Lights on the Prairie

There were lights on the prairie, like milk pouring over corn flakes.  Our hearts hung low in the chest, I could tell by the way the other drivers were before the view. Silent, agape, and hands keeping the chest safe. It wasn't the arrival of Jesus, I knew, but they did think otherwise?

Grains of salt flew away from the protection circles around the house and found refuge in my skin. They had no taste. With that sign, I knew Baby Angel finally took Johannes away.

The cars pulled over along the street exhaled their smog, but the halo of that tiny sun persisted behind it. Under the spell of that supernatural ring, we strangers admired some other kind of arrival. 

Despite I prayed twice that morning, without being a strong believer, God knows why it decided to show its light that evening. God knows why.  However, that second encounter refuted the notion that the first one wasn't a mere child hallucination, but a true manifestation. My prayers and efforts had worked in vain.

Flames came next. Destruction didn't. The entity shook its dazzle and plowed a language on the plains.  Shapes, numbers, and letters were emblazoned on the soil., as a love letter I couldn't figure out. The wheat bowed to its translucent figure and formed circle-like patterns around the property, as acolytes of some unknown nature. The silverish sphere ate the house as we powerlessly observed, unwilling to step on the other side of the wooden fence that led towards that omen. 

The blaze absorbed the planks that conformed the house’s frame, along with the crystals, wallpaper, and pipes in its skeleton. The building warped to my sight, as blankets subduing to the force of a whirlpool. Frayed threads and bleached tapestry patterns came to mind. It’s not real, I thought, unable to move. All that happened when It arrived the first time.

Nature hushed. The wind offered its breeze for carrying the sound of that being. It was a whisper similar to that of a radio lost in the wilderness that sought the right signal frequencies. Almost human. Barely candid. For sure, it obliged us to stay frozen on the street as elders picking the right thoughts up the floor of their withering brains. Quiet. Expressionless. With clouds shadowing the irides. While the TV displays for them white noise in the dark. 

The sun was zirconia compared to that entity’s gold. I could feel its liquid shimmer running down my throat and leaving crumbs of visions deep in my flesh, for me to collect like once in my childhood. A sugary taste surged in my teeth as if I had eaten a caramel apple and didn't wash off its copper venom, which brewed into an alcohol flavor in my calcium. Unpleasant. Unconsented.  As if poisoned.

No animal introduced itself. The creatures that once disturbed the visual peace of the prairies, or that gave them that special liveness, remained hidden in the surrounding landscape. They see things we can't. They have something in their blood, in their hollow brains. Things we don't. 

*

Are all my thoughts of that square in the forest? Its glint. A silver rift in some dimension. Hans and I escaped through it since mom and dad starved to madness. Boom. Boom. Boom. Their gunshots behind. Our hands and hair became chrome like smoke, then the smell of demonic bread took form in the dark. The light from that red square house turned brighter, a neon solace, as the earth breathed underneath. Soft black grass. Sweet raptured light. Honey-coated flesh in a bowl. For us hungry kids who had no world to go back to.

*

The tempest was gone when we woke up.  The house remained the same as when I left in the morning: a shaky whitish square on top of a hill. Something in the air was different, however. The tones were the same in the atmosphere, with diverse tints of greens and blues painting the scene. The firmament, although sheathed with a different shell of clouds, was  mountains cutting the sky like solid waves. A Welcome to Mersey’s Home sign hung over the wooden entrance between the street and the property. Ours, yet it was a strangers’ land. 

The neighbors and I rose up in confusion. Our limbs trembled to find stability in the breeze, with dizzy skulls trying to keep straight in the spine. A sea taste persisted in my throat, while my skin itched and burnt in the sun as If I had been softly sanded in my sleep, by creatures as small as pores. 

The smoke of the cars elevated and trapped their bodies in its tumultuous transparency. Shaking their visions off their shells, the people were ghosts seeking their tombs in that marred atmosphere. Foreign shapes I couldn't distinguish until they stepped away from the haze and the sun streamed its light on them. I knew two of the four.

Mrs. DuPoint opened her mouth to talk as soon as she saw me, but silence came out of it. She contorted as if thirsty, grabbing the saggy skin of her neck downwards in increasing desperation, gasping for air.  On the ground, the apples that she would bring for us every morning were slashed onto the soil, and the basket that contained them rested feet away. The honeycrisp peel crushed on the earth reminded me of animal hide curing into leather: blood-tinged flesh becoming copper as the sun exorcized the water out of them. The image of the apples’ liquid merging with that of the dew on the grass, forced me to pick them up after all was done, for me, since Johannes wouldn't be home anymore.

Her grandson didn't seem to come down to his sense. Instead, he gifted his sight to the landscape. No emotions blossomed in him, as it occurred with the adults, but a fascia emptying itself into the prairie. In the wind that swayed the visible world. In the clusters of insects that took their place back around. In the hills bathed by light particles, remnants of Baby Angel. 

Unable to mutter a word, she hooked his bony hands onto Daniel’s enchanted face and bellowed a croon just for his ears. The other people who were victims of the shimmer were a mature couple I’d never seen before. The blackness of their clothes revealed that they had lost someone recently, and by the way they tapped eachothers’ fingertips as reflections on a mirror, and found themselves in the confusion caused by the encounter, I saw they only had one another. They met their gazes in complete awe and whispered a gibberish language that could probably be Spanish. No smile but disappointment in their fretting eyes. Why? I remembered Johannes once told me, amongst the whimpers of his impaired speech and drooling,  that Mrs. Dupont shared with him the news that some Hispanics had bought the farm next to hers, not far from where our property was. They desired to get away from their previous life, I surmised just then. I understood them since we all did the same.

I remained steady in the waves of the evening heat. I pierced my attention into the distance to observe the mirage ahead. Or wherever the kid looked at. Its colors died and softness hardened when the angel’s poisoned specter retired to the back of my skull. Evenings hit harder the older you get.

*

They had no voice. The specter had overshadowed their senses and allowed just the basic skills to continue inhabiting their carcasses.  Walking and breathing were among those. Enough to survive just until the triggering dazzle’s copy finished installing itself somewhere in the brain. Nothing to worry about since it was a normal livestock branding, deep in the soul. The dizzying effects would wane with days and rest, but life at a farm does not permit that.  Nights and days had no meaning for us, fragile skeletons sheathed by even more destroyed tissues, moved by a strong-willed heart. Yet they will find the way like good rural people. How did I manage to recover back then? We were kids when it happened, but Johannes, being the youngest of us, never came back to himself. I wondered where the true Hans was hiding in that deformed body of his. In the infinity where we were taken?

With a head gesture, we all understood we had to go back home to sift things through. Mrs. DuPont carefully walked Daniel by pushing his upper back, who moved according to the hand’s lead towards their Midget car.  And his eyes… melted into some invisible realm. 

The couple kept their hands enlaced and did not look back at us as they walked to their car and drove away. Those gazes manifested something strange. From where I was, I perceived that their eyes’ shape and irides had something unnatural in them. Human, as it should've been, or a bit too human. Maybe the light was adjusting itself in them. For sure, they would not be normal anymore.

The dust hurled upwards by the vehicle's departure soon descended in slow motion, with the smoke of their artificial combustion. So, I swam again in the sinister haze, alone with the apples. 

*

I rotated the key. It clicked. Silence welcomed me from the inside. Behind me, the salt circles were nowhere to be found, just a barren land sprinkled with yarrow plants and silver powder.

Johannes’ wheelchair was in the living room and his medicine scattered on the floor. The house would be more of a home if it weren't for the emptiness of its space. A simple couch in the hall, two forks in the kitchen, a towel for both of us, and so on. But that ancient chant confirmed my suspicions. The croon. It came from upstairs. His room. Gingerbread smell came along with it. Cinnamon and vanilla filled my lungs.  My tummy gurgled. Water wetted my mouth. A tickle somewhere inside my head flourished the dream: a human specter of the smell, like in those old cartoons, walked gingerly and made a “follow me” signal to me with its finger. It disappeared when it opened the door and I went inside. Hans’ room was empty. It wouldn't be useful to call his name since Baby Angel took him away. I meant him, not my Hans. I had good legs and brains, unlike that version of him. 

The smell of cookies gathering star matter shook my hunger. A hot oven shaping the desserts hid in this world of Hans. I waited. It was a matter of time for the light in my spine to show me the truth. I closed my eyes and felt it all. The click of a key unlocking a gate woke me up. 

The wall facing me opened sideways from the middle part of the window, like store sliding walls, into a realm of memories. The real world from behind didn't alter. Our sun somehow kept steady as the crystal and wood broke into halves.  The clouds continued their path as the blues of the sky deepened. An intense gleam fractured the bedroom, so my eyes hurt. I covered my face with a hand.

Ribbit ribbit, ribbit. A voice sang from it. If I knew that tongue, would I feel the power of its spell cracking my skull to pull me into that world of lunacy? Still, that dimension took shape before me. Ochre. Humid. Dazzling. This side remained as Hans’ room. Dull. Chilly. Asbestos-filled. 

I had heard stories from lunatics wandering in the nearest town, about parallel universes and body robbers, and prophets possessed by magic-filled neurons that forced them to dance in circles for a god expelled from heaven. Was the swamp in the room the paradise they gushed about? Hans and I had traveled there before. The fairies led us there several years ago when we both were kids, to help us run away from our parents, who starved to madness. Then the square house and the crone… Baby Angel… and the bewitched daydreams hidden in sugar meals.  

Somewhere on the other side was the old fairy, waiting for flesh. Was Hans there too or had he been eaten a long time ago? I meant my real brother, not the Johannes I got back with after we went missing. A changeling had occurred. Fairies do it. My Hans had golden hair and sapphire blue eyes, but Johannes dirty brunette fur and a set of purplish ocelli. When you're alone in the world, however, you orbitate around strange companionship. I naturally kept the new Hans.

When we came back to earth, we knocked on a strangers’ door and helped us until we were a burden. What did they think when they saw two soiled children covered in grime, blood, and sweat? 

In Hans’ room,  I pictured Baby Angel preparing the sugar meals for another one, as the amber fire awakes in the oven. It cries chants of a mournful nature, a language composed to imitate human sorrows. Ribbit. Ribbit. Ribbit. A deep drone that shakes me to a microcellular level. Baby Angel is a tall humanoid axolotl on its feet: a water-swollen corpse draped in red algae, whose blubber quivers with every motion, under that silky chrome that shines in the kitchen light. Dolphin's skin. A bony halo rises on its head, from which hair tinsel-like feathers fall around its frame. Shiny. Entrancing. Cosmical. No eyes where our eyes are. No holes where ours are. A sole mystical mass of outer space.

If I got to finish dinner with Baby Angel, I’d interrogate it about Hans’ whereabouts and let it know that it could keep Johannes if he wanted. But will It substitute me for another me? If so, will the other Greta pick up the bread crumbs I left years ago and take my place to be free?