Tag Archives: flashes

Recounting the Unaccountable (a call for stories)

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I am fascinated by accounts of people’s encounters with things that can not be explained – personal experiences of and interactions with the supernatural, paranormal, fantastic, and just plain weird.

Though I was raised in a church, I never fully trusted what I was asked to believe in – mainly because it just seemed impossible that the miracles and cosmology recounted in the Bible could actually occur, at least not within public school’s competing narrative of late 20st century scientific materialism, and my own research into other cultures’ beliefs.

Though for a time I declared myself staunchly agnostic, I was always drawn to stories in which miracles could occur – science fictions and fantasies, family tales like my father standing in one basement doorway where he could usually hear a sourceless foreign radio program – my dreams – anything in which the impossible might finally break through  into this world. Perhaps it was some desire for a more magical life, or a fear – an unable to look away from the abyss terrors – of all that is twisted and horrific and morbid. Or maybe that anarchic impulse that everything we cling to as real come crashing down so we can finally get a good look at what’s really going on.

Eventually I sought out – or was thrust into – a number of experiences that I still can not quite account for – seeing a ufo, being psychically connected to people, meeting God (or what was left of him), having dreams literally come true. All of which made me question my earlier beliefs and adopt a more unlimited perspective – even though each experience could potentially be explained away by rational circumstances – madness, drugs, dreams, trickery, sensory disintegration. But what made it so fantastic, I still experienced something beyond what I’d once imagined, and it was real, for me, and occasionally for others.

At this point I entertain that anything is real, if you ritually believe in it and or experience it – if you are effected, even if just with a strong disbelief, any feeling. Despite a consistent lack of evidence to prove that anything extraordinary is going on, history is crackling with accounts of people running into just that. Earlier today I ran into a friend who likes to tell of the time someone remote viewed his house – a scrap of proof.

Recently I’ve been thinking I should collect personal accounts of people’s encounters with the unaccountable. Because despite rational disbelief, or even the possibility that none of it’s “really real,”what makes the fantastic fascinating is the experience that a person has in the face of it – the way we are changed, or the strange made suddenly more familiar. That, and people today have no problem suspending their disbelief for a good tale, no matter how strange and compelling.

If anyone has their own accounts of the unaccountable, I welcome them to share their stories here, in the comments or by email to be posted and chronicled.

In that vein, here is an account found on a local message board, from a sarita_p, who records on Jul 02nd, 2011 at 09:29:34 pm that a medium friend claims to be channeling aliens:

i don’t believe this to necessarily be “true”, but it is nonetheless interesting. here is an excerpt of one of their recent conversations that i was privy to. he will be on coast to coast am talking about this sometime in the near future:

What would you like to tell me?
Go West.
Pearl near water on beach.
OZ

Do you mean Australia?
Close.
TZ.

Do you mean Tasmania?
Yes.

If I am supposed to find something there, it would be like finding a needle in a haystack among 5,000 haystacks.
No. Give a go.

Give it a go?
Have a go.
In Sand.

I would need to know more specifics than that if I am supposed to find something there.
Dover at Patyu.

Dover at PAtyu?
Yes.
Maybe you is Zuna. You Zuna.

Zuna?
Yes.
Close to Pys.
Close to (Fire Symbol).
Close to a Volcano.
Runs along close to water. Put a raft in the water.

Is another spirit here?
Yes. Other. Other about. ET.

Extra Terrestrial?
Yes.

Not from Earth correct?
Yes.

Where are you from?
A Star.

Which star?
Betelg.

Betelgeuse?
Yes.
Vatyon.

Vatyon?
Wait. At a star. Yes.

What is Vatyon?
A…look. A planet.

You are on or near a planet, is that correct?
Yes.

What is your name?
Atar.

Atar?
Yes.
(Fire symbol).

(From Wikipedia: Atar (ātar, Avestan) is the Zoroastrian concept for “burning and unburning fire” and “visible and invisible fire” (Mirza, 1987:389).

In an unrestricted sense, atar is heat—that is, thermal energy, manifest as fire or other luminous source when visible. In this sense, atar is an attribute of sources of heat and light, an adjectival form of nominative singular atarsh (ātarš). In later Zoroastrianism, atar (in middle Persian: ādar or ādur) is iconographically conflated with fire itself, which in middle Persian is ataksh, one of the primary objects of Zoroastrian symbolism. The etymology of atar is unknown (Boyce, 2002:1). The yazata Atar is not of Indo-Iranian origin (Dhalla 1938:174).

What dimension are you in?
3rd, fire symbol.

Near your sun in the 3rd dimension?
Close to it, yes.

Are you spiritually advanced there?
I am. Yes.

What do you do there?
I see in. I see.

Are you a seer?
Yes.

Do you see in the future?
Past, present, future.

What do you see for us here on this planet, with the coming changes that are supposedly imminent?
I see the Earth at a…(pause). Wait…at harvest.

Is it as the harvest RA speaks of? …
Are you familiar with RA?
No.

RA is a multiple thought form-complex that purports itself to be from the 6th density and is or was in contact with some people on Earth.
Ritzy.

That’s funny.
Yes.

I like you Atar!
Ha.

Too bad we can’t hang out by the campfire and tell stories in person.
Yes.

What more can you say about this harvest you see?
An ET will arrive to save you.
Fuc u.
Go to h.

Is this still Atar?
No.
Atar is at hatch.

What is hatch?
Atar are you here?
Yes.

Did you leave?
No.

Was there interference?
Yes.
ET pretending to be person. From other.

You don’t know who?
No.

Will we communicate again in the future?
Maybe.

Is there anything we can do to facilitate that?
Ask.

The Bunker (flash fiction)

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The Bunker
Flash fiction by Tait McKenzie Johnson

Robert Lambkin had survived the end of the world, at least the last time it was supposed to go kaput, he told me as we stood on the beach, watching the sun try to rise. You see, it was the ‘80s, and for an old hippy like me, well, all that materialism, Reganomics, even those punk kids, it just felt too much like everything was in a downward spiral. But then he heard Clare Prophet speak, her mad dream of the world that waited for all who followed her, the world after the end of the world. Wow, that lady could really preach, Robert almost smiled, even after what happened, or didn’t, but she had that charisma in spades. And so Robert took his wife and their young daughter Katherine and joined the Church Universal and Triumphant, living in a reinforced bunker so deep under Montana that even the Midwestern militias couldn’t penetrate their holdout. And years passed, and then the day came, that fateful day when Clare had prophesied humanity would be over, and the Lambkins would ascend triumphant into their new world, and, well, nothing happened, Robert shook his head, staring out at the blackened tide, and we moved back east soon after that. I’ve never been the same since. I could tell by the way his cheek twitched at his memories; how terrible, to expect, to even want the world to end, and then to have to go back to being a normal citizen, the shock of it. Robert took to writing movie scripts, mostly about their time in the bunker, particularly the incident when young Katherine and several other of the church’s children were abducted by aliens. My brother-in-law’s helping me edit, he lives in Southport where they’re getting hit worse than up here, but anyway he keeps cutting out all the good scenes, says no one would believe it, but I do, I saw them with my own eyes, well, at least the footprints, but they were there. It was the Yeti, he claimed, all leaving Earth because they knew what was coming, much like Douglas Adams claimed about the dolphins. And even though Clare Prophet got the date wrong, he said, and she’s being indicted for fraud and tax evasion like that new Scientology cult, you know we’re seeing the same thing with the bees. Course, Kate doesn’t want me saying any of this; it was the hardest for her, and not just because of the abduction. Poor girl didn’t have any kind of normal childhood, I mean, she had friends, but I can see now what I couldn’t then, it wasn’t the same as everyone else. But she’s adapting, even going to college now, and we retired here to the beach, the Lambkins giving normalcy a chance, and the world didn’t end after all, at least not all of a sudden. Because despite the failed prophecy, all the good things the Lambkins found after their days in the bunker had gone sour, as if the world was still in its downward spiral, sliding into the abyss the whole time they’d been underground: foreign investments ruined by the war, mortgage bombed by the subprime market crash, vacation in the Netherlands indefinitely postponed once Eyjafjallajokull buried Europe in ash. Even our little beach here, Robert didn’t need to point out, well, you can see that oil spill creeping closer as we stand here and talk about it. It’s like I’ve had to make my whole life a bunker against the inevitable, and though I don’t hold much truck with science, that entropy business scares me hell of a lot more than anything Clare preached. But the real kicker, Robert told me, now ready to head off having made sure the sun cleared the surface, was not wanting to tell his brother-in-law I told you so, nor tell Clare Prophet she was right all along, but his gradual recognition that their days back in the bunker had been good ones, with a community that accepted and believed them, days that, now that he knew for certain the world was ending, he wished could have lasted forever.

The Hierophany (flash fiction)

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The Hierophany
Flash Fiction by Tait McKenzie Johnson

Friedrich Carter was nearing retirement and he still hadn’t met a god. Not that he ever spoke of it, not in lectures or in private, he was far too serious to say such things out loud, but I could tell by the tone of his voice, the reverence with which he taught ancient mythology, that these stories were true and lived by their tellers, his reverence tinged with a bitter sadness that might taste like asparagus. Carter had a reputation of being a challenging and curmudgeonly professor, though sometimes given to sentimentality in his office hours, which is when I caught up with him. All peoples once told these stories, he told me, office walls lined with the great spiritual texts from all the world’s cultures, and so few now understand their import. He told me that he had studied under the great mythographer Mircea Eliade himself, had traveled to South East Asia to observe and even participate in the funerary rituals of the reclusive Tamil Tigers, before finally settling here, in Pittsburgh, his dead wife’s old hometown, this burnt out steel city, he bemoaned, where, like the rest of America, the only myths left to tell are of incompetent men like the last president, or of the Fountain of Youth ingloriously crammed in a cosmetics jar. But the gods, he taught later, such hymns sung of the divine, to its manifestations in the world, that ultimate and universal force appearing, suggesting itself for just a moment in a rock perhaps, or even this chair, that sense of the deepest significance of reality, which stories of such deities relate to us, only so that now we read them and say, bad science or poetic metaphor, never knowing what our ancestors truly saw in this world around us. Professor? It was one of the underclassmen, a scrawny girl who had absently been staring out the back window, hoping not to be called on to interpret some dead tale, and from the looks of her sudden trembling I could tell she’d never met a god before either. I… I don’t think that’s a metaphor, she pointed. Everyone rushed to look, to the window, out of their schools jobs and houses, onto the streets they rushed, everyone pointing upward, mouths agape in wonder at that light, those eyes, whatever it was it was near indescribable, but very much there. People were falling to their knees, many crying, joyfully despite the terror, that utter ambivalence Friedrich Carter might say Rudolf Otto wrote about, describing the human reaction to the Holy, if Carter wasn’t struck by it himself. He stood at the window, a trembling hand unconsciously at his heart. My God, he whispered, a real hierophany, not just a feeling but this…Eliade had it all wrong, the gods are real! And before I left, and everything faded back to normalcy and the real world again (whatever that’s now becoming), I even saw him break a smile.

Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds (fiction)

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[This one's inspired by a bunch of puns from work today, and the ridiculousness of the anxiety that manifests itself in Pittsburgh this time of year. Enjoy!]


Bananarchy in the Bowl of Winds

It was third down in the final minutes of the third quarter, and Jerry was on the edge of his seat. C’mon, he screamed, just catch the ball! I can’t believe that call, he was clearly across the line… I couldn’t tell how Jerry knew; it was almost impossible to see the field from as high up as we were in the stands. But the seats were cheap, even if in this terrible weather the wind just whipped down into the bowl of the arena and froze our faces off, even though the group of fans in bright yellow suits right below us seemed jovially unconcerned.

Touchdown! No it’s not, Jerry howled, wringing his towel and jumping up and down. One of the fans cast an odd glance up our way, but his friends were occupied, huddled around something I couldn’t see, probably watching a replay on the Net as the JumboTron screen was having a hard time staying focused. The fan’s face was inexplicably painted like a clown’s, in a yellow as garish as his suit. Jerry had warned me the fans often dressed quite strange to show their team spirit. I’ve never understood football myself, being more of a story man. What’s the entertainment value of watching large men you can’t even see tumbling all over each other? But Jerry’s enthusiasm was contagious, so when he begged me to come along with him to the game I agreed, not realizing how miserably wretched the weather would be, even in the chintzy team windbreaker Jerry leant me that did nothing to keep out the wind. Those thick yellow suits were starting to look appealing right now.

The game wore on, Pittsburgh falling behind as Dallas caught a second wind, and then a third. Unable to make out the ant-like players below, my attention kept wandering, returning to the yellow-suited fans who seemed to be having a lot more fun. It looked like they were busy constructing some apparatus, what after a moment my brain told me was a catapult. A catapult? I wanted to ask Jerry if this was for some post-game ritual, but he was too busy chewing his mittens to shreds over the last foul to listen, so I sat back again to watch, finally a little curious.

Third down in the final minutes of the last quarter, and the Steelers had just used their last timeout, hopefully planning how to turn their game around before poor Jerry threw himself from the bleachers in despair. The whole crowd was on the edge of their seats, except for me, unable to see why this was so important, and the yellow suits, who’d finished building their contraption and all leaned back, opening their jackets despite the chill. Suddenly, just as one of the Cowboys was about to claim another first down (I think that’s what it’s called), a small flapping object went whirling out of the stands, landing right in front of the runner, whose feet flew out from under him in an inglorious pratfall.

The crowd went wild as the cameras zoomed in to reveal a banana peel on the jittery JumboTron screen. The announcers all mumbled, uncertain where it had come from. The crowd was actually aghast, but they couldn’t keep from laughing at the absurdity of it, the yellow-suited fans most of all. Finally the field calmed down again so the Cowboy could redo his play without interruptions. But no! This time with an audible thwang another yellow whirl went sailing, and another. Suddenly the arena’s cold air was filled with banana peels, all landing whichever way the winds blew them! Looking around I realized that the top rows of the stands were dotted with yellow-suited individuals, each group of them busy at their own little catapult. They must have planned this whole caper in case the Steelers began to loose, unless it was a political statement, hiding the bananas in their jackets to keep them from freezing.

No one else seemed to notice the characters depart, all eyes intent on the field, where the game carried on now despite the rain of peels, the players slipping and tumbling all over the place, the ball slick with juice and a fruity reek wafting up to the stands. It was chaos, sheer bananarchy! Jerry could only shake his head as his cherished pastime was reduced to the buffoonery I’d always told him it looked like, while I laughed and laughed, entirely forgetting about the cold. Eventually the game was called on account of the mushy sabotage, and as we were walking to the lot I turned to Jerry and said, you know what, that was a lot more fun then I expected, you wanna go get a smoothie? For some reason he only grumbled and kept walking.

A Yarn: The Burden of Proof (Unlimited Story #1)

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[This is the first story generated by the now finished Unlimited Story Deck (beta version). The underlined words refer to the cards played.]

I was at the bar writing when I was approached by a girl who didn’t look old enough to get in, but she was dressed like a hipster, so maybe that’s the style of the week. We got into a debate about oppression, from parental to existential lacks of personal control, and I told her that a girl once told me that sometimes you have to wait, or ask, for help from outside the situation, like from a god in the machine of our world.

Who are you, the hip chick quarried, some outcast from the middle ages? No one believes in God anymore. Or maybe you’re just one of those androids who believes whatever they’ve been told enough times. I just smiled, and she for some reason followed, and later as we were walking toward the carnival through the milling crowds, a turn of fate showed her why.

The turn was that some eco-hackers had forced a viral attack on the nearby zoo’s computer system, hoping to liberate the animals; but they had accidentally released the creatures in a disastrous stampede! In order to escape the war-zone of terrified pedestrians we ducked into the closest café, but even there could not escape the TV’s blaring noise, advertising the doom and dying of the latest war. But just when all seemed hopeless, and she didn’t believe any help could come, out from a hidden lair beneath the kitchen hearth flew a whole mythic pantheon, turning all the rules of logic on their head as they saved the day!

Celebrating this miracle afterward with drinks and dancing back at the bar, the girl apologized for calling me names, and said that I must actually be some angelic messenger to have been so certain the gods would come. But what would really be convincing, she said, would be to next time catch it all on camera.

After just this one play, I am really pleased with how the deck works. The story, though randomly constrained, manages to convey the same kind of aesthetic, tone, pacing, etc. that I would usually put into a story of this length, but managed to be written in about a quarter of the time. Even more intriguing is that where I usually plot out the turn and ending hook of my flash stories, I was not able to here (since who knew what cards would later come up), and yet they happened to work with a fair amount of continuity. Part of this I suspect is foreshadowing: the otherwise arbitrary debate about oppression resolved through a deus ex machina became, as I constructed the tale, something of a goal or end state, the conflict to be resolved, which I continually kept in mind as I drew and played cards. Of course, with just one narrator, I knew what kinds of cards could possibly be played from my hand, and could group certain ones for later scenes or resolutions. At the same time though there were definitely several points when the story could have spiraled out of control; with so many ways of using any of the cards there is an over-determination of imaginative possibility. But I think that is only part of this deck’s beauty: anything truly can happen!

Now to play it with more than one person…

Heavens and Alchemy (fiction)

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It was Love at first light, the interconnection of subatomics leaping across the solar winds and the vast gulfs between star systems, our photons rejoicing in that immediate recognition. It was always this way, since the People first flew the Cradle of Worlds into these wider Heavens, replacing the primitive Einsteinian relativities with bonds that knew no bounds or bodies in too small space-time. Strife was vanquished with the false god Physics, and Love reigned supreme.

Or it had, while the People sailed out on Love’s fast fields, connecting the Cosmos as She saw fit. And wherever they alit, greeting the beings they found there as they would greet themselves: in joyous recognition. For they too were One and All, as we, my Beloved, should have been One and All, when the waves we reflected first lit each other’s senses. We sailed across the ecliptic and the trajectory of meteor showers, in search of that Dark Flow, the path that still leads to other Verses, which each god-to-be must traverse in our youth, in order to shower all the Verses with Love’s light, or so our stories go. We were still mortals then, little sparks, foolish as we raced across the terminator, your wings shimmering in Orion’s rays, each of us trying to sail ahead, to stay abreast the revolving darkness, but knowing that no matter how far apart we spanned the aether, our subtle bodies would always be in communication.

Oh Heavens and alchemy, I would have caught the stars for you that rained like angels on our orbits, I would have voiced whole new worlds, with their strange uncertain histories, I would say yes, as you reached the Event Horizon first, and leapt into the dark heart of the Cosmos, all giddy and aglow. As the People have done since we left that cradle Gaia, our split across the interstellar divide should have set a new Verse spinning, should have began the Creation anew. And yet, as I traversed, only moments after your wings brushed the Eternal, I felt you slip away. I know not where or to what Verse you fell, for as I alit in this one I felt all the celestial orbits tremble, and the suns race away as if they were afraid. For the connection to your presence, my Beloved, was nowhere to be found. No, not any beings here to recognize as ourselves in the joyous bonds of Love, no, not any One and All, only myself, particled in the scattering dark. And the stars fly apart, faster and faster than you could have imagined, than any of the stories say. Perhaps Love has been vanquished too in this here-now, for without your connection there is no force powerful enough to hold the worlds together, nothing to reflect and no light left to leap between us.

Yet perhaps this too is story, our secret untold chapter, that in each new Verse, Love must begin anew, alone, in search of its Beloved. That somewhere in these vasts and gulfs you still await, or not yet popped back into existence, specks of stardust accumulating in the warps, gathering into stars and planets that some day may birth beings to reflect Love’s light. And so I must wait, and search, and connect the One and All in the rays beyond space-time, until space and time are born anew, and so are you, and Strife is vanquished, and we fly the worlds and finally meet, in joyous recognition, beyond the edges of everything we are yet to imagine.