The Spiral Effect

A spiral in the sky. So often we humans look to the firmament of the heavens and find shapes, and creatures, and fantasies in the clouds. But I never thought I would actually see a spiral, gleaming dark heavy metal, so real it couldn't be anything but a dream.

We all wondered what it was. I think everyone had the thought at some point that it must be some kind of illusion, like wanderers see in the desert, some collective madness, some group hallucination.

By the second day, there were already picketers and news stations protesting the mind control drugs in the water. The third day Atlanta burned. Martial law was brought to Oakland on the fifth day. There were riots in Greece—but then again, there are always riots in Greece.

Denver, the city under the spiral, interestingly enough, didn't riot. They were the ones who would have tasted the taint in the water more than anyone. After all, when they walked from their houses it was right above them—thousands of shimmering conjoined panels of black gold spiraling in the sky, from horizon to horizon. You may wonder: how did they know it was black gold if it was just a black metal seen from a great distance? You could feel it. We all could—the Denverites.

While the rest of the world ooed and awed, life continued as usual for us. Of course, there was a boom in the chiropractic industry from office workers who developed back problems craning their necks to look out windows, and whiplash patients—victims of traffic accidents caused by eyes glued to the sky. While many hid beneath their roofs and avoided actions such as jumping or tossing their keys onto the counter, many of us sought the outdoors where we could see it. After work, the parks and streets were filled with pickup games of basketball, Frisby, and soccer—though baseball was banned.

We dreamed of basketballs that never dropped into baskets, instead flying to the next neighborhood, where they would disappear atop houses and apartment buildings. We dreamed of cats getting stuck in the air instead of trees. Under the spiral, the reduced and ever-fluctuating gravity was too surreal to doubt. Sometimes when something is too far from reality you know it is beyond your imagination. To us, it was never anything but real.

Then, on day seventeen, a pyramid descended from the great spiral. It pushed air and dust out of its way and landed on an empty patch of land in the foothills outside the city. The dust never touched Denver. Instead, it drifted above, turning the sunlight orange and brown for a week. It oozed through the air like molasses to the outskirts. A perfect circle of dust and airborne debris.

The next day, my neighbors Frank and Henrietta Boykin packed their three children, sleeping bags, changes of clothes, and a box of “earth keepsakes” into their minivan. The littlest one, Sophia, was crying, and Henrietta picked her up, rocking her and saying, “It’s all right little dove. By the time you’re eighteen, you won’t even remember it here. You’ll be so happy on our new planet.” Sophia cried even harder, clutching the heart-shaped locket that hung around her mother’s neck, and her words were indistinguishable through her tears as Henrietta strapped her in the back seat between her sister and brother. The Boykins waved and blew kisses as they drove off to join the trickling stream of cars that led to the pyramid.

By day twenty, fear and doubt had turned to acceptance, and curious souls from the world around lined up on roads and fields outside the circle of dust. When they tried to cross the line, gravity reversed and they found themselves falling up, and away from the city, landing on a crowd of impatient pilgrims.

On day twenty-one the Spiral was gone.

We realized it was all a dream. Just some societal fugue state. Newscasters and famous philosophers, physicists and psychologists, all explained the event as a metaphysical co-cognitive manifestation of collective trauma and repressed imagination, something to do with quarks and relativity and solar flares. It was aptly named The Spiral Effect. Yes, it was indeed all a collective dream. It opened up many new branches of study and inquiry in scientific research.

Nobody mentioned the emaciated cats’ bodies peppering the ground, or the basketballs that were still stuck on roofs, or the giant gleaming pyramid that towered over the mountains. Nobody mentioned the Boykins.