Luminous Blowballs

Dale tugged the canvas strap around his wrist and sent a tungsten rod careening over the valley below. Around him, bioluminescent bugs, the size and gravity of dandelion blowballs, fell like soft rain. They collected in clumps at the feet of the sub-orbital cannon.

As it did at regular intervals, Dale’s phone rang. He swiped to answer.

“I’ve spent the day with someone else,” said the strong voice. “And the night before.”

Dale tugged again, summoning another tear of viscous metal. It hissed like chalk crumbling across an underwater blackboard.

“I wanted to let you know,” said the voice. “I don’t think we should speak anymore.”

Dale looked down the valley from his hill. A small city divided two high mountain ranges.

“We shouldn’t speak?”

Dale stood for a moment in a sphere of clear air; the pressurization wave from the barrel had pushed away the luminous insectine mist. However, the sound, like the closing of an epoch, had broken the tiny microphone inside Dale’s phone, which, set to speaker, was now only that.

The bugs returned. They had been collecting in a mug of tea and milk set on a table beside the cannon, Dale noticed. He kicked it over and phosphor cream soaked into brown dirt.

“Dale, can you hear me?”

His voice didn’t register.

With his cannon, Dale had missed. He had never once hit his target — a visual anomaly that hung in the sky. The object was large enough to view unaided. It had come unexpectedly, causing unease.

Here was why: it reminded you of something. In its light, the distance between perception, alluvial channels of sensation, and oceanic memory came to a close. Your eyes got wet. Sudden and unsettling insight into the body as it is and was. The city people voted unanimously for it to be destroyed.

Dale was assigned the task; he otherwise provided no additional torque to the city’s seamless commercial machinations. One of one too many.

Night after night, Dale draped the object in a shower of technicolor sparks — lazy half-halos which hung, at a point, on the visual moment of the city’s collective hope and fear.

The lines were broken. Dale’s words missed the phone and, small and scared, rolled down the hillside and turned into traffic. Cannonfire echoed in his chest like a chorus. Where bug and cream had soaked into soil, translucent stalks and shy flowers rose, forming a small climate that supplied its own air.

“Can you hear me, Dale?”

He could.

* * * *

I have claimed to be the first to perceive the object, and it may be true. As best I can tell, the object came into existence through language, in a series of texts between two people, flirting, on a dating app. Gestures careening toward hope.

As with all calamities, the moment of its beginning is hard to pin down. These people were messaging on phones. Their language swirled in high atmosphere. Their gestures, independent of anything, began to collect small objects and stardust, lured passing angelic gas. A whirling mass grew, developed spin, circling hands, and formed a kind of celestial eddy. At the center of it all, space was created. At no known time, that space became inhabited, and time hid behind a star.

I was the first to perceive the object, and to me, it suggested something. Suggested something unequivocally, like a Turing test. A Turing test is a test delivered to a machine, such as if they pass, they are not a machine, but human. The test was delivered by mistake. I am not accusing my lover of being human. They never received anything by mistake. I received the object in my mind’s eye, with the clarity of a trauma. It stated something. But trauma isn’t the right word, I insist.

It was suggested we meet for drinks. I didn’t know what to do with the object in my head, the spinning pulsar of my lover’s language. When we met, I knew what to do with it. When I looked into her eyes, there was a haunting, a cascade of mirrors. Like my own reflection, the object was there, in a kind of second sight. The object was still in my head, too. Suddenly, normal functioning speech was pure pretend, because, as you may imagine, the scene was now operating on a number of distinct levels, each with unique pangs and colors. We talked about cars breaking down. We talked about our families.

It was strange, though. This isn’t what it seems. Nothing happened.

I felt to be sharing space with a lighthouse, one with a freely rotating swivel, where two powerful magnets aligned my eye to the steaming-hot bulb, through a unique magnetism. Unique, unto them, as no freighters were pulled from the nearby bay and into my face, though this would have been preferred. No one else seemed aware of the lighthouse, though it was speaking.

“I need to tell you something,” I interrupted. Maybe I said it.

I was sharing space with someone I had not spoken with in a very long time. It rang like a truth – Alan Turing assured me that the object was not a hallucination, but a lucid memory: its silhouette, the object, had remained in situ, after hundreds of years.

What had happened? Were we lovers? Sisters? Friends? A family?

“You need you to stop talking to me,” she said, weeks later. “I’m just busy.”

“Of course,” I say. I mean it. I can distinguish her from the memory.

“Try to be at peace with this,” she says to anyone.

It’s hard for me to tell what she looks like. Now as then, the figure resists resolution. I remove myself and wait another turn.

* * * *

Time regains composure, and the object takes a breath. The streams of the valley run down to the sea. As a person, she likes to swim. She likes to imagine her body curving through the air. She pulls out a small knife to open the letter she has received. Luminous blowballs spill from the envelope and onto her desk. The insects turn like organic gears.

The letter is an intrusion. She lays the knife on top of the envelope, subduing it.

It’s hard to know what she’s thinking at this moment, but she pulls out a pen and a sheet of paper. She flicks her wrist gently to equalize the energy between her fingers and the nearby lamp.

It’s hard to know what she’s thinking, exactly, but she writes these words, in clear letters, on the page:

I have all the time in the world, and I will use that time to pursue moments of my choosing.

Signed,

Violette

She goes to the window. Below her, the sounds of the small city accumulate and drift. It’s early morning, but her office opens soon, and, already, she can see that people wait outside to see her. She hopes more come. Overhead, the sound of nothing. Nothing strikes boldly through the firmament. She looks to the mountains. Her eyes are arcing bodies of water, and concentric circles spread shoreword at a pace suitable to her motion.

* * * *

Dale tugs the canvas strap at his wrist, and the letter spills open with luminous blowballs. In our ecology of stars, the dust settles to reveal an object, startling in its crispness and clarity. She picks up the phone — not out of habit. For the first time, the action is deliberate, the result of the machinations of generations. Dale checks his watch. The time seems right. It is impossible what happens next, Dales knows as it’s happening, when his phone rings. He knows who is on the other end. Dale sets down his mug of tea and answers the phone.