The Leonora Carrington Event

Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter, novelist and short story writer. and founding member of the women’s liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s. She was an esoteric explorer of the inner worlds.
 
The Carrington Event was the most intense recorded geomagnetic storm so far in our known history. It peaked on September 1st and 2nd in 1859. It was triggered by a massive solar flare and subsequent coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun. The waves of solar energy from this storm went straight into the Earth's magnetosphere in just under 18 hours, which is very fast, even for that kind of energy. The event was named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first person to ever observe and record a solar flare. One of the effects of the Carrington event was impressive displays of Aurora Borealis across the Northern and Southern Hemisphere, the phenomenon moving far beyond its normal range. Another effect was the way it broke the early electronic communications system of the telegraph. The geomagnetically induced current from the electromagnetic field caused the telegraphs to fail, even giving shocks to some operators, and causing sparks to fly off the wires, poles and other equipment. In some cases though, messages could be sent even when the telegraphs were unplugged: there was enough juice running through the system from the geomagnetic disturbance to power the wires. It has been thought by some that if an equivalent type of mass coronal ejection occurred in our times, it would lead to the destruction of satellites, telecommunications infrastructure, and widespread power outages.

This story is set in a not-too-distant future when electrical systems are already on the fritz, black outs and brown outs common, with sunspots and solar flares very active at the peak of an intense solar cycle.
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DAVE

Dave had grown bored with listening to the space weather on shortwave. It was always the same thing, over and over again. Solar storms, more solar storms, fast solar winds, X-flares, dark holes and more dark holes. It did affect the remnants of the communication grid at times, but not enough to match the newscasters overblown hype.

The weatherwoman read out her report in exaggerated tones meant to maximize hype and terrify people into staying home. Weather forecasters always thought the end was nigh. Her voice crackled through the swish and static of the shortwave. “Geomagnetic storm conditions continue to get worse over the next twelve hours, and may cause major disturbances to the Earth’s magnetic field. With storms hitting an unprecedented G7 strength, there is a high likelihood that this will cause issues with the remains of the power grid due to voltage fluctuations. If you are near electrical equipment, be careful because there is a real danger of shocks during this storm. On the plus side Aurora Borealis will be seen all the way down into the south. People who’ve headed to the beaches of Tennessee this summer to swim in the expanded Gulf of Mississippi, are likely to see extreme displays of green and mauve color. It is likely to be so strange and strong this particular storm has been dubbed the Leonora Carrington after the famous surrealist painter.”

Blah, blah, blah. He’d lived through dozens of geomagnetic storms and they didn’t much impact his day-to-day life. They hadn’t even wipe out all the satellites in orbit around the earth. Some were still working, not that regular folk got to use them ever. If it was a tornado coming his way he’d worry, but until then he was too tired to worry. As it was, he was dead tired and his fingers were sore from a marathon sole sewing session at Monty’s Mountain of Shoes where he worked in the back, rehabbing forgotten footwear back into shape for the secondhand market. He worked as part of a team of twelve others, mostly relatives of Monty’s who all liked to join in busting his balls with one wisecrack at his expense after another. The ribbing he got was almost more annoying than pricking himself in the finger with the needle over and over again.

What he really needed some more sleep, and the sun was well down with all its blasted solar radiation, so why not go to bed?

After Dave blew out his oil lamp he triple-checked to make sure it was fully doused. He’d become a little paranoid about the lamps and candles and stove ever since Edwin’s place down the road caught on fire after their Fourth of July party two years before. The fire department hadn’t been able to determine if it had been caused by fireworks or by one of his many oil lamps and candle nubs. Dave’s older friend Maxie had taken to calling him “oh-see-dee” whatever the flying lizard that meant. Something to do with checking things over and over again.

He turned off the radio, unplugged it from the battery, double checked to make sure he had unplugged it again, made sure the battery was safe, then laid down, got back up, checked the lamp, checked the battery, checked the radio, the laid back down. Maybe he was “oh-see-dee,” but if he weren’t worried he wouldn’t have been checking.
 
Then he said his prayers to the Milk Mother and tried to go to sleep, but Granny Inglebert’s coonhound was barking a baleful tune up at the hazy wisp of the crescent moon as it shone down through his cracked windows. The dog had just shut up and he had just started to dream about Amy Addison in the daisy dukes he’d seen her in late last summer when she was stringing up the beans from her garden, when the blasted dog let out another bale of mournful sound. His eyes flickered open and that’s when he saw the green midnight glow refracted through the dust-tinged pane of his busted-up window.

Aurora borealis. He’d never seen it before. Maybe that G7 geomagnetic storm really was going to be as disastrous as all the chattering yakkety-yakkers on the radio said it was going to be. Maybe it really would be a Carrington event and the entire electrical grid would become toast. Yet for as long as people had talked about the Carrington event, it hadn’t ever happened in his lifetime. Maybe it would and people would give up talking about the damn thing.

Strangely, the barking dog wasn’t a dog anymore, but a cow, mooing. If it had been a goat bleating he wouldn’t have worried. Plenty of city folk had goats after all. But a cow? That a was a bit exotic for city folk. Only those out in the burbs had cows. Then the cow was jumping over the moon and the sound of a trumpet was echoing, echoing, echoing. Soon he found himself going inside a home that was a shoe and meeting the old woman there. He was just glad she hadn’t started asking for repairs. He did not know, after all, whether he could spare any more of his sole.

MRS. INGLEBERT

Mrs. Inglebert’s day had already gone awry when the green midnight glow came and infected everything withs its dolorous echo. Now that echo rattled around inside her head and everything was looking the color of moon cheese. She wondered where her daughter Candy had been. It had been a long time since she’d seen Candy. There had been that other woman coming around to check on her who said she was Candy, but who wasn’t Candy. She was someone else. She was potentially even something else.

But maybe that was just the voice of the worm that had gotten inside of her after her husband Fred had died. Maybe it had been Candy after all. The control worm tried to steer her off course, but she couldn’t let it do so. She had to get the thing out of her somehow.

She hadn’t wanted to leave the house anyway. She hadn’t for some time. Even things like going down to the river to fish for carp didn’t give her the same kind of pleasure it had all those years ago. She used to meet her friend Amber down there and they would fish together. This was after both of their husbands had died. They’d both gone down to fish with them in the mornings, or in the evenings in the summer. The Florida Fever had taken their men away as it surged up from the swamps of the flooded south ten odd years ago, and for awhile afterwards she’d each kept up the fishing habit with Amber. Then she was taken in by her son, who lived in Cincinnati on the other side, and it became rather inconvenient for them to get together. She’d stopped going fishing and stopped doing a lot of other things after that, and most of her time was spent alone, listening to the radio.

Every now and again the woman who called herself by her daughter’s name came over to check on her, make sure she had enough food, that she was washing herself, and her clothes. This lady was very nice, she did seem concerned, she did want to help her, but she didn’t want to be helped. She wondered where her real daughter had gone off to, and why this lady called herself that. Damn impersonators, there were more of them now than ever. Now that Fred was gone, everything was different.

The green light was making her see Fred as if he was there. She heard his voice coming in off the and street down the telephone lines. She was one of the houses who still had telephone service, so she decided to pick up the phone and see if Fred was there. The black phone hung on the wall made of old thick hard plastic. It came from another time, part of the wave of repurposing she had lived through as a girl.

“Hello…” she said with a tentativeness that reminded her of what courting Fred had been like a lifetime ago.

“Hey darling, I wanted to let you know I caught a really big fish, and I got this feeling there is gonna be another one. Why don’t you get the rods and reels, and dig up some worms out of the compost, I know there’s plenty in there. Come on down to the river, and get yourself a real big big fish with me. It might be the biggest one you ever catch I promise.”

“Oh, Fred, I don’t know if I can. I need to wait here. I’m afraid of going out on the street. There is a big green light painted across the sky and it’s covering up all the stars. The moon has disappeared and I don’t know what to think of anything. There is a girl who comes to our house, and she say’s her name is Candy, but I don’t know if it is. I don’t know if it is her or if it’s the worm inside me telling me its not her. But I don’t know how it could be her. She doesn’t act like Candy used to. But maybe it is, I’m so confused.”

“There’s no worm in her darling, it’s just cause she’s taken up with that bad man. You know the one, Harvey. He isn’t any good to her. She needs to get away from him, take you with her. Get out of dodge. I think if you go down to the river and catch that fish, it’ll help you get her back on your side, get her away from that man and all the stuff he makes her do for him. Can you do that for me darling? Can you go down there and catch that fish? We can even use the worm inside you as bait, and get it out of you in the process”

“You know I can. Anything for you. If you really think it will be alright, I’ll go. I don’t know how it’s going to help, but if you say it will help, I trust you. I know you never lied to me.”

“You’ll figure out what you need to do when you get there,” he said to her. “I gotta go now.”

And then the line was clear, back to its hovering tone, and his voice could no longer be discerned from the static.

She went out to the back yard and into the outhouse, where she kept the fishing rods. They stood up nicely there. Then she got a small pot from the table she had outside where she used to work on her plants and scooped up some mud from the compost, fresh with writhing worms. Maybe it wasn’t a worm inside her daughter’s brain. Maybe it was just the voice of that man named Harvey.
 
HARVEY
 
Harvey was jolted out of sleep by a dream he was having of the stock market crashing. But day trading hadn’t started yet, it was only 1 AM. He was wondering if he could get a message down to his stock man and relay something to the main exchange in Chicago before it all fell to shit. He’d been a teenager during the second great depression and he had hated anything termed “finance” with a passion, even as he was a whiz at math. Little did he imagine he’d end up getting addicted to gambling on the horse races, moving across the river to Newport, Kentucky, and setting himself up as bookie. He didn’t know if that counted as finance.

It had proved to be a profitable pastime, even when most folk were flat fucking broke; there were always some who still found a way to place a few bets. When he’d become flush, he’d found himself looking for new things to bet on. As they country rebuilt itself, after shedding some of its excess weight in a series of semi-peaceful successions, the economy bounced back. Things weren’t what they had been before the crash. That had been a racket just as much as the one he was running. He’d just bought stock in a new analog computer company. He was hoping to pick up one of their mechanical calculators for his own personal use, until he’d had the dream of the stock market plunge. Now he saw the machines for what they were. Number eating demons.

Then he saw the light from the window, glowing green and mauve, bathing everything in his back room in the magic of the Northern Lights -maybe they should start calling it the Midwest Lights, it had come down to the area more and more often with all the geomagnetic activity. Then he felt the reassuring presence of the gun under his pillow but it was one of the only tangible things he could feel at the moment. He got up to look at the numbers in his books on the desk wear he’d left his bourbon and cigar, and they meant nothing to him anymore. The green light dissolved math. He couldn’t read the numbers. They were now nothing except a collection of squiggly lines. Where once had been the inflow and outflow of cash, glorious cash, now there was just an overflow of what could have been a sequence of randomized digits written across the page. Where there had once been the order of the mathematical realm, now there was just Dada. He suddenly felt as if he should call up Dr. Benjamin from the Covington Point Mental Hospital, maybe get his head examined. That quack psychiatrist had loved to place bets, and he’d paid him off handsomely to take in his wife Meredith when she started giving him trouble, when she started getting mouthy and threatening to go to the police. Maybe he’d eaten a bad piece of pizza down at Guidi’s-by-the-Slice. He pulled over the trash can and peperoni inflected bile poured from his mouth.

The dream was now alive and looking at him, as sweat poured down his face, manifesting out of the mauve light. Numbers swirled through the belly of a machine without rest or repose, and he laid down to sleep inside his dream, and the numbers bled out of his ear onto the pillow, in inky pools, fives, sixes, sevens. All they invoked now were alien geometries skewed at odd angles that he could only interpret as gibberish.
His on-again-off-again girlfriend Candy was looking at him in the dream whispering, waiting, hoping he would come over to comfort her. She had showed him the chart where the stock market had crashed. That much he did understand. The jagged plunge of the line. She was giving him the numbers, telling him his bank statement, trying to show him, but any time she mouthed a figure it came out as silence and he could not hear her normal, high pitched, smoky satin voice that was kind of rough from growing up hard around the tracks, the stages, all the glitz and nightlife of Newport as the few lawmen who roamed its streets looked the other way.

He’d always been a numbers man, a betting man, a booking man, and now what was he going to be that all those things, all those scratches had proven to be the inchoate ravings of a mad man?
 
CANDY
 
Candy Inglebert was absolutely sure her mother had gone insane. It wasn’t just your run old age and the head tweaking problems that came from untreated urinary tract infections. She’d dealt with that, and this wasn’t that, she’d had her mom teted down at the clinic and it wasn’t a UTI. This was certified loony bin material. Harvey had told her to call up Dr. Benjamin and have his cronies come, slap a strait jacket on her, and have her committed. That was just him being selfish, she realized, not wanting to have her have to deal with anything that might keep her away from him, under his thumb, where he wanted her to stay.

She didn’t want to get rid of her, now she wanted to get rid of him. She just needed some help taking care of her, and there wasn’t any help. As it was, she was stuck with her, for better or worse, and it was much, much worse than her marriage to Tim had been, and that was saying something. He’d been addicted to nepenthe and it had swiss cheesed his brain. She didn’t know how she was going to handle the situation.

Harvey had come on to her strong when she was having a wild night out at the Newport Supper Club. The Big Diamond Revival Band was playing all the Swing Bop classics and he’d sidled over to her. The smell of bourbon, cigars, and his strong cologne made her feel dreamy and they’d danced. She hadn’t intended on becoming the girlfriend of a bookie, it was just something that kind of happened, and he started out treating her well enough, unlike her last beau Bob, who liked to get slappy. Still, no one had been as bad as Tim.

She had just left her mom’s place, had finally gotten her settled down and was headed home. She stayed over at Harvey’s most nights, but liked to keep her efficiency above the Derby Dogs Chili parlor. It always smelled like boiled meat and chopped onions above the joint but it was a small price to pay to have moments of freedom away from mom, away from Harvey. He wanted her to get rid of the place, move in with him, but she had refused. After the latest thing he had said about her mom, she was glad she hadn’t kept up with the rent. Someone who worked for him had told her what he’d done to his wife, and that had really scared her.

She wanted to cut him out of her life, but he was much powerful than her, the mob more powerful than the cops.

 She had just turned onto her street when the telephone lines started to sizzle. Phone systems had been tricky to maintain after the Derp, but not impossible, and for the most part only worked on local exchanges, because the national system had become so fragile, on top of an electric grid in shambles. Sparks erupted off the poles, and she could hear voices emanating from the lines. It would have been one thing if what they were saying was an ordinary conversation, but it wasn’t.

She was certain the voices originated from the peculiar colors of the aurora that that blanketed the greater Cincinnati region in a green midnight glow. She didn’t know how she knew but she knew, a gut instinct that bypassed the rational mind. The conversations she heard were like the one she had with her mom and they made her shudder. Difficult conversations that bordered on the unreal.

That unreality now followed her down the street in a babel of meaningless utterance, like an evangelical falling prey to a fit of tongue speaking. The only thing missing was the froth and the spittle. A crowd of staring people had spilled out of the Anchors Away Bar. They gesticulated like little insects, their skinny little fingers made antennae that pointed up at the sky, waiting for a signal. She felt for sure those antennae were on the receiving end of something. What they were receiving, she could not be sure. Was it malevolent, benevolent, or just a temporary psychotic break? She was at least relieved that it wasn’t just her. The crowd also heard the sizzle of electric talk as it passed down the lines.

All she knew was, she wasn’t ready to go crazy just yet.
 
DR. BENJAMIN
 
At Dr. Benjamin’s madhouse the residents had gone suddenly quiet. He hadn’t even flicked anyone with Thorazine. Nobody had gone sleepy on Seraquel. It was like they had been dosed up on their own. Their incessant crooning had stopped. He didn’t like it when it got too quiet in his hospital. It felt wrong. Maybe it was the cocaine.

He hadn’t expected his little snort of cocaine to have such a deafening effect on him, he was sure that’s what it was. It had to be. He worked such long hours, he needed to get through. He thought he ought to cut back some day, but how could he when their were so may patients to see, so many experiments to run? Maybe the experiments could wait. Maybe he should spend more time at home tending to the needs of his wife and the wants of his kids.

Dr. Benjamin’s hadn’t intended for his hospital to become a prison for men who hated their wives. Yet that was what had happened, at least in part, a side effect of being too indulgent with himself, and certain habits putting him under the thumb of the town’s real bosses -the Newport mob. There really were people who were certifiably insane in his ward. There were plenty of those. Nepenthe heads who had damaged themselves so bad on drugs that they couldn’t be told apart from your natural born paranoid schizophrenic, who were also locked up.

Harvey’s wife hadn’t been the first. He was with Candy now because Dolores hadn’t been enough for him. She’d been too much in fact. When she started questioning some of the men he was associating with, when he was getting deeper into league with the Newport mob. She’d been fine with the book keeping of course, but when he’d had to knock off a few rivals she started having panic attacks. Now she was here, in permanent detention. The anxiety attacks had of course been very real. Every time an orderly came into her room, she panicked.

She was down below now. That’s where he liked to keep the most hysterical of patients. The most hysterical of them were all woman of course, though a few pansies had gone down into the third subbasement. BDSM types would have called it a dungeon, but he preferred the term “down below”. It was a kind of subconscious hell for them, but it was where they belonged. It was where he did his experiments.
 
DOLORES
 
Dolores knew she shouldn’t be where she was. That didn’t change the fact that she was there. Cast aside for some low-town hussy. She’d been good to Harvey. She’d kept her side of the marriage vows, only to end up caged and enraged.

She’d of course been faking the swallowing of her pills as long and as often as she could. The injections were harder to fake. But the orderlies hadn’t come, and neither had Dr. Benjamin, who she knew fantasized about having his way with her, she could just see it on his lecherous face, but for some reason he never acted. She guessed it had something to do with Harvey. Instructions from him, that even though he’d had her committed, she wasn’t to be touched by anyone else. He never visited except when he was in a cruel mood. Crueler mood, anyway. If she’d known as much about him as she did now when she first courted him, she would have kept her distance. He had only showed his charming side then, the side that was a big spender, the side with grand plans and ambitions. He was still ambitious, but it had taken a darker turn when he started courting power for powers sake. When he started hoarding money just to have more. When the bookkeeping changed from just a few bets with friends, to the whole block, to the whole neighborhood, to the whole town. Then, when he was rolling in the dough, he didn’t know what to do with himself, and couldn’t keep his shit together.

            When he started in on the cocaine, that’s when things really took a turn, and it exacerbated his know-it-all, can-do-it-all attitude. Downward spiral after downward spiral after that, only he thought he was going up. It was only a matter of time before it was him on the wrong side of a bullet from a gun thug.

She hadn’t kept her mouth shut about how unhappy she was either, about how she wanted him to stop. Her periodic bouts of depression didn’t help and she ended up in Dr. Benjamin’s lair of psychological sadism.

            In this dank cell, this padded room, she’d been kept in a state of uncomfortable numbness. Her mind was coated in a gauze that kept thoughts and emotions at bay, as if they were distant points of light down some sinister hall. This late evening she’d awaken from another sleep void of dreams. It was the best kind of sleep, as the dreams only tortured her, nightmares of worse times yet to come, or nightmares of a life she never got to live because she’d placed her faith in the wrong kind of man. In any one other than herself, really. The chemical suffusion that so clouded her sense of self was strangely absent. It was one kind of freedom anyway. That was when Larry the orderly came to her door.
 
LARRY
           
The place was strangely quiet, except for a voice that seemed to emanate from the green glow he caught in the sky as he made his rounds on the upper floors, cleaning up the mess of excrement and vomit caused by Dr. Benjamin’s experiments. The glow made what little electric light they had inside flicker with a ferocity he hadn’t elsewise known, it was almost dangerous, and there were myriad voices coming down the wires. “Open up all the doors”, one of them said as a commanding whisper inside his mind, “set my people free”.

At that moment Larry was seized with a fierce vitriol. He would let them free. They were just like him in a way, kicked to the curb one too many times, underdogs. And he knew for a fact many of them weren’t insane at all, especially when he compared them to some of the people he knew on the outside, the people in charge, the people running things. He remembered how Dr. Benjamin had insulted him when he caught him reading an old horror manga comic in the janitors closet where he would sometimes hide between duties. He’d picked that one up at the 9th street flea market last Saturday. Syd always had the good stuff at his table, and he hadn’t been disappointed when he’d gotten a copy of Fumitada Batoh’s much overlooked masterpiece Neverending Underworld. Benjamin called it mind rotting filth, and had told him to go scrub out the toilets, and when he was done with that, to give Ralph a coffee enema. Ralph was a patient who had been constipated, and Benjamin said Ralph couldn’t get stuck at the anal-territorial stage. Larry had grown to resent enema duty. It had seemed alright when he first got on the job, but he’d grown to realize that the doctor and his staff saw him just as much a patient as the weirdos they’d locked up. The mind games they played on him were getting to be too much, and he was going to do something about it.

This was the time to do it too, working the graveyard shift. He was surprised Dr. Benjamin was still here, but he was a sadist, and had strange experiments and relations with his patients. Most of the other orderlies were gone, and those who were there, were as weird as Dr. Benjamin. Larry now wished he’d never taken the job, but they didn’t ask too many questions asked about his past, and since he started the work, he’d been too afraid to quit. Not tonight. His last night.

            The voices told him to start at the bottom and work his way up. Get the queen bee out first. Harvey’s wife. As the spouse of someone high up in the mob, it made the most sense, or so the green glow told him. Other things had stopped making sense, and he felt an increasing dreamlike quality had been grafted onto his mind and time seemed stretched.

            Normally time was like a loop. He’d head home after work when the sun was coming up, maybe stop at Derby Dogs Chili for a couple coneys and two or three beers. They were always open early and catered to those who worked third shift, and to those who worked first who needed a drink and some sustenance in the morning. Then he’d go into his little apartment up on the third floor above Squallie’s Corner Store and Deli, feed his cat Buster half a can of sardines, he’d eat the other half, then maybe drink another beer, look at a dirty magazine, and pass out on the couch. He’d get up, flick off the bed bugs, read some horror comics for an hour or two while he drank weak coffee. He stretched it as far as he could, running water through the same grounds in his French press three or four times. It got him going and he’d stumble down the steps to hang out on the bench with the old timers and shoot the shit while he smoked a cheap cigar. He’d hung out with them more and more since his old lady Darlene walked out on him. She’d grown tired of his comic books and nudie rags, and his laziness. Without her bringing home the bread, mayo, and bacon he’d been forced to get a regular job. As much as he talked about bringing home money from his pool hustling, most of it was always spent on beer.

            He hoped Darlene was happy with that guy who owned the vegetable cart. He seemed like a decent fellow. He hated his guts of course, but he seemed upright and not the hurting type. He didn’t want to see Darlene hurt. He knew that he’d neglected her, but at least he’d taught himself to read. He wanted to be smarter. That’s why he read nudie mags and comic books.

            This time was weird. It wasn’t like his daily routine. It was all stretched out like a bit of chewed on taffy.

            Maybe Dolores herself would run off with him, he thought, as he opened the door to her cell. That’s when the sparks flew and the electric went out in the whole place. 
 
DOLORES
           
This was the moment Dolores needed to seize. She had never thought to escape from the padded, piss smelling room. Opportunity had come in an unlikely ally. Larry seemed to be caught in a trance as he fumbled the lock.

            “Quick, to the others” she whispered and so they went. Some were in straight-jackets. Others were in the straight-jacket of depression and psychiatric drugs. A few stayed behind, silent in catatonia. Others joined and soon were in the stairwell liberating the next level up. Ambling zombies had nothing on the bedraggled wards who now seethed out, eager to reach the mauve zone they could see outside the window, a land swimming with dreams.

            “What if we get caught. What if we don’t make it?”

            “What if we do?”

            This seemed to rally them, like the call of a distant bell or trumpet. A clarion was ringing from the Holy Sophia Parish a few blocks away and the sound bloomed into the fragrance of a hundred roses. The scent was intoxicating, the smell of alien worlds releasing their scent onto Earth. Then it seemed a giant bumble bee, as large and boisterous as a goat, circled down from the stars to the field of roses that glittered in the auroral light, to collect pollen for the nectar of the gods.

            Everyone could see the glow. The walls that had become translucent. One more floor of mind prisoners released, their manacles broken.
 
DR. BENJAMIN
           
This was what he had feared. Larry and Dolores were leading them, and they were all in his office. They had him in their frenzied clutch, dragging him over to a padded cell, putting him a straight-jacket. Then his pants were being pulled down. Larry had the works, he saw. The coffee enema works. The tube was up his butt, and with no lube. The caffeine hit his mind just as he thought that last snort of cocaine was wearing off.

            The jolt was not totally unpleasant. Neither was the tube. He didn’t like being the bottom, but he supposed he deserved being the bottom. All the stuff that had been locked up inside him was now leaking from his bottom and it was the memory of getting picked on in the alleyways of Covington, the memory of being made to do things he didn’t want to do, at gunpoint by his best friend Teddy, who’d they all later learned had been the one poisoning the cats. Later Teddy’s mother had been found dead, and Teddy had disappeared into the hollers, never to be heard from again.

            He missed Teddy, but now those long gone cats from the alleys meowed and prowled around him like spectral holographs waiting to have their own revenge.

            Dolores punched him in the head before dragging him down into the puddle of his own liquid shit. And he stayed there until nurse Bill Larson came in the next day and sprayed him off with the same hose he used for cold water hydrotherapy.

            Perhaps it was finally time to retire to the same dark hollers where Teddy had gone.
 
HARVEY
           
Harvey banged his head against the wall, but it didn’t help him wake up out of the nightmare. Then he heard the banging on his door. It was a male voice, one he didn’t know or recognize. One of his gun thugs should have been there to answer it, but his protection had all been drawn like deer in headlights out into the streets where many were being dazzled by the celestial lightshow and the hallucinatory effects it was having. The door swung open and there they were. His wife Dolores and some unshaved idiot with a griststache who looked like he’d just crawled out of a flophouse on River Rat Row. Dolores had a gun, and the man, Larry, he had a two-wheel dolly and a straight-jacket.

            “My friend Larry here, he wants to take you to visit your old friend, Dr. Benjamin. Then he might have something he wants to show you.”

            “Don’t do it, Dolores! I didn’t mean it! I thought he was only going to keep you for a few days, until you got better.”

            “Maybe he will only keep you for a few days until you get better. You seem kind of nuts to me!”

            “How did you know? Can you see the numbers?”

            He was staring at what looked like a grid of numerical chaos superimposed over reality, and the calculations driving it were changing all the time.

            “What numbers? I guess you really are going nuts.”

            “No, I see them too,” Larry said, his voice trembling. Larry’s vision showed the essential harmony of the universe as a divine Pythagorean equation. He saw every number as a beacon of a particular quality emanating its force out into the world. Harvey’s math had descended to a madness that wasn’t divine. It was all quantity, and for him that quantity was never enough. Even seeing it in all its vastness, made him feel like he had fallen down into the red of negative numbers, instead of the vast connection flowing between them in eternal balance as Larry had just perceived beyond the veil.

            “All you ever thought about was numbers,” Dolores said. “I don’t see what the big problem is now. Maybe now you are just a dumb broken calculator”

            She held her husband under the hammer of the gun, and got him tied up to the two-wheeler. It wasn’t easy to get him down the front steps onto the street. He fell, and then dragged him up and then kept on pushing. There were several more falls along the road, and with each one his skull rattled.
 
CANDY

            Candy was mesmerized by the light show in the sky. It looked like a scene from out of a fairy tale. The green and mauve lights dancing in the sky became pointillistic, then stretched into the clarity of blistering jewel burning with its own internal light, and transformed into a scene that looked like a group of older women and strange animal, maybe alien, beings had gathered together around a table to have some tea in a strange garden. There was a table and woman was sitting on it, and a stairway went up with another being moving towards a portal in the beyond. In another part of the sky a group of three were levitating a body above a checkerboard floor. Birds and humanimals frolicked and conversed and she could hear them, but their language was music and whispers and symbols and light.

Then it faded back, flickered out and dissolved as if were a film that had gotten overcooked by a hot projector bulb. A woman on a white rocking horse appeared from the skys green grass and was speaking right to her.
“You’re mom has gone fishing, go and be with her. Harvey is going into the old desk drawer with the other broken calculators. You won’t be seeing him again.”

 She wondered if everyone else was seeing the same thing? If they could hear it too?

But there was a peace that came from the woman on the rocking horse, and she was gifted with a memory of herself on a rocking horse as a kid with her mom, on one of those happy days when there was a shepherds pie in the oven and apples simmering in cinnamon and sugar on the stove.

She knew the old fishing spot down on the river. Her dad had spent so much time there, smoking his pipe, and she thought she could smell the scent of that amaretto and cavendish he favored drifting along the hot summer night. She followed it along.
 
MRS. INGLEBERT

            Down at the river Mrs. Inglbert was witness to a religious conversion. People were getting baptized in the mauve and green cast waters. People were dancing on the shore. It wasn’t a good scene for fishing, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to get religion. Not after the way her parents went nuts in the Church of the Mall Messiah, a prosperity-based cargo cult that taught the reopening of the malls would happen any day now. Now she believed in something, she just wasn’t sure what all it was. It was getting harder now too, now that telephone poles were talking, now that Fred was back with her so much of the time.

            She’d brought her worms from the compost. They were wriggling something fierce, squirming in the mush. One looked like the sickness that was inside her and she struck it with a hook. Perhaps she’d get that worm out of her after all. Maybe a big fish would come and gulp it up.

            Past a small driftwood fire where a few teenagers were drinking tallboys she made her way down the path under the bridge. Fred would be waiting there. She wished her daughter would come along. Maybe they could have one more night with their father, like in the old times.

DAVE

The next day the madness the world started to ebb. It had been enveloped inside some kind of psychic alien incursion. Dave thought it had emanated from a distant universe on the other side of the aurora. As the sun came up and the day progressed, there was a release of pressure, but all kinds of strangeness had happened all around according to his neighbor.

Dave wanted to find out more, so he plugged in the shortwave radio and tuned around until he found the weather channel again. He waited and waded through all the usual dreck of rising sea levels, floods, high winds, and droughts in the drying west, until the space weather lady came on the air.

“The coronal mass ejections that started just two days ago causing outbreaks of geomagnetic storms last night here on earth seem to have ripped a hole in rationality. We’ve been witnessing massive waves of dream outbreaks. Some might think all of this is fodder for fairy tales, and that’s part of the issue. Renegade psychologist and host of the Archetype Hour on our sister station, WMOO, Desmond Burke, has called it an upwelling of the collective unconscious, when things that were normally repressed resurface and come into the light. Others think that somehow, intelligences from a distant world were carried over the solar waves. Scientists have been left scratching their heads as to how this geomagnetic activity could affect people’s minds. Most scientists in fact reject there was any connection at all, saying it was just a coincidence, that this outbreak of what they call mass hysteria, coincided with the arrival of the solar storm energy on earth. At the same time, there have been numerous reports of patients breaking out from mental health institutions and psyche wards. It seems, that for some people who live with psychosis, the storms actually have had a pacifying effect. Further study is warranted. And while scientists may continue to hedge and hem and haw, regular citizens are less reticent about their peculiar experiences.

 “ ‘We know what we saw and what we have felt’ Jimmy Greenwall of the Greenwall Grocery Wagon’s Firm has said. ‘It’s going to be hard selling turnips now, knowing what they said to me.’ An urban farmer in Detroit noted ‘Some people are calling this a collective hallucination, and who knows, but if it was, it was a pretty real collective hallucination, whatever the heck that means.’ Meanwhile scientists remain worried that this event will only add to the number of people talking about dreams, taking up practical metaphysics, and believing in strange beings that exist in the non-physical realm.”

Dave was no art head, but it seemed that calling this particular storm the Leonora Carrington Event had been right after all. He was just happy that his house no longer resemebled a shoe and the cow was done jumping over the moon. He had a pile of boots to fix for a group of barge workers, and he was eager to get back to work repairing people’s soles.


--Justin Patrick Moore
 May 2024/ July 2025
Cincinnati, Ohio

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