The Altonevers
Authors: Frederic Merbe
Tags: #love, #life, #symbolism, #existential fiction, #dimension crossing, #perception vs reality, #surrealist fiction, #rabbit hole, #multiverse fiction, #meta adventure
the Altonevers
by Frederic Merbe
text copyright © June 2015 Frederic
Merbe
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-9975093-4-2 (eBook)
Smashwords Edition
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The hard work of this
author.
In the split second of blinking when
her mind is in the shade of her eyelids, she sees an apple tree
alone in a field of light green. Whose ripening red fruit assume
any form or figure her imagination conjures them to be as they fall
to meet their apple shaped shadows on the ground. In opening her
eyes she relapses to a reality of light's reflection rendering
living and inanimate things into realism, resurfacing to the
experience of being alive in a living mirror. Where do they go when
they close their eyes? What do they see when they open them? she
wonders, then ponders if what she perceives is real, or if reality
is what she perceives it to be.
Fellow traveler
Anna is standing on the edge of a curb
immersed in a city's summer night swelter as sweat trickles through
her carrot colored pixie cut hair to cover her peach brushed
cheeks, and her toes teeter inches over vacant predawn painted
streets. She's biting her bottom lip white, a habit of hers when
drifting dreamily into wanderlust, often while wondering where next
to go. With ears alert as an unnerved hare she sifts through the
near silence of sleeping urban sprawl. Her honey brown eyes reach
to the horizon like a seasick sailor searching for the sight of
safe shores. Seeing sharpness and straight lines soften, shrink and
tangle into converging blurs merging into a faint purplish pool on
the verge of her perception.
The red orange morning’s glow morphs
into atom sized legions of light and heat, as warriors with wings
and sword and spear and chariot ascending to clash with the nights
swarm of dark and cold. The scene holds her focus for a almost
minute before fading back into a lavender haze slowly unraveling
into shadowy canyons shedding the dullness of depth. Separating
into lustrous blotches and becoming lucid reflections clothing the
flat faces of glass and stone skyscrapers surrounding her. The
traffic lights are coming toward her from the depths as growing
globes of yellow and red, until a glowing green globe is swaying
twelve feet over her head. The traffic lights change with a
mechanical click, interrupting her train of thought in tune with
the electric hum coming from the aluminum pole beside
her.
She slips back into her
shoe gazing stroll along the edge of the curb, passing under a
blinking
don’t walk
sign while watching the laces of her worn white sneakers pace
back and forth. Oblivious to everything that's block behind her
vanishing into an oblivion so dark it appears as a featureless flat
wall of infinite volume. The streetlamps lining the pavement are
straightening up and arching backwards. Their light blue bulbs then
burst into tiny comets leading semicircular streaks of illuminating
vapor that sublimate scars into the facades and sidewalks as they
fall and rise. Forming full circles of counterclockwise currents
containing flat planes as clear as crystal window panes that are
filling with vivid vapor colors of the time of day portrayed by the
comet and its tail end encircling the edge of the emerging
ellipses.
The vanishing violets of predawn
emanating from the closest
clock
match the faint glow soaking the skyscrapers of
the urban canyon around her. The next nearest is brimming with the
lightening indigo glows proceeding the receding of night into
predawn. Through each furthering clock one can see the colors of
the sky just passed, collectively appearing as a single spiral of
vitreous night and day counting counterclockwise by the hour,
stretching down the length of the pavement and reaching deep into
the horizon’s depths.
Feeling a wet chill wash
over her body, she stops and lifts her head to see she's submersed
in the violet of a vapor
clock
. That's fleeing from her like
water from a pebble, and dispersing through the air. She pauses,
awestruck in the face of the unreality enveloping her, of the steam
billowing from sewers caps and storm drains and drawn into a sheet
of fog sweeping around her feet flowing eastward, toward the lazily
lifting sun.
A rush of headlights instantly fill
the streets as streaks of white light with apple sized spheres
leaping up like fish from a stream, then bursting like tiny stars
into clouds and coalescing into continually smaller shattering
spheres reborn at a rate of a hundred generations per city block. A
yellow cab bends and stretches like hot wax melting and sinking
into the asphalt when a beverage truck overturns taking a corner,
exploding like ink in water while throwing bottles of bright sodas
into the air to burst as fluid fireworks. The river of cars filling
every inch of the street, all collide in an instantaneous blitz of
bright color before vanishing entirely in the blink of an eye. The
branches of trees are whipping and shattering, then following their
loosened leaves and lifting into the air. Postal boxes, parking
meters and sewer caps are tearing from the ground, cart wheeling
eastward and crashing through walls and windows like cannon balls
through the hulls of caravels.
A drizzle of droplets start splashing
from the ground and rising through the air, becoming a rain in
reverse that's slowly eroding the city’s surfaces with penny sized
pock marks at a time. High above, the heads of the highest
skyscrapers are cracking and fracturing into swathes of airborne
debris drawn east, toward the morning light. Then crumbling into
comets and cascading across the sky to bombard and cannibalizing
stubborn upwind structures while amassing into a single mass of
vaporizing matter. Stripping flesh from the high rises, leaving
skeletons of steel that glow red hot, stretch and squeal into
warped wretched shapes dancing to their deaths.
Reaching an intersection she looks to
her right, to the sight of churning chunks of city amassing into a
massive wave. The entire east side of the island metropolis is torn
from form and drawn into the wake of the ruptured sun rising into
the sky. She sprints frantically out of fear through the vitreous
hours spiraling down the sidewalk. Crossing the asphalt streets,
now flowing like freshwater streams, by skipping across the tops of
cars caught in their swelling currents. She comes to a crosswalk
with no cars, not breaking stride she gulps a heaving breath and
leaps through the air with legs stretched. Feeling as though
floating for a second too long, then stomping onto the curb on the
other side with resounding force reverberating up her leg and
through her empty stomach to ring her head like a bell. She
stumbles then stops, doubles over and falls to the
ground.
Everything she can see is sweeping
east and up into single tidal wave of vaporizing matter reaching
astronomical heights as the wake of the rising ruptured sun. The
city is gradually capsizing in its pursuit of the high star above,
miming, though a million time bigger, the bending street light's
bulb bursting and spiraling into counterclockwise currents. With
her wits about her she stands from kneeling, squinting into the
deepest depths of morning's glow now dominating the atmosphere.
Seeing a speck of blue violet submersed in its bright vermilion
light bobbing toward her. Becoming a bluish dot casting a
stretching slender shadow of a person splitting the length of
sidewalk to reach her feet.
The shadow marches for almost a minute
though coming no closer, it’s head only wavers back and forth over
her worn shoes. She looks away from the raw daylight to cool her
watering eyes in the fleeing night's blues behind her. Only then,
when looking away is it quiet enough for her to hear the dragging
heels of the shadow marching toward her. Giving this a minute of
thought, she resigns to not knowing how or why, instead enjoying a
moment of rest for her restless senses.
“
Hello!” she shouts into
the silence of night. Away from the rushing of asphalt gushing as
water, and the deafening roar of matter violently evaporating into
a sunlit wave breaking through the stratosphere. Destructions
descends high rises rendering them into vertical avalanches of
vapor, absolving anything around them in existence from atomic
form.
Anna looks down to see the shadow
now crisply crossing the ground just below her. She turns back
toward the sun blurred silhouette of a blue suited man standing
only a few yards away, on the other side of the street with the
heels of beaten brown shoes barely on the edge of the curb. Though
he’s facing her, his face is as featureless as the other side of
the moon. Disheveled in dress and demeanor, his shirt is half
tucked into his pants, his ill fitting blazer’s missing buttons,
and not sitting well over his shoulders. Drowning, no matter where
he stands, in the air of a carelessly gambling vagrant, weighing
the odds of wagers far greater than for casino chips.
“
Hello!” she shouts, but
the blue silhouette doesn’t budge. ‘He can’t hear me,’ she thinks
and turns to shout again into the quiet of the night.
“
Ahh,” she
yelps.
“
Wonderful isn’t it?” he
asks, sitting comfortably atop a salmon painted postal box. His
pale face is standing out against his suit, that seamlessly matches
the deep blue of fading night.
“
How did you get there,
from back there? she asks afraid.
“
Magic,” he says
whimsically, through a Midwest accent she can’t quite place or
time.
“
Magic?”