Pane

 

    There it stands, the old Bize glass place. Empty lot otherwise, they never paved it. It's all pale bone colored dirt and clumps of yellow, insistent chinchgrass. The sun beats down through leopard-spotted sky, black clouds not quite overcast create a calico patchwork of greys and beaming white radiance above, and a feral, angry, liquid heat below. A small puff of wind picks up a sad little wisp of white dust which sinks quickly back to earth, admonished by the angry air.

    We come here to look at the light. All of us from around the town, in our little valley microclimate sheltered from the worst weather. Rag and bone people dressed like scarecrows because god knows nobody goes outside unless they have to, or for the light on days like today. Today would be good, spectacular, a real show, so even the folks from up in the hills, some of them, come down.

    More wild than we are used to, these folks, a primal tide we rarely see. We greet them like we always do, grudging nods and mutters as they scurry about like lizards looking for a place where there is a place for them... settling on heaps of trash and clinging onto rafters around the garage doors like cicadas on a summer night's wall. One we haven't seen in ages, a silent, round-eyed, filthy child. Something has happened and the child has matted white hair with a shocking clot of dried blood all over the rear left of their head, but they seem not to notice or care, just to be interested in the large, square building just like the rest of us are.

    We live here from when we were born, our parents somewhere around here along with the others, perhaps they have left to the mountains or down the river. Regardless, we live here with the river and the hills to the east pink and far and the ones to the west black and looming. For the evening we sleep early and early in the morning we arise, every day identical to the last save for the weather. The weather is our life, our god and our guide. The river is there when the weather fails to provide or is extra vicious, which it mostly is. The river sends us portents from upstream, along with all the food it grows with its waters. The few short trees are our anemometers and our vanes, and they all grow like hog-tails, in some storms they look like worms dancing in the rain.

    We settle in our places, some calm and some restless, the anticipation grows bulbous and the air grows charged, our small hairs rising and prickling. Electric arcs begin stringing from cloud to cloud in blinks, flashes of light form indistinct. Rumbles which sound much farther away than just above our brow follow, making our sphincter tremble like a blubbering child's lips. The sun, thick and wet like an apple with its skin in roiling turmoil, melts on top of the mountain to the west, pouring darkness over us like the arctic soul of the night sky, still itself looming just overhead in oppressive blacks and greys now, and the wind is gusting down offa the hill so much colder than the soup we are in that we get a stabbing sharpness behind our left eye from it. This does not impede our gaze, however, and we look in shock as the child steps out.

    Our feet feel like inelegant slugs as they slide around in the leather sheath too large for our age as we step, ungainly, legs trembling and shoes untied; socks a long lost memory. Away from the weather, from the rest of us, toward the center. The sky is dancing and the wind is caressing and our body feels like it is immense. An umbral cetacean of vast volume and shifted just slightly out of phase, the tip of our flukes visible as a damaged human child. We are inside already of our creation, and we are still watching our work from outside. 

    As we enter the office, we see the light already under the door. The office abandoned a drab tan filing cabinet covered in dust... we note how thoughtful the person who bought this was to match the paint to the color of the bones in our soil. A pause as the post its like dried leaves pick up in a corner, a gust from outdoors disturbed. A brief flurry and again like the dust hushed, as if we deserve respect! This world is madness but there is the door to the old Bize glass place warehouse, the door itself rimmed in light blue and green and yellow and red, flashes like some silent rave just on the other side.

    The door didn't open but the child is inside, the light adjusts to us before our child arrives, we suppose the whale bit did that. Time dips and mixes in rooms with great mass, as if we are swimming under the sea and Time is a vast flock of feeding gulls. Otto, on her own now, looks around. She sees the panes of glass, uncut, all at right angles impossibly. The ceiling above is a tin roof underside with steel rafters and framing in that most industrial and satisfyingly soulless material way. No spirits or ghosts or space for memory here, those things live in the places other humans go. Nobody goes here but Otto, while we watch from the outside.

    Otto is picking a pane. She reaches out her unformed hand and touches a pane in the middle, somehow, leaving a small red stain on it from her oozing, skinless body. She looks up at us, directly in our watching eyes. Her face is silent and defiant, accusing. She has white hair and a spherical face with harsh eyes and wide cheekbones. We leave with no words because there's nothing to say. A private and holy moment so sacred that physics itself refuses to allow an audience, creation is something we do as quanta, all of us. 

    From our place outside we watch as the building silently explodes in light. Transforming in a hesitation from a building to a thing... a beast box of madness shaped like a whirling spindle of fractured light coming into our eyes like it was cheating somehow. Flashes, vignettes of discrete dimensions fly by us in peripheral vision as we focus, or try, on the light in the center as if to define....

    Only the shape of the thing remains beyond us. We can understand it in our bones and our hair and our skin, but we cannot define its shape. It is infinitely smooth yet it is made of nothing but angles and impossibly sharp edges. Everything we see our eyes obligate to a sphere which mimicks our own orbs, so form is the last thing we can define with any certainty.

    The wild folk are consumed by the old Bize glass place. Once the show is over none of them remain, and some of us have gone too. We think to ourselves about Otto as we walk back to our hut. We didn't remark because we were too busy, but as soon as she decided she was a she, her wound had gone away, scab and all. We have seen this before, the wounds removed from them as they find themselves in the old Bize glass place, in others.