Author’s note: I randomly decided I should serialize an old story I wrote in college. Fun fact, I actually recorded this as an audio book with a full soundtrack and two original songs for my senior project. Not-so-fun fact, I actually hate the sound of my own voice, and on top of that, I was actually sick for most of the recording. I sang a song for it in a key that I usually can’t sing in.
Synopsis: Jasmine is a dancer and a recovering lightning-strike victim who stumbles into a world in another dimension. If she wants to return home, she must befriend a wild, destructive thunderbird who cares for nothing but bells and dancing.
Wordcount: ~10,700 Parts: 9
I turned off the lights in the studio and the coming storm re-colored the room. Slate and silver watercolor washed across the smooth wooden floors. On either wall, parallel versions of me took identical windbreaker jackets off hooks beyond the raw edge of the glass. The mirrors created the eerie illusion that I never danced alone. Silent Jasmines leaped and pirouetted into infinity on either side. They all flinched when the pain spread through by back and shot down my arm.
I forced my hand out through the sleeve of my jacket. I was the only one who could still see the scars, like ivy in the winter, crawling up my back and across my right shoulder, lacy and lavender-gray. The doctor said I should be healed up entirely my now. But of course, one could never know for sure. The pain I tried to ignore might have nothing to do with it.
Just the same, it was hard not to suspect it was left over from the lightning strike.
I was different since that dark afternoon last August. Without making further claims, anyone could tell you that. A light had gone out somewhere in my mind. I didn’t see the world like I used to. Waking up was slow. Falling asleep was even slower. Days merged together and I couldn’t read time or remember names.
The wind roused itself and held the door for me as I slipped outside. My steps reverberated on the rusted stairway, shaking the quiet. I lighted on the sidewalk and looked up at the sky. There was a soft whir, and half a dozen starlings burst from the crisscrossing telephone wires. The charcoal-wash clouds streamed above, and the cables moaned in the wind. A tendril of sable-brown hair flicked out of my tired ponytail and crossed my vision. I pulled it behind my ear and ducked into the wind.
I lived out of town, but it was only a fifteen-minute walk from the studio. I didn’t bother to drive this time of year. Perhaps I should have, today. The storm wasn’t here yet, though. It wasn’t due here until tomorrow. I shoved my hands into my pockets and blew down the road into the gentle undulating hills outside of town.
My house is hidden in a young brushy woodland in the middle of a neighborhood of hay and bean fields. My town is so small, the roads turn to gravel only a couple of miles out. On the curve at the very edge of town stands a huge, mostly debarked ash tree. It’s stood there for a hundred years, probably. Now and then a long-dead limb drops into the road. But I don’t think it’s ever been struck by lightning.
Braving the wind, I lifted my wary eyes to the old tree as I approached it. There was a monstrous bird—at least I took it to be a bird—perched on the tree. It was perfectly still, besides the rustle of feathers in the wind, and it faced away from me, overlooking the soy field. The plumage was sooty black and deep oily slate. The tail– like a peacock’s—cascaded all the way to the ground. The bird itself must have stood almost as tall as me. Presently, it turned its double-crested head over its aquiline shoulders. The eyes were dark and placid–oversized, like a nightjar’s.
I couldn’t tell if it was looking at me. It didn’t respond like a bird would. The wind fluttered the horn-like crests that flanked its head, and it raised them slightly, like a pair of folding fans. It turned back a bit and gave me a profile, staring out into the horizon.
I had imagined it, of course.
The day trailed off into night. Still quiet. I sat in my kitchen watching the gray darken outside. A flock of pigeons careened through the sky in search of some barn loft or silo to roost in. They batted out of sight and the dreary sky was empty again. I stirred honey into my tea, watching it slowly dissolve. If I listened closely, I could hear the musical note the second hand struck with each mechanical twitch. The house went dark around me.
Resigning at last to the close of the day, I got up and prepared for bed. Why did I always feel so let down at the end of every day? Each was just like the one before it, lonely, confusing, and directionless. I always dreamed of a solitary life, but I had never imagined it was possible to be this alone. I saw my students once a week. Not that I particularly liked teaching, but it was something. I guess it distracted from the strange sense that I was falling slowly, with nothing ever to catch me. Falling into another world where everything was silent and uncomprehending.
I remember trying to analyze the sound without opening my eyes before I was fully awake. At first, I was sure it was wind, but when I sat up and looked out the twilit window, everything was still. Thunder swelled and broke through the resonant thrum. Maybe it was wind. Faraway wind. It was about four in the morning. My feet dropped to the floor, and I crossed the room to open the window. A scowl pulled at my waking eyes. It had to be the storm on its way here.
I pressed my hands against the rough wooden frame, about to thrust the window upward, but there I stopped. What was that?
Through the deep blue of the morning, beyond the mottled shrubbery at the edge of the lawn something huge and white was closing in. Smoke? No, it was too dense, and it didn’t rise, it fell. In fact, it cascaded down out of the filmy sky, and advanced like a slow ghostly tidal-wave. I could only think something bizarre must be happening with the atmospheric pressure—forcing the clouds to dive suddenly from their natural altitude and crawl along the earth.
But what was it really? I needed to see the whole sky. That sound wasn’t my imagination, and it was growing louder with the passage of time. There were overtones now, like bowed glass, almost music. I made my way through the house, eyes always on the glowing windows, to the back door. There I paused, listening, staring through the glass. The fog was coming through the edge of the brushy border of the yard now, seeping in through the dark foliage, spilling out across the twinkling grass. I stepped out onto the back porch.
Thunder purred. I scowled up at the sky. The air overhead was clear and dry until the cloud blanket. I tucked my hands under my arms and tiptoed down the damp steps and into the grass. A few paces out, I stopped again and scowled at the cloud coming down. My gaze followed it as it poured over some invisible ledge in the sky a few miles away all the way to the gnarled apple tree halfway between me and the edge of the yard. The fog continued at a walking pace, gradually dissolving the tree and the borders of the lawn.
By the time I looked over my shoulder, the house had vanished. Now and then, a shadow in the fog revealed the line of the roof, but aside from that, I might have been anywhere. I scowled back in the direction of the oncoming cloud. Certainly nothing to see that way anymore. But wait.
There was something. Something dark looming an uncertain distance from where I stood. I leaned toward it and took a step forward.
And the ground gave like thin ice.
I fell back on the heels of my hands. Pain jarred through my shoulders and my head cleared. The fog flicked away, and with it, everything. I pushed myself upright and sat staring around at the vastness, at the infinite sky, and the trackless glass prairie that swept out around me for miles and miles. I drew a breath out of the lightly dancing wind and slowly got to my feet.