Aurora Magna

Aurora Magna

Something…? surging through her body brought Celia to consciousness with a jolt. Her eyes flew open, meeting the pitch blackness of pre-dawn hours. 

She lay still, feeling her pulse jump in her throat. There was no sound but Finn's regular breathing. Celia tried to reason with herself: Might it have been the vestige of a dream? Or a phantom perception?

She inhaled deeply, let it out slowly, closed her eyes. Panic subsided. She started to drift…

“Er-er-ER-errrr!” 

Clyde. His shrill alarm carried through the surrounding silence. Something had disturbed him, too. Did he sense a predator? Was there an earthquake? She had an intuition that it was something else.

“Er-er-ER-errrr…” Clyde insisted. Celia began to hear discontented grumbling from the hens. I’d better go check them.

Sliding out of bed, she pulled her robe from the bedpost. Finn stirred. “Mmmh?” he grunted as she soft-footed out of the room, feeling her way through the dark house.

Should she wake him? She debated with herself, stopping at the stove to light a lantern. Its comforting glow was just enough to see what she was doing. 

There’s no point in both of us losing sleep. But what if there’s a mountain lion lurking? Grabbing the fire poker, she slipped into her outdoor shoes. 

All seemed peaceful as she scuffed along the path. A clear, mild night, with just a fingernail clipping of a moon. Stars winked, lucent against the indigo sky. Her bobbing circle of lamplight didn’t do much, but it was enough to illuminate the path just ahead of her feet. 

Holding the poker at the ready, she moved with caution around the perimeter of the chicken house. Nothing. Leaning her would-be weapon against the wall, she set the lantern down and reached for the lock. A potent shock zapped her arm, causing it to tingle up to the elbow! She dropped the key.

After several minutes of fumbling, another snap! of electricity hit the end of her finger—there was the key. She’d probably built up static, shuffling along in the dark. What to do to discharge it? Touch metal to metal. 

Shadowy hen-shapes shifted from one foot to another, complaining softly and staring with bleary eyes in the faint glow. Clyde stretched his body upward on thick yellow legs, and flapped his wings in a challenge. Here it comes.

“Er-er-ER-errrr!” 

“Shhh, buddy…” she whispered, “Everything looks OK. Go back to sleep.”

“BUP-bup-bup-bup…” Clyde scolded.

Backing out of the wooden shed, Celia tapped the key against the lock once more before clicking it shut.

A dry breeze had come up; the very air felt charged with a crackling sensation. Celia shivered, even though the summer night held no chill. Feeling uneasy, she crossed her arms against her body and headed for the house.

Safely inside, she extinguished the lamp and climbed back into bed. Finn slept like the dead. Celia lay staring into the nothingness until tiny silver pinpricks floated across her vision, like the stars she’d seen. It seems like I’ve been awake for hours. 

At last, she slept. When she awoke, she was alone and murky gray light was seeping in through the shutters. I’ve slept late! Something clattered in the kitchen. Finn, trying to make coffee?

“Good morning, sleepyhead!”

“Good morning… here, let me do that…” She took the small kettle from him and began pouring in a slow, steady, circular motion over the fragrant grounds. 

“I was up for a while in the night. Something disturbed Clyde.”

“Oh? Guess I didn’t hear him.”

“Finn—the atmosphere was weird. I kept getting shocks, and the air felt crackly. Like a massive lightning storm was coming, but the air was so clear—”

Celia shrieked and spilled the water. Her hands were shaking. She set the kettle down with a thunk! and pointed across the kitchen. 

A luminous blue-violet sphere rolled erratically across the floor, bumped inquisitively at the pantry door, and disappeared. It left behind a faint odor of sulfur.

“What was that thing? It came out of nowhere, and phased through the wall!”

“Never seen anything like it… Ball lightning?” Finn wondered. “Isn’t that caused by electrically charged air?”

“Yes! That must be it. You’ve heard Mom’s story about the Event.”

After breakfast, Finn went out to work in the fields. 

“Be careful out there, hon,” Celia admonished. “There’s something very strange in the atmosphere. I’m going to check in with my folks.”

She hooked Atlas up to his cart and took off down the road. Ezra, as usual, began calling to them when they reached the driveway—his raspy bray easily carrying the quarter mile.

“Eeeee-awwww! Eeeee-awwww!”

And Atlas, patiently plodding the dusty road, replied, “Eeeee-awwww!”

No matter how many times she heard it, their unbridled enthusiasm enchanted Celia. Despite the eerie goings-on, she was compelled to smile. 

“Yes, that sounds like ball lightning. I’ll never forget that week, that’s for sure! We had just brought you home from the hospital. You were three days old. It was so frightening—first the electrified air, then that bluish ball came rolling through the room and right under your cradle. I thought it was going to set it on fire, but it just went fzzt! and disappeared into thin air.”

“Did you smell anything?”

“Yes. Even after fifty five years, I can still remember that smell. Like ozone with a touch of sulfur.”

“Sun cycle,” Celia’s father commented. Garret was a quiet man who spoke only when he had something important to say. Celia’s ears perked up.

“Sun cycle?” She repeated. “What about it, Dad?”

“Fifty five. Sun cycles roughly eleven years. We’re in the fifth cycle since the Event.”

“Yes, that’s right,” April broke in. “It was all over the Internet that a big solar flare could be coming, but experts didn’t agree on the chances of major disruption happening.”

“The Internet…” mused Celia. “I just can’t imagine what it was like, having instant communication across the globe. And information at your fingertips.” She sighed. “Sure would make life easier sometimes. Anyway, tell me again—what happened next? After the ball lightning visited.”

“Oh, my… well, we were almost afraid to go to bed. I touched the light switch to turn it off, and zap! Got a shock from it. We did go to sleep, but we only got a couple hours when the light woke us. Streaming through the blinds. We stared out at the most magnificent sky, draped with indescribable color. And bright! Bright as noon. Every color of the spectrum, rippling and shimmering across the sky. Everyone was out in the street, marveling at it. Discussing what it could be.” April paused gazing into the distance as if seeing the lights again.

“And then?” Celia prompted.

“And then. And then—people started pulling out their phones, trying to do searches on the phenomenon, but nothing worked. Phones were dead. No Internet. No communication.”

“I remember studying it in school,” Celia nodded. “The satellites were like planets, orbiting Earth, right? And they sent signals for communication?”

“That’s right. There had been talk about a coronal mass ejection that could possibly do severe damage to the power grids and temporarily disrupt our lives. Well, it happened about a year earlier than expected, and look at us now. Like Dad said, we’re going into the fifth sun cycle since the Event. Ten years was the worst case scenario to get it all up and running again, but they never considered the enormity of it. That so much would be deactivated. Every piece of electronic equipment—fried. Useless. No way to rebuild without starting from scratch.”

“Oh well,” Celia shrugged. “Back to basics. Maybe we’re better off.”