The Altonevers (48 page)

“
When dying, I'll think
only of how I will caress you when I wake,” he says, taking a tear
from her cheek and wiping it across his lip.
He’s still a junkie, though a junkie for her, the queen of
his needleless dreams. Just as she’s still a scared child and he's
her pillow, the white knight of her delusional fantasies. They grow
brazen, brave in knowing they'll see each other after this is all
done and finished. He takes her by the hand and swings her out onto
the hood of the car. Out of the safety of their slight nest, then
follows her up recklessly shooting in all directions. Their nerves
are giving up, they’re overheating, becoming physically exhausted,
overwhelmed. Their bodies and minds are riding the adrenaline high
of staring down death. Vainly trying to defend the other from the
assault of flashing muzzles and flying lead whizzing past their
heads.

In the their minds, the photographic
memories of their lives begin to flash behind their eyes, they are
together, always, in every glimpse of their past. They strafe and
rake, and flutter around, evading as much as they can, careful to
stay close to always one another. The fire power becomes greatly
overwhelming, as time seems to slow down for the last seconds of
the last song to play out sluggishly enough to hear the pick
touching the chords, and each interval of the chord shaking over
the guitar and bass and the drums sounding like slowed down
fireworks.

A bullet tears through her neckerchief
throwing a splash of red from her throat, dropping Harley to her
knees gasping for air unable to even scream. Popper sees it all,
every time, the reddening of her neckerchief and eye dying as she
convulses in agony, recurring every year for as long as they love
each other, eternally. He starts screaming like a raving lunatic
and firing blindly in a blind tantrum. She falls to the ground
watching his polished brown shoes trample frantically over the
their spilled money, empty bullet casings, and her favorite,
lavender diamond's, sparkling next to shrapnel and shattered glass.
Lead blows the bones from Poppers right knee, he falls with his
full weight onto his left. Kneeling like a knight, helplessly,
squeezing the trigger as his hands fall to his sides, not shooting
back anymore. Only staring into his lover's dying face, to be sure
she is the last thing he'll see, as she unblinkingly stares to
his.

Harley closes her eyes a split second
before Popper's chest explodes in a burst of red, and his body
falls limp to the hot asphalt. Into the blood spilling from her
neck staining the shiny lavender stones, to lay in death next to
his dying sparrow. The car radio returns to static as the airwaves
empty of the Valentine’s day countdown of everlasting love songs.
Harley’s soul leaves her body a cadaver not a second after her
sparrow’s last breath.

Burning bridges

Anna's bobbing up and down with her
head resting on the black of night, the only sight to be had from
the bus window. The driver turned the aisle lights off a while
back, leaving only a few little conical lights lit over each
uncomfortably cushioned seat. Outside some glimmering dust slowly
floats close enough to the glass to get a good glimpse of them
passing.

“
Why's the snow so bright?”
she asks.

“
It's not snow,” he
says.

“
It's a storm out there,”
she says pointing to the intensifying flurry of tiny flashing snowy
flakes sweeping as speckles of white whirling erratically to the
whim of solar winds.
“The flakes are huge.
You can even see the little ice crystals,” she says
excitedly.

“
It's not snow.”

“
Yes is it.”

“
Look again,” he says as
the speckles grow from the size of pebbles to the size of pennies.
Each slowly sifting from a single speck of light into two speckles,
then three, then five and more. Enlarging enough to see each split
is actually two splits then three, then five minuscule glinting
multicolored sparkles lasting a split second between each sifting
glint. A single flake flickers then splashes as a thousand thousand
flashes while melting and flash freezing into rime as it touch the
foggy bus window. Casting off the energy of the continuous spectrum
while evaporating into wisps of glittering dust.

Cider leans over her and blows his
breath to fog the dust spotted window. She wipes the fog away to
see millions of minuscule wavelengths emanating from the many
microscopic supernova of each split of the snowflake then dripping
down the glass as a drop of effervescing fluid. Just a single flake
of snow in the blizzard is composed of incalculable quantities of
mass and energy. Of Earths and moons, solar systems and star
systems, star cradles and whole galaxies. The desires and deaths of
individuals, whole societies and histories, countless civilizations
eradicated as energy is so seemingly simply released by the flow of
entropy.

“
What is it then?” she
asks.

“
Some type of space dust or
something,” he says.

“
That's splitting hairs,”
she says.

“
No it's not hairs. They're
some type of fractal flake, each a universe of something or
something. It means we're coming close to the bridge.” he
says.

“
But they’re so
small.”

“
Wouldn't be if we were
inside them.” He says pointing to the fractal flakes flurry over
the window.

“
Who's to say we're not?”
she smiles.

“
In fractal flakes of snow
ourselves.”

“
Melting against a dusty
glass window of someone else's daily commute,” she says showing
teeth as she smiles. He turns the overhead light on to show her the
grains of airborne dust aglow filing the inside of the bus, slowly
floating in front of their faces, then rapidly oscillating around
her. Then Quickening and colliding as effulgent web like flashes
casting an array of varying wavelengths, bathing Anna's excited
face in split second shifts of fleeting color and energy feilds.
Over seconds rendering the tiny peaks and valleys of ultraviolet,
X-ray and gamma rays visible to her naked, and interacting as
overlapping pulses of ethereal ebbing and flowing light.

A chain reaction ignites every grain
of air to successively pop like microscopic supernovae sweeping
outward to fill the volume of the bus’ interior with blinding blue
violet bursts of plasma momentarily becoming minuscule
superstructure shapes before vanishing. A sudden spin tingling
sensation of resonance is vibrating lightly through her finger tips
into her palms, up her arms to cross her shoulders and pouring back
down her spine. Her trembling hand turns to uncontrollable shaking
as the frequencies reflect from inside her breast to reverberate
through her ribs, rapidly rumbling through her chest, and rattling
about her brain. A calming warmth accompanies a strange sensation
as her skin atomically separates from itself, then from her flesh,
and her flesh from her ionizing bones. Seeming to her like she's a
atomizing, and spreading like a hand full of sand dropped into
boiling water.

The blinding white flashes recede so
that she can see her own body and bones as loosely bound, lightly
vibrating and slowly sublimating atoms vaguely emulating her form
in the form of astral light emitting vapor. A very gaseous Anna
looks down to see her nebulous figure radiating multicolored
emissions of freed energy luminously colliding into clusters and
churning into spirals while ionizing to plasma of her before her
very eyes. Swirls, swift circles and curved lines of blue lit
particle paths jet from her fingers and mouth and pupils to meet at
her ever radiant refulgent center. Forming a current and forcing
her emulsifying luminescent dust into tiny star clusters and liquid
plasma proto-galaxies collecting as they come closer to her center,
her core. Inch by inch condensing into a mass of convulsing,
continually converging cannibalistic black spheres sweeping into
swathes of alkahestic singularities spiraling around the ethereal
illuminations of her undulating heart. Beating and beaming,
crystallizing and cracking, releasing bursts of Panchromatic
refulgence rippling inner light through her rarefying ribs and air
before her.

Her pupils are ensnared by the
pulsating spectra emanating from one, then a few, then thousands of
iota sized plasma crystals suspended an inch over her open palms.
She's enamored by infinitesimal planetesimals and planets eaten as
morsels by growing crystal clusters that are then engorged by dust
gathering galaxies being devoured by tiny swirling stellar black
holes at the tips of her fingers. All coalescing into the luminous
veins of blue plasma jetting toward her center and emblazoning her
beating breast to resemble a surging red sprite repeatedly
enlarging to the size of a volleyball before collapsing and
releasing a bursts of beatific light blue and orange energy. A
flash to each flutter of her beating heart in second long cycles of
forcefully exploding and imploding to explode again. Lasting for
what feels like forever outside of time.

“
What is this?” she
asks.

“
Your center I suppose.
Your soul, or something. We've all got a bit of Central in us,” he
says.

“
Is that where we're going?
to the soul of eternity?” she asks, unable to entirely grasp what
she just said.

“
Sort of, I guess if you
have to encapsulate it words, something like that, sure. Look over
there, is that snow too?” he asks pointing through the snow filled
window toward two giant stars in binary orbit, lighting the others
spiraling wakes, starkly standing against a Panchromatic expanse of
space.

“
Those are blue
giants.”

“
And those?” he says, about
the many more stellar sized stars popping into view until space is
loaded with emerging and erupting spheres of ultraviolet light.
Ionizing in slow motion, with giant molecular clouds enshrouding
them as they churn through cycles of celestial ultra-violence. The
bus is sailing a light-year a minute through the intensifying
blizzard and stellar winds. Near enough to some stars to see the
magnetic currents of their surfaces as unique to each as a
fingerprints. They're passing through imploding star clusters of
one starburst galaxy after another, through the billions along the
long astral road toward Central, the center of all things. Even
witnessing the calamitous death of a dimension, clearing a universe
of the sight of stars and filling the sight of her open eyes with
an instant of infinitely cascading celestial chaos occurring in the
blink of an eye, and again with each blink of her honey brown
eyes.

Passing through millions of billions
of bright spiraling galaxies and their dense dominions of trillions
of billions of twinkling stars gravitationally conglomerating into
elliptical superstructures. Then bound loosely into celestial
threading fabricating into immense filaments forming a vast single
system of infinitely intertwining vitreous supercluster complexes.
Parsec sized pulses of light surge randomly through the threading,
resembling the flow of synapses through the dendrites of a deeply
pondering person’s gray matter. The whole scene is shrinking
further and further from view, until hundreds of thousands of these
filament threads fit into a single sight through the snowy bus
window.

The stellar storm slows, weakening to
only lightly blow the ebbing snow, then stops entirely, leaving the
flakes frozen in fall. Each individual flake begins clumping into
another, colliding, sublimating and collecting on contact into
small vertically rising lustrous hexagonal streaks of crystalline
rain. Binding and repeating into elongated inch sized hollow
honeycombs increasingly replicating to fill the entirety of space
outside sailing bus. Incrementally thickening and growing into
progressively larger hexagonal structures enlarging from a
centimeter to the size of a fist, to a foot, to a meter then a mile
high and wide. Continuing in scope until the hollow of the
honeycombs are a light year across and their sides of snow are
lucidly aligned into colossal cryptocrystalline pylons. Each a
minute's travel from the next.

A star system sized emission ray
ravels out a vaporous red, ebbing pink fringed plasma road, known
to Centralers as a prominence bridge. Created from chromospheres
skinned from countless stars and formed into a single path passing
only between the crystalline pillars lustrously reflecting the
illusion of light solidified. The celestial threading spread across
the window's view multiplies by factors of a hundred, repeating
continuously, until shrinking away again from the window to be
small enough to fit in a single view with the individual filaments
becoming invisible to the naked eye. To eventually become a single
fractal fiber of a single thread of a supercluster filament of an
unfathomably massive webbing system of gravitationally bound
matter.

In the open span of space on either
side the prominence bridge, are earth sized peaks and valleys of
slowly oscillating obsidian wavelengths. Multiplying in orders of
magnitude until they're several suns high and low. Anna watches
their obsidian luster slide over the frequency of ascending and
descending fluctuations shaping the space around the bus into
monumental waves.

“
What is that?” She
asks.