A Bright House

The disappearance of a police officer is deeply disconcerting to the uniform clad rank and file, for whom the sliding scale of life value holds a higher notch with regards to brother and sister law enforcers; us versus them mentality that cannot be helped and is even understandable at times of high stress. To stand in a spot that looks much like any other spot in a vast rural patch of farmland and heavy forest, and yet to know that a good man and fellow officer lived his last earthly moments here... this alone is hard enough to process.

Then the mystery is exacerbated when a young man vanishes in this same location, leaving behind a camera and its hopeful telltale in exposed film. To say there is anticipation when the roll of film is developed is to utter a gross understatement. The lead investigating officer, one employed by the Ontario Provincial Police force, is present when the frames are converted from one type of information to another, and the mystery deepens instantly. There is a stunned silence at first in the room as the final four images are viewed.

“What the hell is this?”

Months before any opening of minds on the investigating team, into obscure fantastical controversial theory that postulates electromagnetic anomaly as a directly influential force upon the space-time continuum, these are visual impacts that almost injure the traditionalist problem solving mind. These are professionals who employ rigid exacting procedures to get to the root of truth. They begin with a wide pool of information and inexorably reduce its size until the solution can no longer hide... but this? The man who scrapes his chair back to stand, hunched over the table, stares and grinds his molars.

There are three frames near the end of the roll that would defy almost any rationalist’s explanation; ground tilted akimbo and lens blurred details unable to conceal that which is visible in the form of pale lower extremities. Thin gossamer legs in movement, from the knees to tiny humanoid feet, but opaque and diffused to a point of unsure visual perspective. These are suggested images rather than ironclad proofs. With a frustrated exhale, the investigator’s eyes rove the maddening blur for definitives, and then he stalls on the last photograph. Here is where the heart begins to kick at its chest cavity.

“Christ. Jesus.” he whispers to the other person there, who moves in for a closer look. “What are we supposed to do with this?” The camera had been adjusted to a horizontal viewpoint. It aimed toward the young man’s face but from the collar up, nothing but a forest floor’s organic litter visible through a vaguely skull shaped mist.

One golden lit afternoon on the prairie, he was asked “Who are you right now?”

It gave him pause and he ceased his youthful exuberance through movement, turning to look at his beautiful mother two steps down on the front veranda. Her hair was long and flowing in those days, always seeming to halo her face, to accent her expressive eyes. His ten year old gaze detected the flinty suspicion that he had grown increasingly aware of at times when she looked at him. Unsettling, it was, though he loved her so much and wanted to better know her. As was his easy habit, he answered her honestly: “I was a thunderbird” in explanation of his freewheeling arms wide dance of circular abandon in the grass of their front yard.

This was the childhood home. A solidly built house on vast pungent acreage with a large barn, a silo, miles of fence, two long rows of wind breaking trees, but no forest. This land was of horizon and sky confluence. The planet expressed itself forward through the soils, reaching for sunshine, drinking of clouds, swaying to gentle winds one day and braced against howling sheets another. At ten, Ray was not yet fully aware of his developing differences.

He adored his mother, looked up to his father who worked the fields and kept mostly within his own head at the dinner table. At ten, Ray knew that he was unusual but he kept it under wraps with the innocent intuition of an unfiltered soul on the grow. He’d already been given insights into his mother’s psyche. Through visions that revealed her as she could never have guessed to be visible; sudden crying. Passionate bouts of disconnect with the walls around her, even during good days where family and home and hearth were enough to assuage her unquiet heart, until it spoke its ancient foreign language unbidden, no warning.

“How do you know about a thunderbird?” she asked, stepping down off the porch stairs.

At ten, Ray wasn’t sure if he had dreamed it or it was a distant memory in a much younger boy’s brain. At the time he answered honestly that he had dreamed of it; a massive jagged wingspan in shadow that crossed sideways over the dirt between house and barn, then stopped within the outline of his much smaller one to circle counter clockwise in ever growing form until he looked up to see it descending in a dive of backlit sun. He didn’t recall waking from this dream, however. Later in life, after much learning, growing, loss, it would carry the ring of truth for Ray that something very real had taken place during his pre-school years. Something not spoken of that fed those fleeting sparks of concern in his mother’s eyes.

“But how do you know it is called a thunderbird?” she pressed.

Before he could answer, and he truly wanted to, Jenny’s alarm clock sounded.

In the moments where his astral tether maintained its connection, even with the rapidly increasing awareness of a room and bed not familiar to him, Ray went to the memory of that first year after the death of his mother. The un year. The wicked absolute sensation of terrifying pinwheeling unknown. Un. Un. Un-answerables. There were no explosions in his coping. His emotional detonations were tiny incremental loosenings that didn’t involve substance abuse, self -destructive action or want; they were inevitably powerful and this was when Ray completely gave himself up to the will of what would unfold.

He knew there was a sentience that glued every living thing together. He knew it from a young age and its wallop increased even as did its secrecy. So be. So be became un be. What an abstract and wasteful event, his mom’s exit. Her failure to communicate that which drove her retreat, a glaring and justified pain that cut diamond hard into Ray’s heart. And with that pain, the bitterest unsweet blame of self. Had he tried harder. Had he been more able to apply his ability to “see” when it was most called upon... that first year of umbilical severance, in its shocking completeness or finality when perceived through his younger tear steeped eyes, had been his watershed.

So he followed the truest of his compelled messages. They usually manifested as vivid dreams. Hyper real. Stick with him all the livelong day, dreams. He would go to bed longing to hear from her. His conscious mind would summon with an urgency bordering on insanity, but no dream would bring her to him, him to her. So he followed the truest of his other signs, self guided and psychically interpreted during long afternoons of astral revisitation, from every possible angle of view. There came a series of visitations back through time. Back to the dream he had just experienced in Jenny’s bed.

Precisely echoed detail, so familiar as to be the back of his runic inked hands; another dream guidance followed to the letter... “growth”. These returning, looping, mocking dreams kept bringing Ray to the afternoon of his mother’s question “But how do you know it is called a thunderbird?” Before even wanting to research the legend, the symbolism (which he had heard of but only superficially), Ray followed the guidance and had the large feather etched into his back at a dingy downtown Regina parlor.

No hesitance or ensuing regret. It was a blind reaching, perhaps in the belief that it would take the dreams away. And for a time, it did. The recollected revisited day of mom’s concern as her boy wheeled about the yard in mimicry of something he knew about without knowing why. He didn’t have that dream again. Years and years later, in a woman’s bed in a city not of his heart, it returned in the manner of impeccable timing and juxtaposition that only a masterful orchestrator like the Universe could pull off.

The aberration energy dances like a flame. It is connected solidly to its place but ironically exists free of three dimensional rules. Without the influence of countless interwoven energies that synergy and unknowable detail can and will provide suddenly and only under correct conditions, these places of vanishment would be as harmless as the land around them. That two individuals simply disappeared from their earthly domain, or at least the view of those still stuck there, would pose a challenge to the most blown open of minds.

That a dog was taken away in the clutches of something which should not exist according to verifiable methods of proof, then mysteriously returned to its family in an altered state, would become little more than a bizarre side note in a rural landscape populated by hard working pragmatic people. The adding up, however, took on its own inertia. It amplified itself with each enquiring human mind. The investigating officers who trod upon the site of these events were not equipped with the advantages of lateral thinking. They were bulls eye shooters following investigatory protocol and a little of their own hunch work. They didn’t stand a chance. Not even the ones who felt sickly unsettled emotionally and physiologically when walking through those woods. It came down to something that Ray Townes would one day utter in a semi-trance state.

“A B negative.”