A Bright House
Chapter 32

Ray found himself with the house entirely his, the tenants having gone out for a full day of errand running in Regina. The linger of dream vividness heavy on his mind, he took a chair on the front veranda and tilted back his head to look at the spot where his mother’s final earthly realm moments had played out in a kick and swivel tragedy. Or a merciful release. Or both. Addressing a tiny spot on a veranda ceiling that has become the quintessence of loss and a son’s life trajectory, may seem more than a touch sad, but for Ray Townes this small circumference represented a passageway.

“Thank you for the warning, ma” he whispered over the rim of a chipped coffee mug, lupine eyes fixed in place but actually replaying the horror that greeted him once upon a time, taking the sweet from home, the home from sweet. A soil scented wind picked up and also blew fine dust into the veranda enclosure, as if in answer. It wouldn’t surprise a man like Ray if passed-on human souls could shape-shift at will, becoming whatever choice of animate inanimate representation they so wished. He was a mind who had long ago given up dissecting immediate reality for the fruitless pursuit of answers. Therefore, Ray took the dry rasp of prairie dust as a response. It gave him a reason to drop his gaze from the awful hook spot on the ceiling boards. Seconds after he wiped at the rims of his lower eyelids, Townes experienced a deliciously intense psychic flash. One of the important ones that bubbled up without initial language but all-body fizzing. His cardiovascular system flinched with it like a shot of pure adrenal gland ignition. “A B negative” he spoke.

Heartbeats prior to the realization that this was his own blood type, and the rarest of all among planet Earth’s bipedal hominids, the words dangled like shimmering beads. Another wind and dust response flew across the long dirt drive that connected homestead to rural route. Ray shivered a little. In a few moments he would place a phone call to the lead investigating officer of the missing persons case soon to be his challenge and potential burden. In a few moments Ray’s query would be answered in such a way as to contribute generously to his goose bump count.

As for Jenny of Bright street, she awoke that day, exuding. With nary a remembered dreamtime fragment but feeling every ounce rested, she opened her eyes into a sweet anticipatory blanket that would remain wrapped around her through the hours to follow. She stepped into the usual corner convenience store on her way to work, buying gum and a lotto ticket, and noted an extra flush in the visage of the young man at the counter who had complimented her in the past. “You look nice this morning” he somewhat stammered, unable to maintain eye contact with her sudden newfound ability to hold his gaze evenly. Exuding.

A block from the diner, Jenny felt an intense rush of excitement that reminded her of the first time she knew that Scott would become her lover. Here she was, freely allowing the woman to have thoughts... fed by the indescribable certainty of emotions when she had hugged Ray Townes in her kitchen, she felt this anticipatory rush and stopped walking for a moment. Along old DeGrassi street several benches lined the east half of the blocks adjacent to Via rail tracks, and she took a few minutes to sit and assess herself. She had replayed his “I could love you” innumerable times, even speaking it aloud to get the memory and its nuance just right in order to believe all of its potential. Its truth.

She remembered the strength of his body, the oddly “familiar” smell of Ray’s shirt where it covered his broad back. A light breeze tickled her bangs, fresh from the lake to heighten her already elevated senses, and Jenny allowed herself to enter a realm of wanting. Much more than wanting to feel a man’s loving touch, see love in his eyes, know his pleasure within her desire. This was about companionship in every aspect of its meaning.

This was about living and reliving that delicious peace as she had experienced it during the daybreak emotions beside Ray’s easy energy. As though he had always been there, in her bed, sharing her life, but had been misplaced within the matrix. Inexplicably and maybe recklessly, a stranger arrived with anything but foreign energy. He had shown himself to her self maintained void, not even at a critical timing. It wasn’t as if Jenny had been living out her last weeks, finally at the end of a proverbial rope, only to be delivered an answer in male form to catalyze the potential long stifled, willed away; she had long ago accepted that her days would be lonely, but manageable for the flare ups of sadness and ache.

“Good morning, gorgeous” interrupted her thoughts. She looked up to see a passing cycle courier, half her years, smiling on his way past the bench. Jenny, exuding. She smiled and looked back down at her feet, feeling lighter than she had ever thought possible not two weeks prior.

Elsewhere, occupying the same “time” as that of Jenny and Ray, a being not entirely believed as real has approached a location familiar to it. A place where the vortices exist to facilitate transition from one form of reality to others that are as richly detailed and actual as anything the dwellers of a three dimensional world hold as true. That which has been named “thunderbird” by First Nations peoples whose ancestors know of its basis in fact, flies northwest from the region of Toronto toward its most recent place of transitional portal energy.

The two newly acquired souls occupying its body, that of an exaggerated reported size due to a human propensity for such, are of vastly differing ingredients. Where the driver of the Buick had exited cleanly, leaving behind only a sustenance energy, it was a turmoiled residue from the other man that unsettled the creature’s mortality. This being is “immortal” in the three dimensional realm only when mortality fuels its vessel, one soul replacing another as a type of momentum and in a manner that no earthbound human would believe, let alone comprehend.

The thunderbird is ailing, toxicity from a resistant human energy source having polluted its will. That human had not passed through cleanly during their final exchanging. On the frozen lake where a potent ley line runs its basin undetected, this human had fallen into the portal before a transaction could take place. It is only a specific type of life form with a rarely occurring blood type that is able to sustain the veil-travelling creature called “thunderbird”, and only under conditions of alignment with anomalous electro magnetic locale and a specifically resonant human emotional duress, or sacrifice.

The reader, smug in the stealthy comfort of ignorance, is disbelieving. The concept of a life that ends with the finality of a light burning out is easier to grasp than a possibility of endless possibilities that await a departing human soul. A self-aware sentient energy. That there are countless means of exit is unthinkable when a model that espouses one Creator, a karmic reward or punishment, is forcefully repeatedly held to be a One and Final Truth. There is a unified consciousness that divides eternally, as cells divide and as the Universe expands, where all actions are taking place according to the mutable influence of will and under the laws of chaos, attractors, repellers, and higher beings that are never revealed.

No soul cycles through these myriad conditions as does another. One will leave its body suddenly, before awareness may exert its spin into the resonance of event, and this will become a clean separation. Another soul may pass “naturally” as its vessel deteriorates to a point of cessation, and if the mind is at peace, is ready on subconscious levels to move into what exists next, another spirit will have transitioned cleanly. And yet, this confounding “human being” creature with a complex social structure at once unified by common fears and divided by the details of varied belief systems, resists the most natural and inevitable balance to the beauty of life birthed; that all energy must move, acquire and dispense, before shifting into the pathways of least resistance...

They call it “death” and worship it with fear. They do everything in their power to deny its inevitable arrival. Aging is a battle front. Science must acquire the means, through mapping of a genome, to thwart death. To stave off the unknown, because unknowns are unacceptable if one’s species is to rule and continually advance... toward what? The perpetual motion machine of technological impetus is goal oriented without a perceptible finish point. Is it possible to know enough? Will a threshold ever exist in attainable form that these narcissistic cosmic infants will collectively settle for? How will that divine threshold be achieved when so much of the collective species energy is wantonly wasted upon violence and division? On eternally evasive concepts such as “ownership”? On hierarchy. Most lamentably and unique to the planet called “Earth”, on the capacity for “hatred”.

Thunderbird is wounded and weakened, flying northwest to its previous memory, conflicted within due to unsettled forces of will. When in mortal form, within the earthly realm, the creature must feed its body as any large bird of prey must. When newly resurgent there is ample power to move freely between realms, but this being is injured from the thrashing of its turmoil of will versus will, then a painful exit through wood muntins and glass panes. It flies with a minimum of wing movement, riding stronger winds above the cloud cover until its approach to the region affected by lake Huron and Georgian Bay.

There, wind direction is to the southeast, of a more powerful and steady character. Intuiting the energies below, the huge raptor descends into dusk. Lakota, Ojibwa, other indigenous peoples of the North American northwest, gave thunderbird tremendous powers over weather. The beating of its wings to stitch clouds together, create storms, claps of thunder. The blinking of its eyes to create sheet lightning. Bolts of light attributed to glowing snakes carried in its talons. At once a singular entity and a species, over the span of centuries in oral and pictorial records, seen in these contemporary times by serious people; bush pilots, adventurers.

Described as intelligent, powerful, wrathful by believers. Dismissed as myth by non. “Where are the bodies? The skeletal remains?” Human arrogance to assume that only the visible world can be what holds true against all that lingers, unproven; there is no allowance for portals, wormholes, aberrational vortices, ley lines, co-existent dimensions, time-bending, and therefore the lack of bodily evidence bolsters their assertions of nonsense and legend. These beings, like the elementals of lore, like the highly advanced vehicles seen in skies throughout historical record, do not share the limitations of mortality-bound life forms.

The scientifically provable reality is, in fact, a proving ground. Souls are cycled through variations of possibility, accumulating that which will eventually catalyze their ascension and outward placement until they no longer exist solely within three perceptual dimensions. Thunderbird, however, is the archetypal. Ancient. Mysterious. Agenda and meaning not known, other than a seeming method of pure energy transfer between souls and their trajectories.

This, a prototypic Jungian beast that has never gone away. Nuu-chah-nuith history places thunderbird as a mountain dweller. A servant of the Great Spirit. Its flights served only to carry messages from one spirit to another. In this oral passing down of legend, the tribe is very close to a truth. Souls being pure energy, energy being of pure universe, the great raptor is through its very existence a conduit of transfer, fluid from one reality to another. Even closer to truth in their beliefs were the Cowichan tribes, who attributed an ability to shape-shift into human form, even marrying into and procreating with the species. The Sioux and Anishinaabe have many tales of the thunderbird, with the latter tribe basing several of their tellings around an area called Thunder Bay in the Canadian province of Ontario... also a very strong vortex region with a ley line network crisscrossing the basin of lake Superior.

The “civilized” world will have little use for these tales. Without hard evidence beyond spoken history and artistic homage, the tens of thousands of missing persons per annum will have no link to such esoteric nonsense as time funnels and mythic soul-devouring beasts; as future astronomers will most certainly discover distant small solid planets in similar orbits to the life enriched Earth, shouting “it IS possible” for extraterrestrial life to exist, so too will the close-minded frontier explorers of any epoch reluctantly give in to the shedding of their ignorance. Blunt force knowledge acquisition trauma; the human method.

For this story, this thunderbird of both fact and legend, a weakened body containing its troubled unclean energy must make its way back to the place of its most recent renewal. It is compelled by sheer instinct. And a blind, driving hunger that no person may ever know. There is a new arrival imminent. A soul worth coveting. One that will provide a rare mortal longevity.