Grand Mal

A seizure in an airport results in a journey to strange alien worlds | Short Fiction

   Ansel buckled over, mid-stride, as though he’d been hit by a wrecking ball and collapsed on the floor of the airport. A crowd of people gathered round him to see what was going on. He began to convulse on the floor as the throng of onlookers started in with their diagnosis.

“He’s a diabetic, get him a chocolate bar or something!” one man shouted.

Another man quickly jumped in, “No, it’s an epileptic seizure, put something in his mouth to bite down on so he doesn’t bite his tongue off.”

The voices quickly faded into the background as Ansel left his body and floated above the crowd. The people gathered around did not seem to take notice of his departure. Ansel drifted up through the ceiling and left the frenzied crowd to deal with his flailing body while he took a much needed trip.

Up and out of the atmosphere.

He felt tiny particles of space debris brushing past his cheeks.

He turned his head to the left and was temporarily blinded by the flash of a sunspot. When his vision returned he was soaring past the moon at amazing speed, he held out his hand and let it run along the surface as a trail of Moon dust fluttered into space.

Ansel spread his arms out like wings and directed himself at a black hole off in the distance. As he made his approach he heard a grinding sound, it was as though space and time were being granulated into a fine powder of dark matter. He felt the molecules in his body separate and spread out over miles of empty space and then merge like lightning on the other side.

What he saw there rocked him to his very core.

Thousands of tiny orbs, in every colour of the rainbow, teeming with life.

Planets with atmospheres and agriculture like Earth, but smaller, like the Moon. These worlds were Edenesque in their nature. Pure. Untarnished. Incorruptible.

As he sailed over these planets, he witnessed mass migrations of strange alien birds with wings that glittered in the orange light of two distant stars. He saw large blue reptilian creatures race across charcoal deserts with agile cheetah grace. He hovered over one planet as its surface cracked and shifted and then gave birth to several majestic volcanoes. Each volcano erupted spreading a chromium substance like mercury over the entire circumference of the planet.

Finally, on a tiny blue planet, he saw what looked like people. But these people were very different from humans so he decided to get a closer look.

Ansel tilted his arms and glided down to the surface of this glowing blue orb. When he landed it was as if he was standing on a mild electrical current, not enough to shock, just pure energy flowing gently through his body. The people there were all humanoid in form but bioluminescent, with bright halos of light dancing off of their skin. 

They communicated with him, but not in any way he had experienced before. It was far deeper and more meaningful than speech, it wasn’t so much a language as an emotion, but it communicated infinitely more than words ever could. Somehow he understood them just as if he had been speaking this way for eons. What they communicated, on a deep intuitive level, were the inevitabilities of all life throughout the universe. They unlocked aspects of Ansel’s consciousness that he never knew existed.

 It was staggeringly simple and beautiful.

But slowly Ansel found himself being pulled away, pulled back to a place that was not so simple, not so beatific. A cold, confusing, hectic place where communication existed only in its most basic, primitive form. A crowd of people, more dead than alive, were mulling around hoping to get a glimpse of someone worse off than themselves.

But what they saw instead was a man who had just suffered a grand mal seizure and had awakened more alive and joyful than they would ever be. A man who had witnessed what could be and what would be in another place. . .

                                                     another time. . .

                                                                               another life.