work in progress with fire and ghosts

The world doubled over on itself and hummed as colors dimmed to blacks and oranges. The sound would have been deafening if it wasn't coming from inside his own head. His sense of hearing had nothing to do with it, in reality. Reality, though, was beginning to seem pretty subjective ever since these episodes started.

The first few times it happened, the world would just fold itself right back out again. As disorienting as it was, it didn’t seem to interfere with day to day life. Once it even happened while he was driving. From everyone else’s perspective he just carried on as if everything was normal. He just came back around about 5 minutes later while he was parking.

He went to a couple of doctors, but no tests could find anything wrong with him. He was referred to a psychologist, but they could not find a pattern or trigger for the episodes. He was prescribed medication for migraines, and for a time that seemed to have worked. Then, one day in late July, after a storm had broken a particularly difficult heat wave, the world folded back out differently than it had been before.

He found himself to be in a salt flat. Barren and as expansive as the eye could see. The sky was orange and there was no sun, or apparent source of light. He was dressed in some sort of ceremonial robe and was holding a flower, a tulip, he thought. He decided to set off in a direction, took a step, and as he did the world folded right back into his living room.

Once again, the next week, he found himself on the salt flat with tulip and robe. There was a building in front of him now. It was a fire house. It looked like it had been plucked out of manhattan around the turn of the twentieth century. A brick building that stood in stately contrast to the pale, cracked, barren ground surrounding it. He walked towards it, but found himself not coming any closer. Just before the world folded again, he saw a figure in the window.

The world he knew was back. A car drove by his seat on the patio of a local bar. Some drunks were laughing down the block. He felt something like loss this time as he re emerged into reality. Over the next days he came to miss the other world. He thought about it all the time. He looked up historic fire houses, but nothing came up that matched what he had seen. He sat home at night pouring over his research. His walls had drawings of the scene rendered is whatever different media he had at hand. The first ones were detailed and meticulous, but in the intervening time, they had become more frantic and distorted.

Then he was back. Bare feet on the cracked ground. The air as still as a statue. Flower in hand he strode confidently towards the building towering in front of him. He did not see the figure come to the upstairs window as he crossed through the cavernous garage door. The interior had been ravaged by fire at some point The black soot and red of the bricks were a match for the robe he was draped in.

He could smell the fire, but the air felt cold and wet. The building looked as though it were going to collapse at any moment. There was a sound coming from upstairs, so he crept up the spiral staircase. He saw a light flickering as he rose. Upstairs, standing at the window, was a ghostly figure awash in orange flames.He could feel the heat from across the room. Out of the window, he did not see the wasteland that he left outside. What he saw could not so easily be expressed, but he considered the landscape to be part tropical rainforest and part infinite expanse of galaxies scattered throughout the universe. It churned and offered a sens of the true spatial proportions of the universe. He dropped the flower.