ANEMONE ANOMALY
It was a dark and stormy night ... everywhere ... even where it was daytime. The entire planet was awash in storms. There were rain storms and snow storms and wind storms and sand storms and perfect storms and storms so imperfect they couldn’t be fixed in a million years. Everyone, absolutely everyone, was inside. Even those who hadn’t been inside in ages, even those who hated going inside, even those with no inside to call their own found some kind of inside to go into, huddling together, trying to keep safe and warm and out of the terrible storms.
And so it was that no one noticed. No one noticed that hiding inside all these storms, deep within the mist of possibilities, there lurked a singular aspect, a peculiar particle, a quirky incongruity. Incredibly tiny but stunningly effective, this noodle in the quantum soup created an electromagnetic interaction that spread to touch every little huddling thing.
No one noticed, but it stayed there, touching them, until the moment of the turning from stormy to calm. At the moment of this turning, it dissolved completely with the darkness that melted into the next day.
When the storms stopped, everyone emerged and blinked and looked around in the shimmering exhausted quiet. They were different now. They recognized one another’s suffering, they could see deeply into the nature of Nature, they laughed at what had angered them before. They felt as if there was plenty of time.
Meanwhile, in their gardens, deep within the center of the anemones, minute anomalies uncurled themselves. Soon, bright blue vines expanded slowly through the ether, slipping faint gauzy tendrils into everyone's tangled walls of thought which then exploded softly all around them, leaving little glistening worlds bobbing like bubbles. And they realized they were seeing all the possible futures floating in time, all the possible pasts, floating there, in little bubbles, all around them.
From Anemone Anomaly © 2012 Patricia Anderson