Fly Me to the... Moon?

Magnolia looked up at Errol and just registered his look of extreme shock and confusion before a blast of wind hit the back of her head. Her vision swirled, the world spun, and stretched and warped itself like a cheesy, twenty-year-old special effect in a B movie, and she fell on all fours the sidewalk.

Surely, she thought, this isn’t absolutely necessary.

“Zem!” she gurgled, “What are you–”

"Come," she heard Zem's voice intone.

She pressed her palms down and tried to glower at the empty air. Around her, three steps away, her untouched posse shifted uncertainly a step or two back. They were beginning to get used to the little eccentricities that following the mayor of Las Vegas these days entailed. Miraculous comings and goings, disembodied voices, occasional and intermittent farm animals had become parts of their employment expectations. But a private tornado was new.

“Errol–” she faltered.

There was a chuckle, a sound vibrating through the air and threatening to shatter it. Amused, yes, but so strong, so powerful, the world itself shied away in self-preservation. “Oh yes,” she heard, “him too.”

And then there was a thrust, or a grab and a pull, and Magnolia felt she was forced out of her body. She entered a realm of darkness, with speeding streaks of color ripping by. There was a feel of things tearing and crashing together, making and unmaking themselves on a huge scale. Scary. Unpredictable.

My body, she cried out in her own brain. I was just getting used to it!

Again, sounds of disembodied merriment.

“We’ll need these, too,” she heard, or felt, or somehow perceived. And just as the last veil fell and she was cut off from the real, ordinary world altogether, she knew her posse was rounded up, collected, and pulled through to where she was. They followed along like the tail of a kite, bouncing off the darkness, as Zem tugged her and Errol and them all along.

Holy shit, she tried to say. She thought she might have heard another chuckle from Zem, but in this state of things, who knew?

They went.

NEXT POST: DOUBLE, DOUBLE (Friday 3/12)