A Bright House
Chapter 56

Five hours and more, the Gray Coach bus route from Toronto’s hyper-hive busy Bay Street terminal to Kincardine township. Many stops along the way, of course, to discharge or pick up passengers in every sleepy little town on the schedule. The long remaining hours of the night before were entirely sleepless for Jenny, who found her eyelids weighted by lead lining as she reclined in the half-empty bus that pulled out of Bay station. She was so very exhausted that every molecule seemed to buzz. Her entire skin surface alternated from chills to heat flashes.

Her legs couldn’t seem to find a comfortable position. Each intake of breath tingled in an unpleasant way; it was worry, perhaps. Helpless worry that she could not exchange for proactive positive energy from actually doing something to find out what was happening to Ray. Other observations escaped Jenny during the first half hour of bus wheels rotating and carrying her out of a city she never left : that this impromptu journey would have been unthinkable not long ago.

Gradually the miles multiplied. Jenny’s eyelids grew heavier under the steady white noise hum of the tires in the wheel well beneath her seat. She considered moving to another part of the bus and decided that she liked the humming and didn’t mind the slight bump and jar of where she sat. The sandpaper feeling against her eyes when she blinked grew less bothersome, too. Jenny fell asleep somewhere between Orangeville and Shelburne, with her pretty head pressed against the window pane and a deep breathing that issued her directly into a dream state. Ray had been the last conscious thought, of course, as had been the loop cycle for hours on end.

For a while just after her mind left behind almost all of the bus that contained it, she was nevertheless slightly aware of the hum, the bump, the muted sounds of other passengers talking or turning pages in their books. It was then somehow strangely comforting. There came a half formed peacefulness that she sank down into. She felt as though Ray had joined her and was sitting in the very next seat, looking with loving eyes at her as she drifted ever deeper into dreamland. Oh, how she cared for him. Oh, how simple and sweet was the wish to spend time in his company, to get to know all of him and all of how they would be in shared energies.

The feeling of him being there in the next seat was something akin to a memory. It so mirrored how she had experienced their moments together during the walk to her home and subsequent trip to the island where he “read” for her. A small part of her mind, still awake in the bus, caused Jenny to briefly open her eyes to a dancing fluid motion of telephone and hydro wires. It took her farther back, somewhere in childhood with the foster parents, and into the unsettled and frightening life she had walked through then. A similar window view from a back seat. Both adults were arguing about something, saying hurtful things to each other, and young Jenny’s gaze locked onto the wire dance as the black lines bobbed up and down before and after each tall wooden pole interrupted their repetitive monotonous soothing cadence.

As it so often is within the strange dimension of dream being, Jenny could vividly feel Ray beside her, his fingers wound through hers as their hands clasped atop the armrest. She shifted backward into feeling as though wide awake, where she wanted to turn toward his handsome profile to say “I was just dreaming that we were together on a bus”, and this realization in turn shifted the dream. She could not lift her head from the cool glass of the window. From the hundreds of little road vibrations travelling through the pane into her forehead, lulling and gently trapping Jenny between worlds of awareness.

Her eyes just watched the wires lift and flow and fall, lift and flow and fall, and she distantly wanted to turn to Ray but recognized that she was dreaming inside a dream. Something suddenly quite disturbing wanted in. She ignored it with a more dream-determined focus on the wood pole wire dance, but could feel his hand as it shifted and changed within her fingers. Somewhere in southern Ontario between Orangeville and Shelburne, Jenny snapped back to wakefulness when in dreaming she was finally able to turn her head and see that Ray’s left hand had become a large cracked yellow claw.

Townes is alternating between layers of cognitive drift. There seems a long dark void of sensory intermission in the aftermath of seeing the raging wildfire that nearly consumed Delsin Shacapot; Cree, father, Thunderbird, inter-dimensional spirit. Always felt dimly present there is a water pressure and coldness. A part of his cognition knows this to be his mortal body still trapped beneath the liquid surface that has claimed him. When he attempts to “find” that body, through its nervous system indicators, the perceptive energy fields shift and take him away again. When this feeling of being removed, or planted elsewhere within this mutable abyss, occurs... he cannot find human emotions to apply.

Whatever is happening, or has happened irrevocably, is overpowering what remains of the mind’s will. “This is a shared body” no longer whispers itself into truth, for he is aware again (distantly) of flying but that he is now alone. Something has broken off within. After the sentience of that once named Scott was evaporated... after the big body crashed through a shed and once again took flight, turning back toward the vortex nest. It is only what is left of Ray, now. This is a constant loop that cannot be willfully conquered because it is ancient and designed to do only what sentient multi-dimensional loops do.

Perhaps the mortal mind can influence its direction simply through awareness. Perhaps an awakening or opening of the vast unrealized potential within that type of mind can indeed alter the course or choice of pathways and outcomes, but is there ever truly an “outcome”? Time is not capable of cessation. An energy pathway that exists all at once in every possible variation, cannot be finalized. It becomes, then, the viewing angle at any point along the way. This is its “reality”. All of those gnashing fluid thoughts are flying along with the wide swath of these powerful wings that carry the Townes mind forward, back through its return loop. It recognizes itself and can do nothing more than recognize itself recognizing itself.

The road-dusty Gray Coach bus pulled into a station in the landlocked town of Walkerton. Here there would be a half hour snack and stretch the legs break. Jenny stepped out into open air and felt herself cloaked in invisible fuzz. She wanted more sleep. She wanted to return to Ray’s hand in hers, to undo the metamorphosis she had awoken from. A variety store with a small restaurant serving classic diner style comfort food beckoned to her tired feet. Not sleeping properly always amped up Jenny’s aches of leg and foot, attributable to the many years of working in a diner and logging thousands of floor miles.

She entered the quiet restaurant and selected a distant corner booth, drawing glances from a few scattered middle aged men as she half-limped through the space. She wasn’t hungry, and from the taciturn faced elderly waitress ordered a coffee, a toasted western sandwich on whole wheat, and a glass of water. It was the water that most satisfied her bodily requirements. The coffee had obviously been sitting. Her western sandwich didn’t taste very western, and an aftertaste of old grease limited her to four bites. It was the tall tumbler of ice water that went down best.

This being eight years before a pathway of tragedy in this town, Jenny would have no inkling of the year 2000. The year that brought with it the avoidable deaths of seven Walkerton citizens, the illnesses of 2,500 others, and all of it from the drinking water which had become contaminated with E.coli strain O157:H7. Thus was the roll of cosmic dice. Jenny paid for the far below average snack break, stretched out her tired legs, and climbed back into the bus. Her worry for Ray was amplifying itself into new frequencies and she just wanted to get there.

Though a linear identification point is impossible, there comes a “physical” separation juncture before the thunderbird body is to re-arrive in the forest perimeter where electromagnetic doors swing to and fro. Its body is hungry and must be fuelled in order to continue as a mortal realm flying vessel. This is a noted distraction and the mind of Townes, be it dead dreaming transitioning, once again drifts out from within the large feathers and powerful musculature. He resumes that odd just behind and slightly above watcher’s perspective.

This landscape as perceived has become quite dark, overcast, with a strangely diffused glow in the sky that drapes itself down like a plasticized mist over treetops. Thunderbird’s descent takes it into a place for rest and hunting, but the Townes mind does not follow, instead experiencing another undulation in the space-time fabric. A bubble effect sweeps sideways through the softly glowing grey scale tones of all that is seeable, then he is in turn *within body* and flying away but watching thunderbird’s wings fan out wide. Its legs drop down rigidly, approximating landing gear, each talon splayed as a perch is selected, and no longer can he watch because he is off in a different direction as a renewed shroud of utter darkness closes the show.

Linear impossibility notwithstanding as far as timelines exist in the other worlds, next arrives renewed vision and a sudden physical edit that has this occupied avian physique perched on the sloped roof of a large barn that feels immediately known. This here and now, is another event loop. He knows the location from countless times entering its energy maw, recognizing its details, reviewing the same cascade of suddenly powerful emotions. There is a simultaneous deja vu and wish to deny.

He is a note trapped within its own unique harmonic. He is plucked and left here to sound the discordant tones of tragic helpless witnesses the mortal-worldwide, who see things and cannot act quickly enough or with effectiveness to alter what is happening. Here she comes now out of the house, as she has been shown to do so precisely this way in the recorded imprinting of anguished residuals. Townes mind watches her deliberate movements, his dissonant note taking shape from deep in the chest of whatever form imprisons him here. The rope. The chair. The long look around that seems to bid adieu : across veranda, front of property, distant crops of prairie flatline, and always that haunting glance skyward that never brings her into eye contact with where he is forced to replay it all. A tortured spectator.

The sense of ... if only ... if only her eyes would deviate once from the ghastly ghostly magnetic script to find him. If only they could just once see each other, before she steps up to the chair base and into a decision of no return, he might dissuade her. He might alter the entire course of the years to follow, in fact. The black blossoming pain that was to flood so many lives. Her eyes never stray from the looping loop. Her delicate throat never escapes the knotted hoop. And in this barn roof perch where he only recognizes having been there before, upon returning, he is helpless but to watch her choose a desperate exit that is truly no exit at all. It isn’t long after her slippers have hit the veranda planks and her legs have ceased kicking, that a dirt road cloud arrives with sound and he is allowed to look away from the porch. This will be, he re-knows in this eternally revisited moment, when all once again collapses inward in a phosphene implosion that ushers in more impenetrable darkness.

Thinking is allowed. Thinking is allowed in this darkness that still hints at water and death, or an elongated transitory energy bridge between types of worlds. In this colorless realm where any sense of a body is distant or imaginary, he is asking if the replayed suicide of his mother is a chapter in the reviewed years of mortal Ray, due to his dying. Is he dying? Does he remember dying? Does he remember being born to the mother who carried him, raised him, and left him behind? How can such a fundamental event in the very story of Life, ever be absolutely buried in memory, irretrievable? Isn’t the best of love, in whichever way it manifests, a hint at that memory? Of The Womb. Of Home. Of God.

These elusive thought patterns sew him up, unravel, invent magic new maddening stitches, haunt the tip of his reach. His ego feels drowned within this. It was that way in a man’s body and remains so now, whatever this now is. Townes mind wishes to check the balance of his account at the Central Consciousness Bank, but cannot find the branch. Has this insane-like waveform life story narrative reduced his entity allotment?

Two are in motion. They are linked soul stories. Their individual notes create a harmonic that is only possible between their individual notes. That they two have recognized the harmonic together has inextricably woven their realities. What has been left out of Love awareness’s narrative surely seems to have equal plausibility for revealing and concealing.

Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ FɪndNøvel.ɴᴇt website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

Sᴇarch the FindNovel.net website on G𝘰𝘰gle to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.