Jeff Coleman is a writer who finds himself drawn to the dark and the mysterious, and to all the extraordinary things that regularly hide in the shadow of ordinary life.
This post was originally published through Patreon on August 28, 2016.
Quick note: I’m currently working on “Totem, Part 11,” and plan to release it on November 7 🙂
The world is ending. He can feel it, buzzing like a high tension electrical wire. Like the bass in a celestial orchestra, it began as a rumble, emanating from the core of the Earth itself, and quickly rises to a crescendo. It’s only a matter of hours before the whole thing uncoils like a tightly compressed spring.
He’s witnessed the births and deaths of many worlds, and the end has always fascinated him the most. It’s almost always self-inflicted, a wellspring of violence that erupts from the inside out, blowing the world asunder.
He sometimes likes to imagine he’s the cause—that he’s an Old Testament God, raining down judgement and destruction on an ungrateful world. But of course he is not. He’s only an observer, a cosmic tourist in search of entertainment. He doesn’t want to get involved, and at any rate, humans have done a fine job of destroying the world themselves.
He’ll stick around for the end, and when it’s over—when the Earth is adrift and bereft of life—he’ll move on.
He gazes up at the sky and smiles.
The show is about to begin.
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A sparkle, followed by a twining liquid shimmer. Tara flexed her fingers, and the suspended ribbon of water before her wormed through the air like a snake.
She cycled through a series of basic patterns, all geometric constructions her parents had taught her to form when she was young. But she had no real investment in what she was doing, nor any desire to venture beyond mindless repetition.
There’d been a time, long ago, when her talent had been revered. Water charming, it was called, and it ran in Tara’s family. But the world had moved on, and now, it was good for little more than idle amusement.
“It’s your birthright,” Mom had said when Tara was nine after she’d complained about water charming the way some of her friends complained about piano lessons. “It’s part of our identity.”
But Tara never felt a deep connection to her ancestry, only a desperate longing to be like everyone else. She wanted to come home after a difficult day at school and veg in front of the TV like her peers.
Instead, her parents made her study how water resonates with the energy in the soul, and how intent, amplified by physical gestures, not only contains, but shapes and molds the water as if an extension of the physical self.
Now, Tara wondered how those lessons had helped her through life. Had it gotten her through college? Secured for her a decent job? Saved her parents the day they died in a high speed collision on the freeway?
No, no, and no.
Tara sighed, then let the water go. It lost cohesion immediately and splattered on the kitchen floor.
“Useless,” she muttered.
Tara stalked into the living room, seized her sweatshirt and keys, and stormed through the front door. The frosty November air prickled against her skin as she pressed into the deepening darkness, and she welcomed the sensation.
This was how she connected with the mysteries of her secret power and the many questions they inspired: not by performing parlor tricks in the privacy of her apartment, but by wandering the neighborhood at night, surrounded by the dark and the shadows, free to speculate on matters she preferred not to think about during the day.
The question that was always first and foremost in her mind was “why.” Why the power to manipulate water? Why her family? And, coming in at a close second, was the question of “how.” How could such a talent be useful? How was such a talent even possible?
Tara had studied chemistry in high school. She’d even taken physics in college, though it had nothing to do with her major. She was aware that polar covalent bonds held water’s hydrogen and oxygen atoms together; that water possessed the remarkable ability to shift from solid to liquid to gas within a remarkably narrow band of temperatures and pressures; that water, contrary to many other substances, was denser as a liquid than as a solid.
But none of what she’d learned in school explained the mystical influence she exerted over water, nor the almost tangible connection she felt whenever she moved it around by willpower alone. There was so little that humans understood about the world in which they lived, and Tara had always found this fact to be unsettling.
A smell pulled her from her thoughts and made her look up, a scent like burning charcoal, or wood from a meat smoker. Her first thought was that it was a barbecue, and that she had a hankering for a juicy rack of ribs. Then she spotted the smoke—thin, ghost-like tendrils that glowed in the moonlight—and panicked.
The house beside her was on fire.
I should call someone, she thought. Then she reached into her pocket and realized she’d left her cell phone at home. Her next idea was to knock on the door and see if whoever lived there was okay. Only the house was dark, and it looked like no one was home.
Tara became acutely aware of the water beneath the street: a hidden, surging reservoir that, if channeled, could be diverted. She reached out with her mind and was instantly overwhelmed by it’s immense weight—not at all like the tiny droplets she played with when she was bored. Nevertheless, she wrapped her will around it, and without thinking, she began to pull.
She routed the water through various patterns, all of them shapes her parents had taught her to make when she was young. The drainage slits in the gutter were what she was aiming for, and she pulled the water toward them in a rush, first dividing the flows, then pulling each segment out like thread through the eye of a needle.
Once the water reached the open air, she recombined the streams, braiding each channel around the others like a rope. The result was a massive column that seemed to shake the very foundation of the world. She strengthened her hold of it, and then, with a fierce tug of the will, she pulled it back and slammed it into the house.
Windows shattered in the onslaught. The sound was so loud, so deafening, that Tara instantly lost focus. The raging airborne rapids collapsed, and the water, once more under gravity’s influence, cascaded from every open surface, carrying glass and debris as it journeyed back into the sewer.
Had Tara just done that?
Dazed, all she could do was stare, until people started to shout, and sirens started to wail. Then Tara grew short of breath and the world contracted. Someone must have seen her.
She had to get away.
It wasn’t until she sprinted home that she considered the magnitude of what had happened.
Who knew how long it would have taken the fire department to arrive. She might have destroyed the house in her attempt to save it, but how many others would have caught fire and burned alongside it if she hadn’t intervened?
Her entire worldview shifted. She was no longer the practitioner of an arcane and esoteric talent. She was a superhero.
Alone in the lengthening shadows of her apartment, she gazed up at the ceiling and whispered, “Thank you, Mom and Dad.”
Then she let her face fall into her hands and cried.
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