He reached out, his hand like a ghost’s, the light shimmering on his fingernails and then back to the table. The brightest light seemed to come from the southern window. He rubbed his eyes, just to make sure he wasn’t asleep. The entire southern window was bathed in purple, green, and gooey white. Resting his hands on the camp stove, he stared out. The glass panes caught the colors and twisted them. He put his fingertips to the glass, his mouth slack. He wondered again about the mushrooms at Trent’s party. Tracers, they called them. But he wasn’t on anything. Matt gazed out to the dead oak, its branches bathed in the vivid light. At last he understood, feeling embarrassed that he hadn’t known right away.

The Northern Lights. The Aurora Borealis.

He and his father had observed them on several occasions from the orchard, always mesmerized. After lacing his boots, Matt clomped across the floor and lifted the steel bolt. Looking up at the sky, he stumbled towards the dead oak, marveling at the display. Pulsating reds, yellows, greens, purples, pinks, and hot-whites consumed the sky as if at war,

Dad, I wish you could see this, he thought. He wished Stacey could see it too, and Elmo.

Although the display was beyond normal comprehension, bordering on absurdist surreal, there was a definite structure to the whole thing. The top of the sky was an orb with a gelatinous-looking center. This center oozed and pulsated, but stayed within a certain circumference. Every few seconds the orb lit with a bright white charge. Radiating down from the orb to the horizon were sky-covering curtains of light. The curtains glittered and rotated like mini blind slats opening and closing, except every time the slats moved, red, green, purple, and white dripped off the edges and slathered the sky below. Frenetic bombasts of white light shot from the orb to the bottom of the curtains like the eighties’ arcade game Tempest.

Matt raised his right hand to his face and observed details in his palm and fingernails even though it was the middle of the night.

Across the horizon, the bottom third of the light curtains shifted to fluorescent emerald as the gaseous edges dripped milky, fading streaks of white.

Without thinking, Matt ran up the path to the leaning post for an unobstructed view. There was no need for his headlamp, not tonight. The aspen and apple trees sighed in the wind, their leaves encased in a soft emerald glow. Towering light curtains spread out across the universe, dropping all the way down to the treetops. It looked like the curtains were right there in the lower forest, brushing the fir, chokecherry, and aspen in lush strokes of emerald and white. Night birds that normally couldn’t be seen flew low over the trees, their wings sharp knives against the slats of light. The green silhouette of an owl glided to the south.