The Altonevers (54 page)

Spiraling further from any semblance
of perceived safety and further still with cold creeping through
her bones she’s trapped stiffening to stone with quivering breath
forever. Until she remembers living a path of circumstance and
freewill alongside an interAlto criminal, alive beside him and on
her own, in whatever present her foot may fall next. She remembers
the unreachable holes in the sky above her when she learned to
drive. How the road split by the second then infinitely bending
into every plausible path while remaining a straight line. Wavering
side to side, its edges blending with the shifting hills of green
on either side. Of her holding the wheel while phantom pink and
yellow hands emerged from hers to make every plausible motion at
once. Spreading to her legs and arms until her body was enveloped
in a ghostly blur of her being in every possible place at once.
With each movement emerging into a diverging reality reacting to
each other as reverberating parallel paths of pink and yellow
ghostly light illustrating impossibility by the time they reach her
peripheral, and radiating infinitely outward to fill the entirety
of existence, like she was seeing the body of a sea seen from the
car seat as she was steering the wheel.

Thinking that either way she is where
she is, whether her mind is affected by the weather of weltering
emotions or not. That It's up to only her to know if she can
weather the storm of her own restless soul. And that she is one of
them, the endlessly overlapping forever expanding reverberations.
Thinking of herself, her own perception, her own path and present,
as just a single pink and yellow echo to the infinitely ebbing and
flowing echo to her. Each with their own minds and souls, growing
independently while existing in the same stream of experiences,
simultaneously persisting along their parallel paths, each alive in
a life of their own.

In another place there's one of me
that's courageous, there's bound to be, she thinks, of another her,
that's fearless, not fearless but a brave warrior when in the pits
of fear and panic. An echo that's thriving, valiant when perceiving
herself through a lens stained by self loathing, defying the
sentiment, destroying their soul eroding swarms falling from her
minds sky. One of her who single handedly makes a crater in the
clouds and the sky, that opens slowly into a massive hole of clear
blue with hot sunlight pouring through it. That her feet would flee
from the ground and she would float toward the warm and windless
calm hole in the sky of her own creation.

Why can’t it be me that's strong
enough to make holes in the sky? she asks herself, It could be me,
It is me, she thinks. Struck by the thought of her summoning her
own strength, then feeling passions embers igniting deep inside
burning like wildfire in her chest. Heat is beaming through the
bruises and blemishes her being, endures by all things from simply
being alive, like sunlight shines through the sea’s water surface.
Then thinking she could be what she sees herself as, realizing then
that she's already in the eye of the storm envisioned as her mind.
That she’s already manifested the strength from within, and it's
she alone that through thought is afloat in its calm windless
center of her mind's creation. She tries for fun to sip the steam
rising off her sun drenched skin, quelling the tempest churning
around the center of herself, seeing, feeling it’s tranquil eye in
her mind’s eye clearly. Embracing without doubt, her sense of self
and wielding it to easily creating craters in the sky as she
pleases. Seeing herself as the ruler of the rains of fear and self
afflicted disbelief pouring from blighted clouds raging around the
center of her being. That to live, to feel alive in the life she is
in, the path she's on, she must drink the depths in like fresh
water from a stream.

She wills of herself freedom from her
anxiousness, from her fidgeting finger tips and clammy palms.
Reveling in the sensations of sweat dripping, and blood boiling
through her veins, while riding each rib rattling pulse of her
frantically beating heart. Learning to use her panic spells, her
weakness as a source of strength, something to strive against, to
rise to and conquer in the moment. Forcing her to seek and sip the
ambrosia of life optimizing positive perspective, and slipping into
a path of where ever her foot may fall next is the place to be.
Experienced with sheer optimism of having no other choice, though
free in the present to forge the path she will be infinitely on as
herself existing.

“
Anna...Carrots!” Cider
shouts a foot from her with flustered face. Snapping his fingers
and tapping on her forehead, snatching her out of a full minute’s
daze.

“
Hm?” she says
hazily.

“
I almost smacked you, ya
know,” he says.

“
Oh.”

“
Well not really, where’d
you go anyhow?” he ask s.

“
Home,” she thinks, finding
herself still and still standing in front of the open door, though
relieved of her senseless apprehension. No longer dreading the
mammoth monsoon pouring millions of ripples per second onto the
mellifluously undulating avenues. Instead hearing the deafening
downpour outdoors as the roars of lions encouraging her sense of
courage to swell. The immensity of the storm outside and her
pounding heart beckon her forward, to immerse herself, her senses,
to experience the deluge, to know the invigorating feeling of
living, of being alive. She's lost in a delighted daze and drifting
past his open palm, through the open door into the same roaring
deluge she seen sweeping across the windows with dread a minute
ago.

My perch, she thinks,
recalling the scenes seen from her many window sills, just before
passing the glass door. She wakes from a wakeful slumber a few
steps into the deluge and already entirely drenched. The tepid
water’s running through her carrot colored pixie cut hair, down to
her slender neck and soaking her soles and socks. Feeling like
she's submersed and melting away in warmth. Her spine isn’t
shivering and her nerves aren’t trembling, she’s tempered by the
weather of her own inner tempest. She’s not afraid, but welcoming
the weather outside, dreamily basking in the boundless scope of the
refractive downpour outdoors. Seeing the rain as glimpses of
glistening bliss beating like drums onto her head and ears and
beading down her elated face.
The
overwhelming experience of being immersed in this onslaught of
refractive rain is invigorating to her senses. Allowing and
embracing the passion she feels in this moment, this present to
enrapture her, wash away her cares with each penny sized drop
splashing against her skin. Light, weightless, alleviated of worry,
feeling like she's levitating without her feet leaving the flooded
undulating ground. Carelessly swaying up peaks and down the valleys
of five foot swells while standing readily still.

“
They have umbrellas ya
know,” he laughs, and she turns to him beaming ear to
ear.

“
I’m already drenched, so,”
she says waving for him to join her.

“
So,” he says
shrugging.

“
Why aren’t you,” she
asks.

“
Do I have to be? I mean
they have umbrellas,” he says, finishing his smoke and flicking it
at her but missing, instead fizzling out to the falling
water.

“
Fellow travelers, right?”
she says. He stands unflinching for a minute, watching her standing
in place swaying up and down unfazed by the weather, while beaming
brightly smiling alive in it.

“
Well?” she asks, tapping
her foot to splash the ripples. Holding his sensibilities hostage
with a smile, that's sweetened to please only his soul.

“
Oh come on, what’s living
for right, if not to feel alive? aren’t you a weather chaser, or
something?” she asks.

“
Sort of, as a hobby,” he
says.

“
One who’s scared to get
wet? ha,” she teases, waving him closer, and with one step he’s
drenched head to toe, head over heels, standing close enough to
kiss to her.
The faint blue spinning
particle winds are sweeping across their elation shaped faces as
they march along the edge of the curb. Side by sides, soaked and
soaking in the storm while strolling the ups and downs rolling
underfoot. Passing intersections, parking meters and payphones.
Occasionally passing a straggling particle person, whose skin is
blotching and darkening in the drops of rain, like every
fluorescent and mineral wall in all of Central.

Anna waits for a crest to be underfoot
and pushes him off balance, laughing as she leaps, splashing onto
the top of the next wave, riding it down and up to leap again to
the next. She rides the five foot swells up and down by staying in
place, as he goes down and up again to catch up. They stand in
place, riding the peaks and valleys of the grounds frequency as
though they're on opposite ends of a seesaw. She times another jump
and takes it, then skips away hurdling across the peaks of wave
with bounding lunges of limber legs. He follows trying to catch up,
coming to be one wave behind her a minute later. She's careful to
stomp crowns and craters from the two inch sheet of rain rippled
river riding the ground, sometimes splashing up to her shoulders
and onto his.

The streets are empty but for the
torrential downpour and the two running and jumping, stomping from
one crest to the next. In reverie between canyons of variegated
mineral skyscrapers whose tops are disappearing in a falling fog
above them. The rain is so ferocious if she were to look up one of
the millions of heavy penny sized drops would falling in this
moment would poke out her eye. The two are reveling in running
through the rising undulations that she'd seen with self defeating
uncertainty only moments ago. Anna stops suddenly at a crosswalk,
Cider nearly knocks her off her toes, but pulls her back to the
pavement before she hits the street.

“
What is it?” he asks,
patting his pockets for the smokes he knows are soaked.

“
You don’t see it?” she
asks almost bashfully “look, weather chaser” she says turning his
head by his chin toward the scene down the street.

“
See what? you can only
see, I dunno, a hundred yards in this...?” he says putting a hand
over his eye like a sailor in the sun to see what her eye has an
appetite for. He's peering deeper into the depths of sight through
a dense, perspective bending apparitious downpour of sun stippled
streaks vertically diffracting the particle breeze into wavering
stripes stretching from the ground to the clouds, and bending the
blue ether like heat waves blur light. Overlapping one by one until
stratifying into a massive volume of mirage suspended in the air.
Appearing to slow the flow of motion more, the deeper your eyes
reach through its wavering depth. At eye’s length matter is moving
slow as molasses, rendering billions of light blue particles
spinning in the breeze, and becoming excited from suspension, more
animated the closer the two come to their depth.

They stomp, skip and jump through the
flooding mellifluous ravines lined with dry sheltered faces fogging
the front windows of stores, looking out as though bunches of
bewildered eyes blinking unevenly from behind the bushes. On the
verge of visibility is a veil of colorful light hazily churning as
bursting flares battling to fill the ambient over the city streets
with luminosity suspended in split second strobes of falling rain.
Underfoot the undulating avenues are converging into a pattern of
surface wave interference as the street widens into an expansive
square in the shape of a triangle that's encircled by thousands of
brilliantly lit blaring billboards and advertisements of all shapes
and sizes. The smallest are as big as stickers and sign posts, the
largest are swathes stretching from the ground up hundreds of
stories into clouds

The two are mesmerized by a luminous
haze of hue’s spilling out from the imagery of the ambient
illuminating advertisements ahead of them. That are acervately
projecting illuminated illusions outward from the fluorescent
mineral walls filling the expanse of dense, vertically standing
wavering stripes of water vapor with an agglomeration of
phantasmagoric figments and figures. With each approaching step
gaining greater depth and detail until the two are fully immersed
by oneiric illusions of the billboard's all enveloping lights
endlessly refracting around the raindrops and reflecting through
ambient. Emerging into three dimensional sculptures reaching
through the apparitious rain as they transforming into abstract
images and symbols appealing and reforming into tangible shapes
again. The phantom like advertisements are accompanied by a strange
sort of succulence to the subconscious of whoever is present to
perceive them. Making her in this moment feel weightless, walking
through the midst of the mirage of her own thoughts manifesting as
brilliantly lit abstractions summoned through depths of her
subconscious into the distorted phantasmagoric phantoms encircling
their bodies in her own psyche.

Immersed in the thought of herself
being only a single drop caught in a current of an infinitely
persisting, endlessly flowing energy. Envisioning the volume that
she ponders as being an endless expanse of all existences, of all
of eternities to ever be, as an ocean she's drifting through. Whose
body is made up of the echoes of each thing, each being, each
moment, each eventuality that has and will ever be, reverberating
into a single eternally persisting protean body of all
possibilities persisting at once. That even Central, the center of
known eternities to an unknowable number of Altonevers and Altos,
is itself barely a grain of moisture of this ocean’s expansive,
beyond infinite tides.