(From the Petomele Historical Association)
It was June in Petomele, particularly firebug weather, and the five of them- Kurt, Hugh, Wanda, Clyde, and Lana- were driving along the short strip of Highway 423 between Kurt’s place in the North Village and the road leading into the Espadana Nature Reserve. Clyde had recommended walking, but Kurt wanted to bring a couple of lawn chairs and a six-pack of beer or two, so in the end they pooled whatever snacks they had and Kurt got behind the wheel.
Kurt’s family had moved to Petomele from Pueblo specifically because of the North Village- that had been in 1975, when he was a freshman. It had been taxing to take the school bus to Pueblo County High every morning, but the district was more than willing to provide transit across the area, and his parents were attracted to the brochures which got sent to them every week, which promised lower property tax and cleaner air in Petomele.
Petomele’s North Village had been constructed a year earlier, in 1974, by a real estate developer known as the Lambiek Corporation, who in 1968 had attempted to build a suburb called Fascination City west of Pueblo, although the project went over the allotted budget and past its schedule. Rumor circulated among Pueblo’s major politicians that the architect behind the project had suffered some kind of mental breakdown.
So the North Village was built, affording LambiekCorp a much better return on investment and a recovered public image. These 8 blocks of roughly identical homes were unambitious, but modern and chic in comparison to the rest of Petomele, and located on the north side of Highway 423, directly across from the ruins of the Industrial Sector. This was cheap land, and provided the Corporation supplied each unit with cold and hot water, gas, and electricity, the future residents lined up and handed over their money.
Kurt hated the North Village, because it felt so far removed from the world- there was no library, no recreation center- all the usual resources that fed a growing mind were abruptly halted when he entered high school, and though he had promised many of his old friends that he would still come to visit them in Pueblo every so often, these assurances fell on deaf ears.
Wanda, as it happened, came from similar circumstances- brought to the North Village due to the appealingly low down payment on a brand new, top-of-the-line designer home. She only had her father to rely on, though, and so she and Kurt had quickly made friends, both being displaced Puebloans who were largely victims of factors in the world beyond their control.
The other three- Clyde, Hugh, and Lana- were all native to Petomele, being some of the only members of their generation raised entirely in town. They were the children of various farmers and small business owners. Given that the school on Canterbury Way only taught grades 1-8, they also had to commute to Pueblo County High every morning with Kurt and Wanda, and so, being trapped on the same vehicle each morning for four years, they formed a natural and very low-stakes clique.
Only Hugh would still make that trip by the summer of 1979, as he was a year younger than the others. The rest were prepared to celebrate their liberation and make plans for college throughout the summer.
By this point, Kurt had more or less adjusted to life in Petomele, viewing it as a sort of respite from the strain of the city. His childhood in Pueblo had been somewhat difficult, as he had struggled to find any particular direction. He didn’t know if he’d discover what he wanted to be while attending the University of Southern Colorado, and he wasn’t sure how well he would reintegrate himself into Pueblo. He might view the old streets and restaurants as foreign, he might not recognize new landmarks- or, even worse, he might- and also wonder what had taken place at them since his time away.
He wasn’t going to have much more time around Wanda. She was leaving for CU Boulder, and though he encouraged her to go back to Pueblo with him, she wanted to see the northern half of the state. Like Kurt, she had never been to Boulder, or Denver, as the drive up I-25 seemed like more trouble than it was worth for a glance at the Capitol building. Her father had promised her a cheap mid-range sedan upon her graduation, though, and Kurt said he’d teach her to drive, and so in less than 2 months, she, too, would fade out of his life and into the hazy plains of memory.
He wasn’t as close with the other three, but Clyde and Lana had their minds set on going to college in Colorado Springs, and Hugh would probably still be spending most of his spare time forking hay and tending to the chickens at his family’s property on Frontage Road.
Kurt had to accept that he was no longer unfamiliar with Petomele. He knew it well. He knew all its crevices, its shortcuts, its valleys and peaks. He had charted it out of pure boredom time and again, and it seemed as if the little town had nothing more of substance to offer. So, come August, he would be packing up, leaving his parents to grow old together in their kitschy house on Median Street, resuming his residence in Pueblo, and ending this formative chapter.
So they’d all piled into Kurt’s Mustang, and he turned on the radio, which only played four or five stations despite the prominent antenna in the Business District. It was mostly a slow mix of instrumental background, filtered through four or five layers of static, so it came through warbling and delayed and with all sorts of assorted compelling distortion to accompany the flitting of the firebugs among the tall grass on the shoulder of Highway 423.
“Hey, turn it down,” Clyde said. “Too much interference.”
“I can’t,” Kurt shot back. “It’s night music. Night music needs to play.”
“Gosh, I don’t know what to think of it,” Wanda opined. “It looks so- strange. Like it doesn’t belong here.” She was referring to the new Museum, which was being touted as the greatest thing to happen to the town in years. It was yet another reminder that Petomele was desperate for outside revenue.
“I still think they should have built a library with all that money,” Kurt said.
The new Petomele Museum was a three-story, rectangular structure made out of concrete, and it sat adjacent to the parking lot which functioned as the entrance to the Espadana Nature Reserve. A tollbooth was being constructed on the lane leading to the parking lot. The road, previously unnamed, was going to be called Museum Road, and the lot which used to be unpaved dirt was going to be expanded to twice the size and slathered in blacktop. Kurt didn’t need to pay the toll until the tollbooth was finished, and he didn’t plan on sticking around long enough to ever have to, but it was disheartening all the same to see land so close to the Nature Reserve being altered in such a visible way.
“Never mind it,” said Wanda. “Let’s get in the trees, nestle into the cool shadows. You’ll forget all your worries in there.”
The grass around the lot was the uncultivated kind, and it struck Kurt on his knees, wet and stringy. The green expanse was peppered with various small rocks, and past it the fortified wall of cottonwoods swayed proud.
If Kurt squinted, he thought he could see, far off to the Southwest over the vast acres of farmland, the glittering lights of Pueblo, although it may have been Boone or Avondale. No, he thought. There- more lights! All turning on around sunset. For me. Come back, they’re saying. We miss you. Return home.
He turned away from them, readjusting his pupils to make out the forms of Hugh and Lana carrying the lawn chairs, muted backs with soft tones, and Clyde hauling the insulated cooler with the food. Wanda only carried her purse, it was draped over her left shoulder and her hair was blowing around her ears, which he knew annoyed her. But there hadn’t been time for her to put it in a ponytail, so the light breeze whisked it to and fro. She also probably had a flashlight, because she was in the process of reading a book called Dandelion Wine. It was one of her father’s favorite novels.
Kurt realized, even in the dim evening glare, how she carried herself- there was something correlating one’s posture with one’s degree of confidence in life, Kurt thought, and she had absolute confidence in her future and her potential. Nor did he doubt her ambition for even a moment. She would likely go on to serve as an indispensible, immensely popular element of the academic circuit in Boulder, become a successful lecturer in a given subject, and then marry an equally productive orator.
He didn’t feel bad about any of that. In fact, he felt sort of relieved that he would never have to see her again, that they would be able to go their own separate ways. It was freeing, somehow.
“Come on!” came a shout from up ahead, somewhere in the woods. It sounded like Hugh. “The water’s fine!” And then a distant splash, and then Wanda broke into a headlong run, still with that immaculate arch in her back- she lifted up the bottom of her skirt, preparing to dive into the Espadana with the others before the nighttime chill set in.
Kurt couldn’t really bring himself to engage in activity that jovial- and, of course, the Espadana was too shallow to perform any of the basic strokes he knew anyway. He preferred learning to swim at the Pueblo County High pool- and soon, he could swim in the pool at the Pueblo Rec Center again, membership for a year was only $20, and he could submerge himself in a potent chlorine mixture, underneath fluorescent lights-
There you go again. Only thinking of the future. No time to enjoy the present, savor its magic. What’s wrong with you? Why are you like this? Why can’t you accept the fun they’re having?
He could, he knew he could, if he put himself in the right mindset. He’d enjoyed many an evening with Clyde, listening to his sizable record collection, and he’d also had a decent night out on the town with Hugh the last week of the semester. He would miss Hugh, that affable, dim-witted but good-natured farmer’s boy. He’d regret leaving all of them.
He came to the border of the trees and glanced back over his shoulder with a potent mixture of disdain and trepidation at the foreboding prism that constituted the new Museum. There was a bulldozer next to it, a crooked-looking thing with a long neck which scooped up piles of the soil to make way for the structure’s basement. Soil which housed worms- and grasshoppers- and maybe even warrens of prairie dogs.
It was best not to consider such things.
He passed in, and the stars began sparkling through the intricate sprawling mass of branches overhead, a protective lattice structure, and the grass gave way to a narrow path made of dirt which pressed up against the soles of his red Converse sneakers. He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs to capacity with the unmistakable creek-infused oxygen. Above, a symphony of cicadas rang out, breeding, multiplying in the hollows by the thousands, spurred on by the latent summer heat.
And in the brush which rose invitingly to his knees, the firebugs. Not many, only around a dozen in his immediate vicinity, but their presence was welcome all the same. They were rare in Colorado, and did not take well to the arid climate, but here, along the Espadana, a particular blend of moisture and vegetation allowed their annual appearance. It only happened for a few weeks, then they returned to hibernation and secrecy.
He did his best to avoid them while approaching the rest, who, going by the unobtrusive shimmer of Wanda’s incandescent bulb, appeared to be about fifty yards downstream of the Oak Rapids. He smiled. Hugh was completely submerged, drenched even in his shirt, and Lana was paddling in a particular alcove. She noticed Kurt’s arrival and beamed.
“You can take your shoes off,” she suggested.
“Nah.” And so he sat down next to Wanda instead, who was drying herself after a quick dip and emergence he hadn’t been there to witness. The flashlight was on the verge of giving out. It sputtered a few last times, and she set the book down next to her towel, its pages splayed and worn, its spine visibly cracked open.
“Your dad read that a lot, huh?”
“Yes. There’s plenty of reread value in it.”
“I don’t mean to worry you,” Kurt said. “You don’t need to fret right now, Wand. It’s just- I seem jittery. Like one of those toys you wind up, you know? Electric remote-control car. And it’s like as if someone had the control, and they were pulling the switches, and I had to, you know- go in all those directions at once, spin, turn-”
“You don’t have any remote,” she smiled and pulled the towel around her for warmth. “You’re going to learn that, soon enough. You won’t need any remote to tell you where to go or who to answer to. And that’s scarier, in a way. But it can also be a great deal more fulfilling, when you realize how much of the world you can access and confront.”
“I’m not going to see the world,” he said. “I’m going back to Pueblo.”
“Nowhere else? California, maybe? Oregon?”
“No,” he mused. “I don’t like low elevations. I know that sounds reductive, I shouldn’t have so many hangups and drawbacks, and I’d go with you to Boulder, honestly I would, but- you can do better than with me, Wand. I know you can. I have faith in you. You’ll get a boyfriend.”
“I don’t think I want one,” she warbled. “Boyfriend. What is that? I’ve gone four years without. You know, basically the entire senior class had one. Even Clyde, he’s put the moves onto Rebecca Warner. And I think, if they both go to Colorado Springs like she says she’s going to, he has a pretty good chance of making that work. But me- I don’t want to be inside walls, parameters, fences that tell me who I can see, can’t see, talk to, like that.”
“There are always parameters and limitations in life,” Kurt posited. “The Petomele town limits, say. What goes on inside them, and then what goes on outside. And it’s very different.”
“Well, thank you for teaching me to drive,” she murmured. “That’s one limitation broken.”
She rested on his shoulder and curled her hand around his forearm. He in turn put his arm around her towel-covered back and they both lowered themselves to a position where they could watch the constellations and one low purple nocturnal cloud which hovered a few thousand feet to the east.
Oh, there you are,” Clyde erupted from behind a trunk. “Beer is good. I think we’re going to start a little fire in about half an hour. Maybe tell some ghost stories. It’s been a while since we did that. Two years back, I think.”
“Aw, c’mon,” Kurt argued, not moving from his upturned position. “You know that’s not supposed to be done in the Reserve. Last time we were lucky, this time I doubt we’ll get away with it. What if the museum’s hired security?”
“You’re shitting me. They’re not even open yet. Why would they hire security?”
“I guess you’re right. And there are never any rangers here.”
It was true- along the roughly ten-mile stretch of the creek that included the Nature Reserve, there was no official oversight by any state agency. The park, unlike those further up in the mountains, was not generally deemed worthy of state expenditure, and so virtually anything was possible after dark, and all sorts of laws were broken.
Petomele’s population wasn’t large enough to cause any real damage to the ecosystem, Kurt knew that, but every so often he’d be walking along the trail on the shore and he’d happen upon a piece of trash- a Zagnut wrapper or a carton of Pizza Spins, and he’d be a little disappointed, aware that such transgressions would be punished up at Royal Gorge or Pikes Peak.
“Let’s get on the food,” Hugh insisted, raising himself from the bank and shaking off. “You brought hot dogs?”
“Yeah,” Clyde replied, cracking open a can of beer. “I’ll get everything set up, arrange the rocks and all that.”
“I’ll help,” Kurt volunteered. “I know how to do it well and secure. And remember, everyone- if a single ember gets out, we should have a pot of water nearby to douse it.”
“Ah, look at Smokey the Bear over here,” Clyde giggled, popping open a sizable bag of potato chips. “Sure, let’s both get on that.” Kurt let Wanda go, she pulled two batteries from her purse and exchanged them for the old ones.
“You’ll be alright here?” he asked.
“Yeah. Go on.”
So Kurt dusted himself off, and got to work finding large rocks, and used Clyde’s trowel to cut a decent three-foot wide hole across the ground. Clyde formed a tepee of sticks, and Lana brought a dusting of leaves, and then Kurt asked Hugh to go to the creek and dip in the important reserve kettle. He trusted Hugh, Hugh knew the dangers of fire- when he was 5 years old, half of his barn had been decimated by a faulty electric pole. Hugh wouldn’t be careless.
“Alright, here we go,” Kurt said, pulling a box of matches from his jeans. It carried the insignia and phone number of the Petomele Fill-Er-Up along with a rough cartoon of a particularly cheery match, running towards the outline of the station. He pulled one out and struck it across the included tab. It wouldn’t catch.
“Lemme try that,” Clyde said, grabbing the matches without asking. “First try, I bet.” And sure enough, it made that sizzling noise and popped to life. Clyde tossed it on and then began pulling various chunks of cardboard from the cooler to feed the growing warmth.
“That’s great.” Lana leaned in and from below her earrings were made prominent.
“Okay,” said Kurt. “Who wants to go first? Ghost stories have a particular way of serving as psychological fodder. They reveal a lot.”
“I’ll go,” said Wanda, joining the other four and pulling up a rock to sit on. “My batteries died again. I guess I may as well test your boundaries.”
“Have at it,” Kurt offered.
“Alright,” she began. “This is true. All of it. Have you ever heard of ‘Petomele Wisps?’ Anyone?”
Nobody responded.
“Let me explain,” she continued. “I read about them once, at the Pueblo library. I don’t remember what the book with them in it was called. It was old, probably out of print now, but it republished local folklore. The author had gone around, interviewing people up and down the Front Range Corridor, and he learned of several entities- beings, spirits, and so on. And one of these, the most prominent in this area, was the so-called Petomele wisp. At least three residents from around 1900 corroborate their existence.”
“My pa’d never told me about such things,” Hugh countered.
“Well, he might not want to scare you,” Wanda suggested. “Or he may not have known. Anyway, they’re like the swamp flickers of English folklore. Or the basis for what we call jack-o-lanterns. Ghostly phenomena that flicker in and out, move in erratic patterns. Always with apparent sentience.”
“Not firebugs?” Kurt asked.
“No, not green like they are. Petomele wisps, in most accounts, are purple. Pale violet. Or blue, in one case. But the folklore here is poorly recorded, and this historian, who wrote this book- he was working with second or third-hand accounts. I don’t know how many times they would have been witnessed since the book was written. Maybe, as we continue to settle here, they diminish. Maybe they’re already gone.”
“Can they hurt you?” Hugh cut in.
“No,” Wanda insisted. “Not really. Those who encountered them do report feeling strangely wistful, and sad. But that’s to be expected, if they really are the souls of the dead. And, you know- even if they are fiction- fiction has a tangible impact on reality that is absolute.”
“This is the dumbest, most boring yarn I ever heard,” said Clyde after taking a long gulp of sudsy canned beer. “Absolutely fake. I’ve grown up here and I never even heard such a thing, and I would know. There are only so many people who’d say that.”
“The book is real,” Wanda said. “I just can’t remember the name of it, is all. You could probably find it at the Pueblo library, if you asked for one about the Wisps.”
“Okay, okay,” Clyde said. “Enough about all this. My turn. I’m going to one-up Wanda’s weak attempt, okay? I’m going to tell you all about the Axe Grinder of Carnage Hill...”
Clyde’s story was long and tedious but contained many verbose adjectives and drawn-out pauses for dramatic effect, and the others did their best to humor him. They put marshmallows on sticks and ate sardines from the tin and passed around buns and ketchup for the hot dogs, and once dinner was over, and Clyde’s story drew to a close, then it was Lana’s turn. Her story was much shorter, and after that, neither Kurt or Hugh had anything much to contribute, but they agreed that it was getting late and the fire was close to gone, so they extinguished it.
Kurt got up. His back was sore, he’d been sitting for multiple hours, even if the time had flown, but two cans of beer had made him unfit to drive, and the others were all huddled around the warm embers, looking into the depths of the structure they’d assembled with contemplation. They seemed close to sleep. He reached down and patted Hugh on the shoulder.
“The kettle, bud. You know what to do.”
Hugh yawned, grabbed the handle of the pot, and poured it in one crackling gush over the remnants of the hole. A vast quantity of smoke was released.
“That’s it.”
Kurt remembered nothing beyond that, save the fuzzy texture of Wanda’s towel on his cheek.
The slog lifted, his muscles relaxed and he found himself looking up at the stars again, they filled his field of vision and were framed by the slowly waving leaves. Here I am, he thought, his eyes adjusting to the dim light, the hairs on his arms standing up from the nighttime chill. It was still extremely late, either that or very early, but certainly on the precipice somewhere between the two.
He sat up and rubbed the last vestiges of rest from his body. Everyone else was asleep. Hugh and Lana were holding hands, Wanda was alone but very close to him- so close that a few strands of her hair approached his. Clyde was nowhere to be seen. This worried Kurt, who assumed that he had either abandoned the group or was out in the brush getting up to something.
Nah, the rational part of Kurt’s mind suggested. He must have just gone to piss. He’ll be back, he’ll lie down and you can lie down, and drive everyone home come sunrise.
Well, he couldn’t very well call for Clyde with everyone else trying to rest, and besides it might draw the attention of some wayward police car, if one happened to be driving by on night patrol. They’d probably have some charges lodged against them for lighting a fire, or at the very least there’d be a fine.
Kurt weighed his options. Finally, with the soothing gurgle of the creek masking his actions, he tied his shoes and got to his feet, then set off along the trail to the south.
“Cly...?” he softly inquired.
He continued on about five more minutes, taking special notice of his position. The creek kept going, over a few small waterfalls and diversions. Here, it careened over some flat stones in the middle of its path. Here, a lone ponderosa deposited its needles into a shallow pool. There was enough variety to the landscape that Kurt felt safe in never losing his way. All the same, he wished he had Wanda’s flashlight, as opposed to the weird glare of the yellow teardrop moon, which by this point had approached the west. So, he reasoned, probably around 3 A.M.
“Oh. There you are.” He nearly tripped as he caught sight of Clyde’s pallid figure sitting on the edge of the water, legs dangling into the morass. This was a particularly calm section of the creek, populated by the Espadana’s titular cattails. Clyde was silent, ahead of him a row of the tall, sharp plants bent in unison.
“Why’d you leave? Clyde?”
Kurt waved his hand in front of Clyde’s face, but there was no response, he seemed to be transfixed in a kind of stupor, his back was hunched and his hands were folded together in his lap. His jaw hung open. Kurt tapped him on the shoulder, but regretted his decision when Clyde appeared to lean forward, coming dangerously close to falling in. Kurt grabbed him and pulled him back, and then Clyde was lying prostrate beneath the same inkjet cosmos-
“Clyde! Clyde, speak to me. What is it?”
Kurt glanced over his shoulder as he repeatedly thumped Clyde on the chest, but he didn’t have to ask what it was- because they were obvious. He was amazed he hadn’t noticed them at first. It was as if they had faded in when his attention was divided.
The Petomele wisps, Kurt thought.
There were two of them, one bobbed about three feet over the lapping current and the other only about half a foot. The higher one moved slightly, and as it did a trail of equally faded purple color appeared behind it. It reminded Kurt of afterimages, which burned themselves into the retinas long after the eyes had closed. There was something patently impossible about the light emitted by them.
They did not really interact with the cattails- they passed through the aquatic forest with little obstacle, they proceeded on a pace and Kurt stumbled ahead to keep up, having altogether forgotten Clyde’s unconscious state. The lower one, which followed the higher one as if it were some kind of parent, swayed from one point to another, oscillating. It gave Kurt a headache, and he wanted instinctively to look away. But his focus remained locked.
Now the lower one proceeded towards Kurt, and he backed off in equal measure. It was around seven feet from him, so close that if he wanted to he could lean into the cattail grove and touch it. Something told him that wouldn’t be advisable. So he kept his distance.
It was then, he noticed, apart from the sound of the water in the back, the wisps themselves produced faint, extremely pleasant humming frequencies. They were an octave or two beyond the scope of human perception, but somehow Kurt’s ears could make them out all the same, impossible sounds to go with impossible lights that seemed to have no physical point of origin. An incorporeal symphony. The tunes they emitted complimented each other.
The higher one approached the lower one, and then beckoned with a trail of light and a slight pitch shift towards Clyde, who seemed extremely vulnerable. Kurt rushed to stop them, but before he could, the higher one darted onto Clyde, and appeared to vanish into his face. It had entered one of the orifices like a trapdoor spider, and now Clyde’s entire complexion changed- he sat up, and his forehead glowed from the inside. It was akin to holding a bulb behind someone’s hand and watching all the blood vessels light up red, but this glow was ultraviolet. It radiated from him in four dimensions and Kurt, in horror, backed away down the trail.
“What-!” he panicked, unsure of which direction to head. He decided he’d run further to the south. The other wisp followed close behind Clyde, who rose up and staggered onward entirely under his host’s spell. The glow pulsed and vibrated slightly.
“Clyde isn’t here anymore,” he crooned. “Clyde is gone. I am here now.”
“Get back!” Kurt shouted. He remembered the book of matches, fished it from his pocket and took one out. He hesitated, unsure of which end to strike. They were entering a thick grove and visibility waned. Luckily, he felt the enlarged tip. With a remarkable deftness he struck it and it sprang forth in a fiery amber blaze. That would give him at least a minute of clear visibility, but he couldn’t let it run down and burn his grasp.
“What are you?” he asked with conviction. He stopped running, and the thing inhabiting Clyde stopped following. Both it and its companion ground to a halt, put off by the sort of light the match cast. Clyde’s arm raised, shielding it. It looked unhappy, going by Clyde’s sour frown. Clyde said nothing, though, just hovered as an unknown variable in the dust. Kurt blew the match out, but even so neither entity proceeded.
Kurt took deep breaths. He assessed this bizarre enemy- yes, they emitted light, but the light somehow made it harder to gather his bearings or take distance into account.
The frequency was also disorienting, and he experienced a particularly vile sensation as it ramped up in intensity, like a piercing roar. His balance was interrupted, the anvil and stirrup felt as if they were blended into pulp, and the trees went diagonal. The last thing he saw was the lower wisp careening headlong towards him, leaving an ongoing trail in its wake which had multiple layers and streaks. The match dropped, clattering harmlessly on the dust.
It’s beautiful, he thought. And that music-
His vision went dark, and he searched around inside himself for something.
Kurt seemed to view things as if he were within a crystal ball, a fisheye lens that distorted and magnified certain portions of the landscape. At the same time, another part of his mind was held alone in a dark void, movement entirely restricted. The piece of him which could still see the creek was moving forward, and then he caught sight of Clyde’s sleeve. Clyde’s awful haircut. He was following behind Clyde now, steps coordinated in time.
And the view was purple- although it looked much more to his taste now. Much less incomprehensible.
No! The Kurt in the void shouted through an imaginary mouth. It’s taken me- I can feel it in my legs- why can’t I get out? Let me out!
But the solemn nothing remained, and the fisheye Kurt and the fisheye Clyde proceeded on, various branches hitting them in the face. Kurt felt nothing, it was as if all his autonomic functions had been reduced to clockwork, and each of his nerves had been dulled. He detected a strange warmth in his chest, and an equivalent gnawing absence in the mental chest of the mental Kurt, who faded from sight and receded into the distance with each step.
As they walked, a new hum increased in clarity, and once the old Kurt had been subsumed in the mists, three forms appeared- two purple and one blue, bobbing up and down happily. What had been Clyde attempted to wade into the creek, but turned around once it realized that it could no longer levitate between the ferns and cattails. It had mass now, it had gravity, and had to adjust its movement accordingly. The new Kurt, too, felt an offset difference.
Their companions neared and raised themselves to eye-level- but Kurt couldn’t quite discern their intent. He imagined how he and Clyde must look from the outside- craniums sporadically bulging with purple, shambling forward aimlessly. They must have been a sight. But, of course, the forest was empty, and even the fireflies had gone to sleep.
His vocal cords began producing the unique intonation, or at least a rough approximation of it- as close as the human throat could manage- and Clyde in turn came up with something on that scale, and the companions giddily hopped up and down trying to make sense of it. Kurt couldn’t see or hear much of anything, but he felt that if only he could determine the meaning of the sound, it would reveal vast and innumerable secrets.
He doubled over, his neck hung limp as a marionette and he was guided onward- he realized they were going north now, and it had been roughly the same amount of time on the return trip as it had been to reach Clyde in that mesmerized position. The water sounded beautiful, like jewelry clinking against itself, like a diamond broach around the neck of a countess, and Kurt knew how wonderful it would be to stay here, within the borders of the Nature reserve, to live life drifting in the current and to vanish during the day, to play with the guppies and dragonflies- and to frolic at night, always.
But that was not to be, because the wisps were ready for a new frontier, and they were moving on.
They happened upon the circle of friends, still fast asleep amid the cartons of cookies and the thermoses of water, and so their own companions, the two purples and the one blue, initiated the process of appropriation. The violets settled down over Lana and Hugh’s noses, and in one swift breath, they were drawn in like bubbles. Lana and Hugh did not move, the process was much less violent than it had been for Clyde- the hosts settled and shifted vaguely in their dreams, but nothing more.
The blue one now faded in over Wanda. Wanda, her strawberry blonde bangs resting gently, her arms out to either side, receptive and inert. Kurt remembered something about the way she had been earlier tonight, but it felt as if seventy-five years had passed since she absorbed their stories around the campfire. It had been a long time.
So it descended, and she seemed to smack her lips as it entered, and then her brain, too, pulsed a few times before dimming and shutting itself off. Kurt couldn’t determine what the difference was between a blue wisp and a purple wisp, but couldn’t be bothered to worry about such trivial matters. The shell of Clyde sat down on the cooler, and then rolled off without much thought, thereafter collapsing into an unruly heap.
Kurt, too, felt the onset of a great and powerful sleep, where his neurons could recover from the transformation. The old would seamlessly mesh with the new, the functions would resume, and all would be right with the world. He lay down next to Wanda, his nose adjacent to hers, and his eyelids fluttered- and then the mists closed in and he was pulled into the fog, unable to exercise even one more conscious postulation.
When he came to, it was morning, and a thin birdsong reached his ears from the top of the tallest cottonwood in sight. Following this, the familiar ebb and flow of the Espadana filtered in, and then a golden shaft of sunray broke through and the dust settled. He was very uncomfortable, his shoulder having been pinned beneath him. He rose to a rough sitting position and rubbed his scalp. A rush of fresh air.
“There you are,” came a voice from his right.
Wanda was perambulating around what had been the campsite, taking special care to clean up any wrappers she noticed. She had already disassembled the fire, scattering the remnants of the ashes across ten feet, and had then doused the whole mess with a full thermos worth of water. And then either her or someone had taken the rocks from the circle and replaced them back into the woods. It was an efficient job, Kurt noticed- such that nobody would assume there had ever been a human presence here.
“Good morning,” he muttered as he got to his feet and wandered over to his water bottle. It was difficult to walk, and even more of a conscious effort to breathe. He couldn’t remember, exactly, but something had been in his lungs. Maybe he had inhaled some smoke.
“Clyde left before any of us had noticed,” she explained. “And then Hugh and Lana said they had to go, and that they’d walk back to town on their own. Lana seemed sort of out of it, but I guess that’s the effect of all this alcohol for you. I only had one, but- wow, I’m hungover.” She retrieved a stray can of Coors and held it up, wrinkling her nose as a beetle meandered around the tab.
“I see that,” Kurt said. “I feel it, too. Or maybe something in the air. You know what they’re saying about smog these days in concentrated urban centers, the dangerous effects it can have on the body. I wouldn’t think it’d reach this far out, but maybe the wind carried something over from Pueblo.” She shrugged delicately, placing the last few leftovers back into the cooler and fastening it shut.
“Yeah. What’d you dream about?”
“Hmm? Oh, nothing really. I was out the longest, huh?”
“Yes,” she insisted. “I was kind of worried, actually. It almost looked like- well, you were pale. That was the most concerning. For about fifteen minutes, you seemed white as a sheet. I considered waking you up- everyone else had left by then- but it passed and you started breathing normally again. So I took it upon myself to clean up. And you do seem better for the extra few minutes. I didn’t want you to puke or anything.”
“Well, thanks for that, I guess. I’ll bring the trash bag.” He took it from her grasp, tied the drawstrings on top closed, and then hauled it over his left shoulder. It wasn’t all that heavy- ten pounds, maybe, all things considered- but his mind could rest easy knowing that a fish wouldn’t choke on a scrap of plastic, and no squirrel would mistake a bottle cap for an acorn.
“C’mon. Nothing left,” she said, flinging her towel over her shoulder. They began walking out towards the parking lot.
“Who took the lawn chairs?” he asked.
“Hugh did,” she said. “He told me he’d drop them off at your house, behind the garden shed, at the first opportunity.”
“Oh,” Kurt mused. “I guess I’ll have to thank him for that.”
Over to their side the sun was rising above the trees, a brilliant crescent that skimmed off the water and filtered through the mosaic of life. It seemed to waver, as a hot desert road does at eye-level during periods where the temperature exceeds one hundred. This green and fertile environment was, really, an inexplicable anomaly- a green belt within a banana belt, an oasis in the desert. Life where there should have been none. Kurt began to feel uneasy the longer he looked into it.
“I did have a dream,” he recited. “I just couldn’t remember it. I was standing there, along the side of the creek. And there were those things you told me about, playing in the cattails. The wisps. There were five of them, all in a row, and they were just like swamp lanterns, in fact I think that’s why they preferred the more fern-strewn bit down there. It’s a little calmer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They made music, Wand- beautiful, like a chorus or a choir or something, like the world’s best singers all lined up and combining their efforts into a harmony. But there was something sad about them, too. They seemed to tell me about how they had to move on from their place in the riverbed, they had to go somewhere, and they wouldn’t be coming back. So they were playing specifically for me, one last time. Because I had to move on, too. I had to open a new chapter in my life. And they were doing the same, really- except their life was much sadder and longer.”
“They faded out, Wanda, one by one-” he brushed away a tear from the corner of his eye. “They all blinked into nothing, the two little ones and then the two purple ones, and then finally the blue one. There was only one blue one. But they said goodbye, in that way of theirs.”
They were approaching the museum now, it remained dormant and inaccessible. Behind the dark tinted windows, Kurt could make out the unlit forms of various power tools strewn around- a bandsaw, planks of wood, an unplugged drill. The room itself was empty. It would probably become the visitor’s center. For the time being, though, it was only so much plaster and concrete. Inert and unthreatening.
“What was the title of that book?” he mentioned. “The one with the wisps in it. You said if I go up to the desk and ask for it, they’ll probably be able to locate it?”
“I made all that up,” Wanda admitted. “The wisps, the color, everything. I just thought it would make for a compelling story, honestly. I mean, nobody is willing to create a creature or legend for Petomele. Nothing ever really happens here. Folklore can’t take root in a stagnant environment like this.”
“I dreamed of them, though. I dreamed they were moving on. Leaving, for some reason- it being the right year, or something-”
“Well, that’s the power of fiction,” she said, fishing the keys from his pocket without him noticing. “Fiction can become real, it can manifest itself in ways you wouldn’t expect. If you dislike your own life, you can create new lives to explore. And there’s nothing to say the wisps aren’t real, only that nobody ever really reported seeing them. They’re as real as you want them to be, Kurt.” She shot him a knowing glance, hauled open the trunk and set the cooler down deftly inside, and then she crossed over to the driver’s seat.
“You’re driving?” he inquired.
“Yes, of course.” She checked her watch. “It’s getting to be late- about eleven. I was planning on doing my hair and makeup, because I told my boyfriend that I would be to Pueblo in time to meet him for a hamburger, downtown. And I’ll drive for that, too.”
“Boyfriend? I thought you said you didn’t have a boyfriend. I thought you said you didn’t ever want one.”
“I did?” she hesitated, confused by the discrepancy. “I’ve had a boyfriend for about four months, Kurt. His name is Jack. He’s said he’ll move with me to Boulder when it’s time. We’re going to live together. I thought I told you. Maybe I didn’t, maybe I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“That’s strange,” Kurt said. “Strange, is all. The world seems to get stranger, every day.”
He turned up the dial on the radio, assuming he’d hear some soft ballad or a jazz standard from the Petomele antenna, but instead the husky voice of Ronald Reagan came through from the Republican National Convention, followed by an enthused smattering of applause.
“My fellow Americans...”