'To every thing there is a season. . . ' ten-year-old Jimmy read aloud.

'. . . and a time for every purpose under heaven.' His mother walked through the room, carrying laundry, and finished the quotation with a pious look. She also ruined his podcast recording. As this was his homework for the Pool of Siloam Christian Academy, he sighed and backed up the recording, ready to start again.

'Mom, can it be time for me to see the Avengers movie?'

She shook her head. 'No, Jimmy. Those movies are too violent and full of godless supernaturalism.'

'Aw, Mom. We never get to go to the movies.'

'That's not true. Your Uncle Joe took you to his church to see The Prayer Warrior.' Jimmy was about to say that those were not the kind of warriors he wanted to see in a movie, but his sister Kaylea picked this moment to turn on the tv. He sighed, and started collecting his devices to take his homework to his bedroom.

He stopped when the announcer said, 'We interrupt this programme to bring you a special news report from the Badger News Team. Tiffany?'

A very blonde woman whose face bore the unmistakable signs of expensive plastic surgery grimaced into the camera with what she appeared to believe was a smile. 'Y'all won't believe this, but. . . aw, look out the window!" The image behind her showed – not, obviously, her actual window, because studios don't have them, it spoils the lighting, but somebody's window, perhaps the network vice president's – where, past the usual office buildings, an object hung in the sky blocking half the daylight.

An object, one might add, that had not been there yesterday. Or even fifteen minutes before.

It was round, this object, and have we mentioned huge? It was impossible to see its surface clearly because of the rainbow of tints that appeared to play on its surface in more-or-less constant motion. Too large for a moon? Too big for a satellite? It appeared to be a planetoid – at least to all the humans who were still ready to admit that planets could be spherical.

So startling was this announcement that they ran to their windows to do an unusual thing: verify the accuracy of Badger News. Sure enough: the object hung in the sky, shimmering like a giant Pride parade float. Only this was no balloon and could not be removed by court order.

'It's beautiful,' breathed Jimmy, who seemed less perturbed than Mom or Kaylea. The others shushed him and turned away from the disturbing vision to the screen in hopes of an explanation from the Badger News Team.

Unfortunately for them, the News Team, as clueless as everyone else, had opted to 'invite' their two least-favourite science apologists, Bob the Science Person and Ned van Dyke Purdue, in order to entertain everyone by arguing with them over Faith versus Godless Scientism. Normally, this would have been a fun half-hour, with the atheists spluttering and the Badger Team smirking: but this time, the professional science educators were clueless as to the origin of the phenomenon. This alarmed the news team, who for once actually hoped that somebody had an explanation for what was going on.

'How a body of this size managed to get this close to Earth without being spotted by NASA is the first problem,' Bob said. Van Dyke Purdue muttered something about budget cuts, but Bob shook his head. 'And then there is the really puzzling fact that everybody on the planet is right now seeing the object –   at the same time.'

'That is impossible!' growled Van Dyke Purdue. 'It violates all the laws of optics, physics, and common sense!' Nonetheless, it was true: north, south, east, west, atop mountains, on seashores, and at both poles, the huge rainbow spheroid was being seen. And it wasn't asking anybody's permission.

'Wouldn't that make sense if Earth was flat?' ventured one of the Badger Team. This set off another torrent of mutual barbs, still ongoing as the station cut to a commercial.

Whether the newspeople and the science entertainers would ever have reached a consensus, or whether the government's spokesblonde-of-the-week would have shed any light on the subject, nobody ever found out, because of what happened next.

Jimmy noticed it first.

'Ha, ha!' he laughed. 'This tickles.' A broad wall of light, transparent, but shimmering with that rainbow of colours that could be seen playing across the surface of the planetoid, flowed over every single living thing. Plants and animals seemed undisturbed: perhaps a bit brighter than before. Jimmy felt a pleasant tingling in his extremities. He was not alarmed until he looked at his mother and sister.

'Mom? Kaylea? What's happening to you?' The two of them looked pale and colourless. Not merely their faces, hands, and every exposed portion of skin. Even their clothes had been robbed of natural tint. It was as if the light had reset them to greyscale. 'Mom, does it hurt?'

Jimmy's mother stared at him and shook her head dumbly. It may not have hurt, but she was obviously terrified.

The television was no help. All of the participants in the debate, and indeed every part of the set, had seemingly regressed to a 1950s-style black-and-white. As had the White House, to the press room of which they finally went, and all but one of the reporters assembled there. That reporter, whose red hair stood out in this crowd, was attempting to ask a question, but being shouted down, as usual. However, the other reporters were giving him more space than they normally did. They looked at him critically, almost fearfully, obviously wondering why he seemed to be immune to the colour-draining energy.

'We seem to be under assault from some sort of force field,' the spokesblonde was saying.

The not-black-and-white newsman jotted down, 'Ms Salivaria seems to be a Star Trek fan, which is as surprising as anything today.'

The press secretary continued, 'The President has ordered a counterstrike against the enemy satellite. His orders to the military are to fire ICBMs loaded with nuclear warheads at the object and to 'blow it up, bigly.'' She smiled uncertainly at the crowd of reporters.

'What if they can't reprogram the ICBMs?' the redheaded newsman managed to call out.

She squinted back at him. 'In that case, he'll call on his advisor, Mr Funk, who is an expert at programming.' The cameraman made the mistake of staying focused on the reporter's face: this meant that his expression of baffled contempt was the very last image Americans saw before their televisions went off forever.

In the quiet that accompanied the dying of the television – and, indeed, every electronic device in creation, so that nobody ever got to find out whether or not Elmo Funk could reprogram an ICBM, Jimmy heard another noise. It was outside the house, so Jimmy ran to the back door and out into the garden to hear it better. Jimmy's mother called to him to be careful, but he didn't hear her because of the very loud, very beautiful noise.

It was the birds.

All of them – cardinals, juncos, bluejays, doves, sparrows, finches, wrens, warblers. . . ones he could see, ones he couldn't see. All of them singing, all at once, as if something really important depended on it. Birds ignoring his mom's vegetable garden with all its anti-bird nets, and perching on fences, hedges, and in trees. Birds flying. Birds everywhere.

Jimmy looked all around: he saw the world growing brighter, every blade of grass, every budding leaf on every growing tree. The sky itself grew bluer, the clouds whiter. Come to mention clouds, one of them was parting in two, and a door was opening. . . Jimmy started running. . . his mother called to him, but he didn't hear and ran on into the cloud and was swallowed out of her sight.

The last anyone saw of the redheaded reporter, he was sprinting across the South Lawn of the White House shouting, 'Tell us all about those wings! Are they attached to your shoulder blades?'

The street was dark. But then, it was always dark. And crowded. People jostled their way along the narrow sidewalks. There was a vague sense of urgency, although if you had asked them, none of them could have told you what they needed to do that was so important. A dull glow came from the windows of the buildings they passed – a dirty sort of light that seemed half-ashamed even to be drawing that much attention to itself.

In one of the buildings a woman stood within a small circle of illumination from a shabby hanging lamp. 'But I know. . . ' she began.

'Mrs Sanger,' said the clerk wearily, 'I've told you and I've told you. You don't have a son. So he can't be missing.'

The woman glared at her. 'That's not true! You're. . . you're gaslighting me! I won't have it.'

'Come on, Mom,' said her daughter, tapping her arm. Together they stumbled out of the office and joined the other grey figures shuffling down the grey street under the dark skies, with no particular goal in mind other than to keep moving. What else was there to do?

Dmitri Gheorgheni

31.03.25 Front Page

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