Jenifer Jorgenson - 1983 - Centralia, Pennsylvania, (now a mostly abandoned mining town with fires burning underground) - Danny, age 10
The Aurora Archives: Day 5
ARCHIVE ENTRY: 1983-DEC-24 LOCATION: Centralia, Pennsylvania (The Burn Zone) SIGNAL RESONANCE: Critical / Toxic OPERATIVE: Deep-Earth Unit (Sub-type: Canary)
TRANSCRIPT OF RECOVERED CORRESPONDENCE:
To the Fire Department (or Whoever Listens),
I know you said the monitors would beep if the air got bad, but ours didn’t. I was lying on the rug waiting for Santa, but I felt so tired. My head hurt like it was being squashed by my older brother. I just wanted to sleep.
That’s when the soot came out of the vent. But it wasn’t soot. It was a rabbit, black as coal and wearing a soot stained red scarf. It squeezed through the grate and just looked at me.
I wasn’t scared. I was too sleepy to be scared. Its nose was twitching fast, like it was panicked. Then it went crazy. It jumped into the Christmas tree, knocking it flat. Ornaments shattered everywhere. It started thumping its back legs against the hardwood floor, Thump. Thump. Thump. So loud the windows rattled in their frames.
Dad ran in with his shotgun. He shouted something about rats and looters. He fired. Boom. The drywall exploded next to the TV. But the rabbit wasn’t there anymore. It moved like a glitch on a video game, zipping sideways without looking like it pushed off the ground. Boom. He fired again. Missed.
The rabbit bounced off the ceiling, it actually pushed off the ceiling tiles, and knocked the lamp over.
I closed my eyes. It was too loud.
“Danny?” I heard Mom scream. “Jim, stop! Look at Danny! He’s blue!”
The last thing I remember is Dad dropping the gun and picking me up in his arms. The cold air on the porch hit me like a slap. I woke up in the snow, coughing up sickness. The house was quiet. The rabbit was gone, but the front door was wide open, letting the poison out.
Dad cried for a long time. He said the monitor was broken. He said the rabbit went crazy. But I know it wasn’t crazy. It was waking us up. I think next Christmas we might live in a different house now, like mommy wanted.
Danny
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE:
Subject describes symptoms of advanced Carbon Monoxide poisoning. The operative, likely a ‘Burrow Navigator’ adept at sensing air quality in subterranean environments, engaged in some heroic chaos. Note the subject’s description of the rabbit ‘pushing off the ceiling’, a clear use of gravitational inversion to evade projectile fire while maintaining maximum acoustic disruption.
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I had a mix of emotion, confusion, intrigue, and excitement all wrapped in a short micro fiction. Well done.