A Bright House

Enoch who went missing. Ambrose Bierce accounts of fields that swallow people.

Ezekiel’s vision of whirlwinds within whirlwinds. Elijah, taken by a fiery funnel. For they who would scoff in the 1880s at Bierce, or the scientific minded who would only repeat “prove it”, no matter the alarming statistics in support of the suddenly vanished... time would unwind and knowledge would accrue. Vortices, inextricably linked with these missing persons. Science and its ruthlessly limited but necessary proving ground, at last seeming to understand that all matter is locked in a swirling or spiraling motion; that is, vortex kinesis.

From the greatest galaxies through the reductionist layers of solar systems and their bodies, to the smallest atoms, all things rotate upon an axis, revolve around a core.

When examining the characteristics of all known atoms and expanding that into matter itself, the difference between all matter must be the electromagnetic energy created by the different number of these charged particles, not in the basic ingredients of individual particles. Nitrogen and Oxygen, for example, are vastly different gases; not because Nitrogen has 7 protons and 7 electrons compared to Oxygen’s 8 of each, but due to the different amount of electromagnetic energy that one proton and one electron make to change the substance. The difference lies not in the makeup of particles, but in the space between the particles in orbit (electrons) and the nucleus (with protons)... that space is tantamount to the substance of everything. It is electromagnetic energy. It is “reality”.

It is the atom. Electromagnetism is essentially the substance of all structure; a space that equals energy.

As Will Pritchard regains consciousness, however briefly, he does not know that the most complex molecule known to man is the red blood cell. As his temples burn with a piercing fire that arcs into his eyeballs, Pritchard has never heard of the Hutchison Effect. His teary eyes find only snow and vomit. His ears are flooded with the sound of a thousand sea shells. He begins to crawl forward and is approaching the trees rather than regaining his feet; the tote bag remains behind. This soon to be forcibly retired constable, this being named Will by a loving father who was himself an RCMP cop, is composed of the stuff of his universe. He is pain in motion; a disoriented epidermis wrapped body of thirty trillion red blood cells but nonetheless composed mainly of space between cells, electromagnetically defined and driven, now on hands and knees before the vortices of this forest.

In he goes, crawling like a baby, nose running, spittle hanging in rivulets as he gasps for air and his temples threaten to touch in the middle of his cranium. The pain, the sickness, the taste of churning terror. His face catches low shrub and winter weed; off comes the cap. He keeps moving into the trees, stops to retch weakly. In this gripping unknown, Will Pritchard has no concept of electromagnetic aberration. He has never heard the words “ley line”, has never considered the implications of manipulating atoms and electromagnetism into as yet discovered frequencies. That doing so could conceivably reveal a different reality with each new angle of the metaphoric-literal hologram.

Pritchard wants himself back.

He has never heard of Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov. He doesn’t know that gravity, the very force holding him to the forest floor even as it seems to mutate beneath him, is much more than simple attraction. It is orientation. It is necessary to energy. Pritchard crawls through his piercing temples and arrives at a dip in the ground that reveals a small creek that has split around several trees, into two channels. He manages to gather enough of his focus to look into the picture; something intangible is vibrating before him, and it feels alien to the landscape that has shaped his very character. He crawls another agonizing distance before falling into a slight dip where the converging waters have pooled below an outcropping of jagged rocks. His face hits the snow, right cheek down, gloves clutching at tree trunk bark.

A strange unfocused eddy seems to hover just above an opening in the ice. No; he cares nothing for and knows little of, exotic knowledges. Pritchard doesn’t know that the last communication NASA received from three of its probes, Pioneers 10 and 11, along with Ulysses, upon leaving the farthest gravitational reaches of the known solar system, was “an incomprehensible acceleration”.

Had Will Pritchard known any of this, it would not have made a difference.

Jenny in her bubble of inexplicable new calm, the steady floor and solid wall, directed Ray to the kitchen with a “follow me” wave of her fingers. He was light on his feet for a large man; those floorboards nary a creak as he passed through the dining space and ignored the marble that had nestled into the corner of opposing baseboards. He appreciated the square kitchen with its easy instant comfort, the angular sunshine beginning to announce the dusk of late Spring through the west facing windows of the glass doors. Her mind touching upon Adam and Eve, the garden, the serpent and the fruit, Jenny poured Ray a tall glass of apple juice and suggested that he sit in the yard whilst she cleaned up and changed clothes.

He did so. He settled into the same chair that she had occupied the evening prior, beneath the same boughs of her beloved tree of privacy, and let his mind go into some of the peripheral images that were drifting by, announcing their urgency but well within his control... he sipped the cool juice, tilted his head back to look up through mother nature’s limbs, the glint of sunlight firing off starry bursts, and within his calm assurance that he had followed the guidance to Jenny with open purity, came the subtle wash of unsettled energy from the night before. His eyes moved from the tree branches, to the old shed. He sat for very still moments, watching the dirty window panes there, looking at the narrow entrance door off to the left with wide plank pine running vertically, crossed atop by a two-by-four ‘x’.

Yes, it came then to him with stomach rooted impact; the missing love of this self isolated woman... it was there behind those city grimed windows and that strong door. Ray sat forward in the chair, finished the apple juice, and got to his feet with a sigh; always the nicest souls, it seemed, carrying the heaviest burdens. Unjust Universe. No true fulcrum or stable morality. All designed to elevate the one real truth, the one impervious beauty; love itself. Love at its fullest.

Ray Townes moved a few steps from the chair to the old shed, feeling the build of vibrational sadness in his chest. He stopped beneath Jenny’s privacy tree to peer up at the second floor window where she was showering. It was slightly fogged and he could hear the water. Within the water, he could hear soft humming of a melody that seemed familiar beyond the moment. It reached deep within him, shut down the welling up of the other feeling... transfixed in a city where he could never live, Ray felt a pang of homesickness the likes of which he had never before

known, and it had nothing to do with his prairie family farm.