passed a pool made of obsidian, filled by a jet of water cascading down from the ceiling.

The sound of falling water mingled with the distant sounds of the city below, which floated up the white, dusty hill covered in tufts of dark green grass. The city fanned out from all sides of the temple – avatars rushed about their daily lives below. A white tree, eighty feet tall and with viridian leaves on its branches, stood in the east. At night, the world tree would glow blue with concentrated avatar energy.

PEACE AND SERENITY ARE GRANTED TO THE AVA’TARA, THE FIRST ASCENDED NATION

The inscriptions lay underneath a relief of white stone, which depicted a naked human woman reclining along the lower left corner, holding a fiery sword aloft by the middle of the blade. Æon knew she was the first Sky Avatar.

Looming above her was a crowd of men and women, also naked, clambering over each other to get at the shining sword. Their faces were bestial and ugly, frozen in grimaces, howls and scowls. They were the first anti-avatars.

Around the woman’s head, on the relief, was a circle of gold, the halo of an avatar. Æon shook her head and thought Time to get on with it.

Æon proceeded up the stone steps of the dais to her seat. On its high base, facing the steps, carved in avatar hieroglyphics read,

PEOPLE OF THE SKY

PEOPLE OF THE WINDS

PEOPLE OF THE WATERS

FROM THE DESERT OF ICE

The hum of avatars, in white robes, conversing on the temple patio, came in through the entrance way. The city chattered below.

While her avatar body sat in the Temple of the Sky, Æon opened her eyes in her Inner Space. All avatars and anti-avatars have an Inner Space, but this Inner Space was special. The Inner Space of the Sky Avatar connected her to the second spiritual world, where only she, in her role as the Iridescent One, could reset the universe.

Only her Inner Space housed an intricate clock, of concentric, spinning rings made of red light. Each of the red rings measured the milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, years, centuries, and light-years until the next time the universe would reboot.

But Æon was not in her Inner Space to restart the universe. Æon sat at the desk and opened the computer. She keyed in the code for Alli’s Headspace using the numerical signature of the energy of Alli’s aura.

Alli was dreaming that she stood in darkness, wearing ancient white robes. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw she was in a desert. Pale light poked over the mountains on the horizon. In front of her, someone was lying face down on the ground. The figure was covered in rough-looking blankets and Alli assumed he or she was sleeping.

The bundle glowed and a woman shining with blue light stood up from the ground. She grew larger as she got to her feet until she was ten times as tall as Alli and her head scraped the black, cloudy sky. Her blue glow lit up the desert: the colossal human figure was on fire – blue flames leapt from her clothes and her hair into the sky, but she did not burn – it was an aura.

The figure looked down at Alli. The gold in her eyes shimmered and swam like oil rainbows on puddles. The figure knelt on one knee, to get a better look at her quarry. Alli looked back at the figure as those gold-flecked eyes and the blue face came closer and the fiery head came down from the clouds. Alli backed away terrified. She tripped over a rock and fell on the ground.

“Do you know who I am?” the woman asked.

“Æon,” Alli said. She trembled.

“Do you know why I am here?” Æon asked.

“To tell me that I am an avatar?” Alli said. And she shook even more.

“No,” Æon said.

Alli blanched; her skin turned almost gray.

“No, I am here to tell you that you are the next Sky Avatar,” Æon said.

Alli grew even paler and then the dream, or rather, the Headspace communication, ended.

Inside her Inner Space, Æon closed the laptop.

Music

コンシャスTHOUGHTS

CVLTVR∑

Gravitational Sounds

February 8, 2018April 6, 2018 ~ Piece, of the Sky

Gym Leader Agatha

Alli walked barefoot by the sea. The sand was cold in the morning air. The waves were rolling back and forth, crossing oceans to get here. Alli turned and faced the east; the sun looked like it was rising out of the water. The golden rays hit the rocks, the forgotten shrubbery, shrewn around, and the window panes of the beach house behind her.

Constant undulations. Water that came halfway across the world, to this shore, hidden in some corner of the Keys, a silent island chain. Alli watched a wave bring in some limp plants.

Sitting down on the beach, Alli picked up handfuls of sand and let them run through her fingers.

“What would you have me do?!” Alli had yelled, months ago.

“Offer me a future!” Jan had yelled back, the night they had broken up.

And Alli had moved up north with Dallas, the debonair esper of Pennsylvania, self-assured, confident, and devastatingly beautiful.

“I would have given the world for you,” Alli had said.

“But you didn’t,” Jan had replied.

“You didn’t, and you won’t,” the words resonated from that time, ping ponging off old memories. The perennial swirl of New York and Florida.

“You don’t have to give up on me,” Alli had said, lying on the couch. Dallas held a rag full of ice up to her forehead.

“That’s the fever talking,” Dallas had responded. Alli had been working through some bug she had caught in Melbourne. “It must have been the crayfish in your bibimbap,” Dallas said.

They had both gone to several restaurants, including the offending Asian fusion joint. Dallas had said she was going to look at various Okinawan karate dojos, to see if she could buy one. But the premise had been running a little thin, even then. As Alli would soon see, Melbourne was only a foreshadowing.

“I want to be there for you,” Alli had mumbled from the couch. Dallas had dabbed away some sweat with a handkerchief, “You’re here for me, right now.”

The New York loft was receding from view. “Tell me I am right for you,” Alli had said, hovering in the darkness.

The spring buds were falling to the earth and the trees were unfurling their newborn leaves. “You’re not giving yourself any room to maneuver,” Nealy had said.

They were sitting in the park during the afternoon; the sun was gaining strength and beating down on them and the other chess players.

“I had a bad start,” Alli laughed.

“Yes, that was a horrible opening,” Nealy had said, “What were you thinking moving your knight way over there?”

“I was going to bring it in and position it in between your queen and your bishop. A knight fork.”

“An ambitious plan, in the best of times,” Nealy sighed, taking another one of Ally’s pawns, “Checkmate.”

“Tell me I am the one for you,” Alli had said, standing in between worlds.

“If I write you out of the will, what will you feel about that?” Jan had asked, turning around in her chair.

“Nothing,” Alli had sneered. When she left, she left for good, closing the screen door, walking out into the night, the endless crashing of waves and the peerless moon.

On the beach, in the increasingly hot morning, Alli let another handful of sand run through her fingers. “Are you going to do that all day?” a voice behind her said.

Alli spun around, still sitting on the surf; Nealy stood behind her, surrounded by the tall beach grass, “Are you going to come in for some crêpes, or what?”

Somewhere in the bottomless pit of space, echoed a thought, reaching back across time, splitting into pieces, stretching the distance traveled, in a second, by a photon careening at the speed of light: “Tell me I’m your one and only.”

not afraid of the darkness