The Blaring Blue by Emmie Christie

You know how TVs have advanced so far they show details better than real life? A giraffe at the zoo seems unrealistic and vague, like you expect it to have more pixels or something. Well, that’s how the Nebraska sky operates.

It blares an eldritch blue, too bright, too bold. It shouts like a bathroom LED bulb, revealing your red splotches where none showed in the forgiving yellow light of the bedroom vanity.

Unnatural. Too real. Too high a frame rate.

At first, it will fascinate you. Hypnotic. But don’t stare too long. Sometimes, at high noon on December days, when the cold freezes the moisture in your nose into tiny stalactites, the sun ricochets off the blanket of snow back up into the cloudless, windless sky, and the air tastes like peppermint because of nostalgia, a shadow appears in the East.

In other states, the human eye can’t catch it, but the blaring blue presides over the prairie and uncovers the outline of something with wings. Angelic? No, not angelic. Those who do spot the silhouette shudder and gibber at reporters in semi-coherent sentences.

“Heavy,” they say. “Like it wants to fall.”

The reporters snigger and smile at each other, and the cameramen try to capture the ‘weather phenomenon’ with their high-tech cameras. They never do. The lens cannot grasp the loudness of the Nebraska sky, cannot capture the vastness of the open horizon that somehow adds to the crescendo of it all. The reporters don’t see it, either, because they stare at the wrong times and never for long enough.

But the weight of that silhouette presses like the drop on a rollercoaster. A sinking. An inevitability. A judgment for decisions you cannot withdraw, no matter how much you scream and throw your hands into the air to surrender.

Step over the state line with trepidation, and don’t look up during cloudless days. The locals know. It’s a horizon transplanted from another place, where giant shadows show up in the florescent heavens. Shadows heavy enough to fall.
 

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Emmie Christie’s work tends to hover around the topics of feminism, mental health, cats, and the speculative such as unicorns and affordable healthcare. She has been published in Intrinsick and Allegory Magazine, and she graduated from the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2013. She also enjoys narrating audiobooks for Audible. You can find her at www.emmiechristie.com. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @EmmieChristie33 and on Facebook @EmmieChristieFiction. 

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