“Not Gonna change your tie my sparrow?”
“Not this time, it's got a bit of oil on it. Ready,” Popper says locking eyes with his lover, and she pulls him in for a final flashing embrace, lasting until she nibbles his tongue. They cock their weapons, an unpolished gold plated AK 47 for him and a sub-machine gun with an extended clip for her. The Ribbits are set up at all the entries and exits, and in battle positions behind cars throughout the sprawling airport parking lot. Local swat teams and the spinning lights of squad cars are spreading a pulsing red and blue over everything in view. The local sheriff starts talking confidently, with practically as squadron behind him, at the duo through a loudspeaker.
“The Ribbits didn't tell em,” Popper laughs.
“Guess not, they never do tell the locals.”
As the bus pulls out of its place Anna sees the backs of Harley and Popper, seeming the same sight as they pass her view, standing against hundreds of authorities minions seeing them down the barrel and staying steady to their beat on the defiant duo. All but the few pencil pushers are unknowingly participants to the sparrow’s annually celebrated ritual of death and renewal. Canisters are thrown by the swat teams, trailing tear gas toward them, and a line of smoke shot from a grenade launcher on Harley's hip, arches into the air as her reply. The bus starts speeding then turns sharply, pulling the scene out of Anna’s sight, but she hears the metal twisting explosion of the grenade landing, then the gas tanks of parked cars popping like heated corn kernel.
The loudspeaker button clicks for a second, but when the sheriff is about to yell, Popper shoots it right out of his hand and him in the mouth. The standoff erupts into a shootout lead spreading lead like pollen through the winds of spring. Harley and Popper are dancing out of the strafing bullets and bad aim of the attacking officers and pencil pushers, Knowing they have one more song to go they move fearlessly and shoot flawlessly as they swing smoothly as one through their deadly dancing. Having the time of their lives for the last minutes of them, before their song ends and their number is up. Gloatingly floating freely over the spent shells falling from their weapons, and taking trick shots behind their backs and over their heads. Popper strums his rifle like a guitar while shooting wildly at empty cars to jar and suppress the Ribbits and their local flunkies. In the heat battle they jive, skip, duck and hop like excited birds with clipped wings. Their open gym bags spill and splash jewels, and money, and bullets to the ground while they're slowly being flanked by authorities crawling up on either side.
Two more grenades explode, ravaging glass and metal to wreckage. One takes out an empty swat truck, the other a group of rental cars and setting hundreds of car alarms off simultaneously, serenading the whole parking lot with asynchronous electric beeps. Masking the pings of ricochets and crunching glass around them, but not their music. Down to the last song of the Valentine’s day, songs for everlasting lovers countdown. The lot is spotted with flames and sprinkled with shattered glass and downed law enforcement.
The duo start feeling the pressure closing in, fighting to focus through their fight or flight instincts, sweating like they’re in sweltering desert heat. They jump behind their tattered cream convertible. Harley picks off two who are shooting from behind Popper and he pops his head up to spray suppressive fire with sweeping motions of his rifle. The duo are crouching up like hiding children, looking into each others fear filled, wily eyes. Every emotion they possess is surging at once, no matter how many times they relive this moment, the depths of heart wrenching pain and crippling anguish resurface, while soaring from their adrenaline dumped for their last few seconds of survival, primal savages knowing nothing but the breath of the other until their inevitable end.
“Think of happy thoughts my sparrow,” she says, stroking his cheek and taking his blush onto her thumb.
“When dying, I'll think only of how I will caress you when I wake,” he says, taking a tear from her cheek and wiping it across his lip. He’s still a junkie, though a junkie for her, the queen of his needleless dreams. Just as she’s still a scared child and he's her pillow, the white knight of her delusional fantasies. They grow brazen, brave in knowing they'll see each other after this is all done and finished. He takes her by the hand and swings her out onto the hood of the car. Out of the safety of their slight nest, then follows her up recklessly shooting in all directions. Their nerves are giving up, they’re overheating, becoming physically exhausted, overwhelmed. Their bodies and minds are riding the adrenaline high of staring down death. Vainly trying to defend the other from the assault of flashing muzzles and flying lead whizzing past their heads.
In the their minds, the photographic memories of their lives begin to flash behind their eyes, they are together, always, in every glimpse of their past. They strafe and rake, and flutter around, evading as much as they can, careful to stay close to always one another. The fire power becomes greatly overwhelming, as time seems to slow down for the last seconds of the last song to play out sluggishly enough to hear the pick touching the chords, and each interval of the chord shaking over the guitar and bass and the drums sounding like slowed down fireworks.
A bullet tears through her neckerchief throwing a splash of red from her throat, dropping Harley to her knees gasping for air unable to even scream. Popper sees it all, every time, the reddening of her neckerchief and eye dying as she convulses in agony, recurring every year for as long as they love each other, eternally. He starts screaming like a raving lunatic and firing blindly in a blind tantrum. She falls to the ground watching his polished brown shoes trample frantically over the their spilled money, empty bullet casings, and her favorite, lavender diamond's, sparkling next to shrapnel and shattered glass. Lead blows the bones from Poppers right knee, he falls with his full weight onto his left. Kneeling like a knight, helplessly, squeezing the trigger as his hands fall to his sides, not shooting back anymore. Only staring into his lover's dying face, to be sure she is the last thing he'll see, as she unblinkingly stares to his.
Harley closes her eyes a split second before Popper's chest explodes in a burst of red, and his body falls limp to the hot asphalt. Into the blood spilling from her neck staining the shiny lavender stones, to lay in death next to his dying sparrow. The car radio returns to static as the airwaves empty of the Valentine’s day countdown of everlasting love songs. Harley’s soul leaves her body a cadaver not a second after her sparrow’s last breath.
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Burning bridges
Anna's bobbing up and down with her head resting on the black of night, the only sight to be had from the bus window. The driver turned the aisle lights off a while back, leaving only a few little conical lights lit over each uncomfortably cushioned seat. Outside some glimmering dust slowly floats close enough to the glass to get a good glimpse of them passing.
“Why's the snow so bright?” she asks.
“It's not snow,” he says.
“It's a storm out there,” she says pointing to the intensifying flurry of tiny flashing snowy flakes sweeping as speckles of white whirling erratically to the whim of solar winds. “The flakes are huge. You can even see the little ice crystals,” she says excitedly.
“It's not snow.”
“Yes is it.”
“Look again,” he says as the speckles grow from the size of pebbles to the size of pennies. Each slowly sifting from a single speck of light into two speckles, then three, then five and more. Enlarging enough to see each split is actually two splits then three, then five minuscule glinting multicolored sparkles lasting a split second between each sifting glint. A single flake flickers then splashes as a thousand thousand flashes while melting and flash freezing into rime as it touch the foggy bus window. Casting off the energy of the continuous spectrum while evaporating into wisps of glittering dust.
Cider leans over her and blows his breath to fog the dust spotted window. She wipes the fog away to see millions of minuscule wavelengths emanating from the many microscopic supernova of each
split of the snowflake then dripping down the glass as a drop of effervescing fluid. Just a single flake of snow in the blizzard is composed of incalculable quantities of mass and energy. Of Earths and moons, solar systems and star systems, star cradles and whole galaxies. The desires and deaths of individuals, whole societies and histories, countless civilizations eradicated as energy is so seemingly simply released by the flow of entropy.
“What is it then?” she asks.
“Some type of space dust or something,” he says.
“That's splitting hairs,” she says.
“No it's not hairs. They're some type of fractal flake, each a universe of something or something. It means we're coming close to the bridge.” he says.
“But they’re so small.”
“Wouldn't be if we were inside them.” He says pointing to the fractal flakes flurry over the window.
“Who's to say we're not?” she smiles.
“In fractal flakes of snow ourselves.”
“Melting against a dusty glass window of someone else's daily commute,” she says showing teeth as she smiles. He turns the overhead light on to show her the grains of airborne dust aglow filing the inside of the bus, slowly floating in front of their faces, then rapidly oscillating around her. Then Quickening and colliding as effulgent web like flashes casting an array of varying wavelengths, bathing Anna's excited face in split second shifts of fleeting color and energy feilds. Over seconds rendering the tiny peaks and valleys of ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma rays visible to her naked, and interacting as overlapping pulses of ethereal ebbing and flowing light.
A chain reaction ignites every grain of air to successively pop like microscopic supernovae sweeping outward to fill the volume of the bus’ interior with blinding blue violet bursts of plasma momentarily becoming minuscule superstructure shapes before vanishing. A sudden spin tingling sensation of resonance is vibrating lightly through her finger tips into her palms, up her arms to cross her shoulders and pouring back down her spine. Her trembling hand turns to uncontrollable shaking as the frequencies reflect from inside her breast to reverberate through her ribs, rapidly rumbling through her chest, and rattling about her brain. A calming warmth accompanies a strange sensation as her skin atomically separates from itself, then from her flesh, and her flesh from her ionizing bones. Seeming to her like she's a atomizing, and spreading like a hand full of sand dropped into boiling water.
The blinding white flashes recede so that she can see her own body and bones as loosely bound, lightly vibrating and slowly sublimating atoms vaguely emulating her form in the form of astral light emitting vapor. A very gaseous Anna looks down to see her nebulous figure radiating multicolored emissions of freed energy luminously colliding into clusters and churning into spirals while ionizing to plasma of her before her very eyes. Swirls, swift circles and curved lines of blue lit particle paths jet from her fingers and mouth and pupils to meet at her ever radiant refulgent center. Forming a current and forcing her emulsifying luminescent dust into tiny star clusters and liquid plasma proto-galaxies collecting as they come closer to her center, her core. Inch by inch condensing into a mass of convulsing, continually converging cannibalistic black spheres sweeping into swathes of alkahestic singularities spiraling around the ethereal illuminations of her undulating heart. Beating and beaming, crystallizing and cracking, releasing bursts of Panchromatic refulgence rippling inner light through her rarefying ribs and air before her.
Her pupils are ensnared by the pulsating spectra emanating from one, then a few, then thousands of iota sized plasma crystals suspended an inch over her open palms. She's enamored by infinitesimal planetesimals and planets eaten as morsels by growing crystal clusters that are then engorged by dust gathering galaxies being devoured by tiny swirling stellar black holes at the tips of her fingers. All coalescing into the luminous veins of blue plasma jetting toward her center and emblazoning her beating breast to resemble a surging red sprite repeatedly enlarging to the size of a volleyball before collapsing and releasing a bursts of beatific light blue and orange energy. A flash to each flutter of her beating heart in second long cycles of forcefully exploding and imploding to explode again. Lasting for what feels like forever outside of time.
“What is this?” she asks.
“Your center I suppose. Your soul, or something. We've all got a bit of Central in us,” he says.
“Is that where we're going? to the soul of eternity?” she asks, unable to entirely grasp what she just said.
“Sort of, I guess if you have to encapsulate it words, something like that, sure. Look over there, is that snow too?” he asks pointing through the snow filled window toward two giant stars in binary orbit, lighting the others spiraling wakes, starkly standing against a Panchromatic expanse of space.
“Those are blue giants.”
“And those?” he says, about the many more stellar sized stars popping into view until space is loaded with emerging and erupting spheres of ultraviolet light. Ionizing in slow motion, with giant molecular clouds enshrouding them as they churn through cycles of celestial ultra-violence. The bus is sailing a light-year a minute through the intensifying blizzard and stellar winds. Near enough to some stars to see the magnetic currents of their surfaces as unique to each as a fingerprints. They're passing through imploding star clusters of one starburst galaxy after another, through the billions along the long astral road toward Central, the center of all things. Even witnessing the calamitous death of a dimension, clearing a universe of the sight of stars and filling the sight of her open eyes with an instant of infinitely cascading celestial chaos occurring in the blink of an eye, and again with each blink of her honey brown eyes.
Passing through millions of billions of bright spiraling galaxies and their dense dominions of trillions of billions of twinkling stars gravitationally conglomerating into elliptical superstructures. Then bound loosely into celestial threading fabricating into immense filaments forming a vast single system of infinitely intertwining vitreous supercluster complexes. Parsec sized pulses of light surge randomly through the threading, resembling the flow of synapses through the dendrites of a deeply pondering person’s gray matter. The whole scene is shrinking further and further from view, until hundreds of thousands of these filament threads fit into a single sight through the snowy bus window.
The stellar storm slows, weakening to only lightly blow the ebbing snow, then stops entirely, leaving the flakes frozen in fall. Each individual flake begins clumping into another, colliding, sublimating and collecting on contact into small vertically rising lustrous hexagonal streaks of crystalline rain. Binding and repeating into elongated inch sized hollow honeycombs increasingly replicating to fill the entirety of space outside sailing bus. Incrementally thickening and growing into progressively larger hexagonal structures enlarging from a centimeter to the size of a fist, to a foot, to a meter then a mile high and wide. Continuing in scope until the hollow of the honeycombs are a light year across and their sides of snow are lucidly aligned into colossal cryptocrystalline pylons. Each a minute's travel from the next.
A star system sized emission ray ravels out a vaporous red, ebbing pink fringed plasma road, known to Centralers as a prominence bridge. Created from chromospheres skinned from countless stars and formed into a single path passing only between the crystalline pillars lustrously reflecting the illusion of light solidified. The celestial threading spread across the window's view multiplies by factors of a hundred, repeating continuously, until shrinking away again from the window to be small enough to fit in a single view with the individual filaments becoming invisible to the naked eye. To eventually become a single fractal fiber of a single thread of a supercluster filament of an unfathomably massive webbing system of gravitationally bound matter.
In the open span of space on either side the prominence bridge, are earth sized peaks and valleys of slowly oscillating obsidian wavelengths. Multiplying in orders of magnitude until they're several suns high and low. Anna watches their obs
idian luster slide over the frequency of ascending and descending fluctuations shaping the space around the bus into monumental waves.
“What is that?” She asks.
“The endlessly rippling event horizon, we're getting close to Central,” he answers. The wavelengths frequency increases into minute long vast vacillations as the bus screams silently through the ether. Blue shifting the cardinal chromosphere path purple as they near, with each intensifying ripple rising into perfectly vertical walls of standing space nearly seamless from the vapid vacuum of volume existing outside the window. The slight stone blue opalescence shaping the shortening peaks and valleys of the waves, becomes so vast and close they seem to either vanish into open space or become it. Deep in the distance are the tiny glowing lights of superstructures as small as speckle, of a single universal fiber fabricating into fulgent filaments. Along with millions of other filaments forming the fibers of even greater supercluster threads continually woven into ever more immense webs. That shrink to her eye to be thin as a human hair, and another set of thread grows as millions more emerge and shrink in a repeating cycle of continually enlarging and furthering fractal filament structures. Trillions of these glistering threads are weft together until a single sheet of versicolor space-time fabric emerges with each thread of the film containing all the frequencies of the known multiverses.
The pulsing synapses that thrive through each thread, increase in number, and amplitude. More and more of them are marbling through the sheet of space-time fabric aglow against an all enveloping dark matter backdrop. The sheet begins shrinking in size, compressing to resemble a strip of cell membrane. Its entirety aligning with a second sheet slithering through open space, overlapping and amplifying each other’s celestially threaded patterns. Then a third, another, and a fifth, to an eighth sheet, and repeatedly multiplying until there's millions of them converging, but never touching. Conforming into overlapping layers, and aligning into a lattice structure of superstructure stratum continually compressing into a single translucent sheet.
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