A week before the summer solstice, the numerologist Tim Luna worries the date into perfect configuration for Armageddon. He sleeps in a large closet surrounded by stacks of newspaper and magazine clippings salvaged from his parent’s garage in the medical district, low-end flats of Beverly Hills. The closet scent has acid for a top note, gasoline and mildew in the heart, and cat scat at the base. His partner, a very skilled bodyworker who calls herself Kiva Hands, breaks down into tears when she first confronts the closet and tells Tim — when he asks — that she will never move in with him as long as he has it. 

He is a hoarder. You have to make a perilous path from the living room into the kitchen. Anywhere, away from this place, he is irresistible to Kiva. Still, she doesn’t believe any of his doomsday warnings: bank account deletions, AI takeover, water wars, food depletion, mandatory oxygen masks or brain chips — your choice. She holds love over fear and conspiracy, as he so passionately does the opposite. She counts good news like lab-grown meat and seafood and the coral reef flourishing in the Red Sea. He bats his long-lashed, deep brown eyes at her, shakes his head, and though his slow smile intimates she is naïve, it also says he wants her to be right. 

Summer solstice comes and goes. Autumnal Equinox comes and goes, as does Halloween. Then, exactly one week before the winter solstice, LA is hotter than any summer on record, and though this is not significant in itself, the world for Kiva shifts into hyperrealism. Colors glare obscenely. Plants stand stark and carnal against the street, palm trees hover, whispering to one another and the sky is close and clear like high-definition TV, while the meteorologists keep saying there is smog. Rainbows occur on days as dry as the desert, the sunsets are pinker, glowing malevolent and neon. Birds squawk directly at her, butterflies chase her, and squirrels approach and stare. Clouds, cumulus and errant, streak in parallel to the chemtrails Tim rages about, and the moon is always in view during the day.  When is it waxing, when is it waning?  She has a strange pressure in her chest, she can no longer keep track of time, and her heart is continually opening.

Saints and other strangers begin visiting Kiva’s bedroom at night whenever Tim isn’t there. With the flat of her hand, she spanks the mattress as if she could materialize him. Two of these spirits introduce themselves as Tim’s grandparents from the other side. They get into bed with her, taking his place, flanking her like long-lost lovers.

“Those who seek to control you, they are sordid in their ways, do you understand?” the grandmother says, leaning into her. Kiva waves her hand through the grandmother’s body, which is transparent.  She looks up at the ceiling, and behind her head, wondering now if she could walk through walls. Could she walk on water? Could she bodhisattva, as if it were a verb? This would all be funny if she wasn’t so scared. She regrets every horror movie she’s seen, she is sorry for the hayride years ago at Griffith Park and sorrier still for that Halloween when she walked the amateur maze of impersonated legendary slashers at the old man’s bloody house in Sherman Oaks. Her screams that night reverberated in her throat and gut for what felt like eternity.

“This is the time when you must gather all strength about you,” Tim’s grandmother continues.  “The strength that is inside. Stand in love, always. Otherwise, they will sprinkle you, like so much parmesan on their pizza. Do you understand?”

“Surrender, dear,” the grandfather echoes. “Surrender yourself completely to the Love, capital L, and you will survive all that is to come.”

“What is to come?” Kiva asks. “And who is they?”

The grandparents show her a picture, as if the inside of her head was their screening room: Here is Tim sitting with his pointer fingers and thumbs in the form of a triangle, inside of it is a crescent moon, behind him dark leaves, lush and dense as the Amazon. The numbers 888 are in front of him. He glows incandescent. His chest is as pumped as Superman, growing larger like a balloon, then turning red as if aching, but he is grinning now with a sick pleasure.

“I don’t understand,” Kiva says.

“Shhhhh,” the grandmother responds.

Kiva’s ears ring as if she’d been moshing by the speakers at a punk show, but it’s the music of the spheres. The beauty is electrifying, and she is next to Tim’s grandparents, who can’t really be there. She looks long and hard at them with this symphony in her ears and she is gripped in the terror of mystery, until she sits with it long enough to accept it. She feels an ecstatic sense of connection to everything and everyone on earth. This connection doesn’t last long. 

What becomes of the world? She wonders. “What is to become of me?” she asks aloud. The music stops. She looks on either side of her — the grandparents turn into serpents making the shape of caduceus, but when Kiva questions their shape-shifting aloud, they become live veins, slithering over her bed, slivering over her limbs.  Kiva passes out.

When she awakes, she finds herself crumpled on the floor in between Tim’s legs. His voice is far away as she is pulled up by the underarms and lifted to her feet in a dizzy hangover. The stench is awful. Her eyes sting, the underlids puffy and heavy like she has been crying. Her stomach hurts like she has been laughing and there is a feeling like a dimming of the sun. Hoping for the sound of wild parrots or crows, she doesn’t know where she is, until asking aloud. While wishing she was at the mouth of a swamp, she realizes she is still at the entrance of Tim’s closet.

– Lisa Teasley

In our ECO LIT series, Red Canary Magazine dedicates space for established writers and emerging voices to imagine better ways of being.