The News of the Town

The news hit the town almost immediately. After all, it was a national, if not world wide emergency. It only took one creature intelligent enough to figure out how to fly or cross the ocean, and the rest of the world would be as screwed as the United States was at that moment in time. At first, people were looking at each other, calling out in the streets, calling their spouses and making jokes out of it. They kept wondering if it was secretly a new April Fool’s day that Green Tech had spontaneously declared. But then relatives began calling them. And the kids were coming home early.

It was then, truly, that the news hit. Everything that everyone in Sedona had ever feared – figments of their imaginations, bad dreams, gargoyles and centaurs and faeries, dopplegangers and elves, could cross that magical boundary at any time. And the worst part was, the veil was anywhere, at anytime. Perhaps in their own houses.

…But no one had seen anything yet. It was weird. They had all accepted it as truth, almost immediately – after all, they lived in Sedona, and practically had to sign a non disclosure agreement with Green Tech for living there. Not to mention, house and life insurance went through the roof when living so close to an experimental facility. Granted, Green Tech paid well. But, we digress.

It wasn’t quite true that no one had seen anything yet – the children had. It had begun with flashes out of the corners of their eyes, unless they were very young, and that barrier between maturity and childhood had not quite formed. Those lucky children were seeing all means of both frightening and frighteningly wonderful things. Unicorns, banned from the earth for the beauty of their horns – for their own protection, and because the humans were jealous –– and bad dreams, manifesting in all sorts of ways, most often grim reaper style with a black robe and hood, some form of gruesome, technologically advanced or not, method of killing people readily available in their shadowy, darkness dripping hands.

The kindergarten room of Mrs. Jako-Nielson exploded in laughter almost immediately after the veil had gone down. There seemed to be strange creatures everywhere – Mrs. Jako-Nielson’s room was situated right on top of what had been, many ages and realities ago, a mass meeting place for all sorts of creatures – and after, a Native spiritual location for those energies. Mrs. Jako-Nielson’s classroom was filled with laughing children – and, in their eyes, pixies and griffins and faeries – all air born, of course. Mrs. Jako-Nielson had assumed that a child had farted or something similar – until the lights above them shattered. The children kept laughing, and pointing when there wasn’t anything there!

Much like the Native in the myth of Columbus’ arrival in South America, Mrs. Jako-Nielson could not see what she no longer believed in. And, as the phone call came close to an hour later, after she had ushered her children out of the room and calmed them down, and taken up residency in the spare classroom next door, it all clicked into place.

Suddenly, Mrs. Jako-Nielson could make out those flashes in the corners of her eyes. As she grew more and more suspicious, so her beliefs grew – and so did the creatures. What were motions soon became great beasts and little pixies, all doing unspeakable things to each other – though not in as great numbers as she had begun to imagine. In the spare classroom, there had only been one griffin and twenty pixies. Much better than the three griffins to fifty pixies ratio that had been occurring in the original classroom. If only she had been thoughtful enough to look.

Pixies are not known for their…decency in things that are usually considered private. All of the above mentioned pixies were completely and totally, for lack of a better word with a deeper meaning, naked. One could not necessarily see where the pixies began and ended, for they tended to blend with their surroundings, but in the portions of them that the teacher could see, they were very well endowed. Masterfully, in fact.

The school was evacuated fifteen minutes later. And Mrs. Jako-Nielson ducked into her original classroom, trying to ignore the griffin droppings and public pixie fornication going on above, below and right in front of her face. Soon, she could even make out their voices, as she grabbed her coat and wormed her way past the griffins. They looked to be getting angry. And the body of a lion, even with the wings of an eagle – was nothing to mess with.

Likewise, across town, as others slowly began to allow the truth to sink into their minds, those things which could not possibly be happening in their houses – plates floating, voices indistinctly shouting back and forth across what seemed like miles, right through their ears – all began to make more and more sense as the outlines became apparent, and then those forms which some people found frightening, others fascinating, solidified, and humans came face to face with what may have been their worst nightmares.

Charlie arrived home safely after making sure that everyone was out of his particular complex. That damn monkey had released the creatures – turning the switch back the other way just wouldn’t fix the problem. There was about to be a war, and it wouldn’t only take guns to win it. The only way to get them to cross that border again, that man made barrier against all things deemed unnatural by the majority – would be to convince them to cross it themselves, or let them die in the process of fighting to stay on the ‘light’ side.

He had a perfectly valid belief in all things unnatural – look at what he was working with. However, he was occupied so much with the problems at hand that he failed to see the pixie flying out in front of his car. In some cases – the creatures were solid – and others, they were not. On the bad side of things – and Charlie felt bad! – the pixie was one of those creatures that was solid. And the resulting green paste, plastered all over his windshield – sucked. It seemed to be so gooey that not even his windshield wipers could get it off. It was just one more event tacked on to what was going to be the longest day of his life.

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