Penumbra - Chapter 4

After the world stopped shaking and the grout in the floor tiles coalesced into straight lines again, I struggled to my feet. A darting speck of movement caught my eye; a scorpion skittered under the toe-kick by the kitchen sink. The back door had blown open when the swamp cooler kicked on and pressurized the house. Groaning, I stepped out into the night, not bothering to close the door behind me.

Above, the sky was shedding. That’s the most accurate way I could describe it. I rubbed my eyes, attempting to smother the disbelief. But there it was when I opened them again: the sky was a pristine umber sheet studded with unfamiliar white jewels; but it had scales of luminescent contrast rippling through the sea of stars. It looked like the night air was glittering with fallout from an impact in the heavens, and the site of the calamity was fracturing, its edges white-hot and sizzling outward like a smoldering sheet of inky-black paper atop a slowly advancing flame. The moon glared down in relieving familiarity, but it was flanked by a smaller, dark neighbor. Like a stellar child in its “new moon” phase, completely dark but for its haunting silhouette.

Alongside our moon and its unfamiliar sibling, a new cloud of turquoise and copper haze stretched across a quarter of the sky. It was taken right out of a NASA art gallery, a sprawling nexus of hauntingly saturated clouds, a nebula from a distant place in the cosmos, parked right by our humble Earth. The alarming calamity of flaking, broken sky was seated within the cloud, its apparent damage spreading outward at an imperceptibly slow pace.

A second moon, some kind of nebula cloud, wrong constellations, and now it looked like the something had shattered the sky? I mused. My head ached with the strain of digesting these new impossibilities. The incoherence of the astral had certainly dampened the incredible events I had witnessed in the house. But even those had come back around to add to the rushing ache in my head.

As I contemplated the roof of the world, the dry and dark dirt of the desert, blown across my sandalled feet, woke me and took me back to the world within my reach. Behind me, the intro to Judge Judy boomed in the living room, the cool, damp air of the swamp cooler gushed from the open door, quenching itself meaninglessly on the quailing desert heat. It cooled my back and reminded me of home, so close at hand. Of half a Whisky River burger from Red Robin, still in the fridge. Jim wasn’t around anymore to beat me senseless for eating his food. He was a little white dog of some sort, hopefully scampering off far from here. I grimaced bitterly at my acceptance of the supernatural. The world out here was falling to pieces. The air behind me was cool, I could eat. I could watch Judy and her bailiff dispense no-nonsense justice and pretend the sky hadn’t suddenly changed its mind about being consistent and logical. That phosphorescent specters weren’t haunting my steps and giving me episodic seizures and trying to tear my brain out through my nose.

At the thought of turning back, the pressure in my head lessened, too immediately to be my imagination. The cool invite of home was a balm to my discomfort, well-aligned with the cryptic warning the smoky figure had given me: Struggle not your fate and the burden shall be light. But should you instead cling to senseless purpose, you will suffer… It would be best, I thought, if I just tried to sleep this off. Surely, I would wake up and the world would be right. Mom would be asleep on the couch. Jim would be hacking up his morning cigarette.

A flash of cobalt blue in the shrouded brush on the other side of Jim’s truck wrestled my attention from the tempting thought. Beyond, lying low in the sagebrush, a white, smoke-bodied feline was regarding me. Alongside, a swirling mist converged into a second and a third, smaller than the first two. A small family of what could be cougars or bobcats, comprised of the same spirit-smoke I had seen so much of. The first one opened its formless mouth and called without sound, summoning tears from my eyes as the ache returned.

The spirits dissolved into the quiet night and I was reminded of a salient fact: If my home was lost in time, or space, or whatever it was before I came, and If I absorbed whatever pain and distemper was causing this catastrophe, albeit excruciatingly, could it happen elsewhere? Who else was lost to the savage sea hanging overhead? Where else did the insects not sound and the coyotes not howl? Was the icy stasis that had fallen over my home plaguing other families in theirs?

The throbbing in my head made sure I was reminded of the cool air behind me. Home. Comfort. Safety. Blissful ignorance and a soft pillow. The ground underneath my feet crunched and my shadow bounced off into the trees as the light from the open door grew smaller behind me, and I stepped into the thick sagebrush. A wisp of white smoke left a trail for me to follow east, towards town. Home grew smaller at my back as fresh pain clawed at my head. I kicked a piece of mesquite into the dark and trudged on; the white breath of spirit and the silent moon were my only light as the bright promise of home finally winked out.