Excerpt

Autumn's grandmother, who lives in an assisted living facility has been discovered with a sword. When Autumn asked her grandmother about it, Omma was insistent that the sword had manifested out of nowhere. Having completely failed to get a more rational explanation for the sword being in her grandmother's room, Autumn has stopped by the security office to pick up the confiscated weapon and take it home until the riddle of its appearance can be solved some other way.

Once Omma was settled, I went by the security office to pick up the sword. Unlike Ms. DeBall's roomy office and the relative grandeur of the other common areas of the building, the security office most closely resembled a broom closet. When they opened the door to my knock, I could see a desk crammed into the corner and covered with stacks of papers and folders, and a computer that was so old it was still rocking one of those ancient, ginormous monitors. The bank of television screens on the wall which flicked from one view of the facility to another were flatscreens, however.

The room was stuffy, dusty, and smelled vaguely of stale farts.

There were two other people in the room. A man and a woman. Both had similar body types—round on top with skinny legs—and I immediately dubbed them "Humpty" and "Dumpty". I chastised myself for my unkind thought and tried to banish it back to the depths from whence it had come, but it was impossible. Sometimes, I thought, I am such an asshole.

Humpty and Dumpty were both wearing uniforms that looked more like livery than a traditional security guard uniform—another nod to trying to disguise the fact we were in a hospital, I expected—and they were looking at a monitor which was set off a bit from the bank of screens showing live footage. The man, Humpty, had a remote control in his hand and was using it to skip forward through the footage in big jumps. I stepped into the security office and looked at the screen.

I knew that room. It was Omma's. This, then, must be the "video review" Ms. DeBall had promised. She'd made it sound fancy and official, not just a couple security guards hitting rewind.

Dumpty looked over at me, as though she'd just noticed I'd come in, and tilted her head in question. I pointed at the screen, "That's my grandmother's room. I'm here for the sword."

"Ahh," she said and then looked back at the monitor. Obviously, we were all going to watch this together before she gave me the sword and that suited me just fine. I was as curious as anyone to see what had happened that my grandmother had interpreted as a manifestation.

Skip.

Skip.

Skip.

There were the security guards—not Humpty and Dumpty but two other, taller, guards, rushing into the room and disarming my grandmother as she sat on the edge of her bed. They weren't rough, there was no physicality in the encounter, they mostly just seemed to coax and cajole until she handed the sword over.

Skip.

There was my grandmother before the guards rushed in. She was standing in the middle of her room in her nightgown, her back to the camera, holding something. Humpty let the tape play a few seconds and Omma turned to face the camera. She seemed as comfortable with the sword as Gene Kelly with an umbrella. She looked around the room and then sat down on the edge of her bed.

Skip.

Omma, her back to the camera, lit in a way that suggested a lamp was directly in front of her, bright and glowing. She looked a little bit like the saints in Catholic artwork, haloed by golden light.

Skip.

Omma coming out of the bathroom in her nightgown. As soon as she exited the bathroom and turned to go to her bed her back was to the camera, blocking its view, but before the view was obstructed there was nothing unusual about the scene. Certainly there was no sword visible.

Skip.

Humpty let it run again.

Omma's room looked normal. Mundane. No sword. She came out of the bathroom and turned to walk toward her bed. As she turned and obstructed the camera's view of what was occurring directly in front of her, she paused. A light began to build around her, gathering, would be the word I would use to describe it. The halo spread, intensified, shining through her nightgown and showing the outline of her frail body clearly, like a cartoon x-ray shows bone structure. She reached out with her left hand—we had that in common too—and grabbed something. Then she turned so that she was standing parallel to the camera, in profile.

She was holding a sword. It looked old. Medieval. Like something from a movie about Arthur and his knights. Or maybe older still. What did I know? I wasn't a sword expert. It was long, straight, and looked heavy but she held it as though it was light as a feather. As though it was an extension of herself. Wherever the light had come from, it was gone now. The sword did not glow, but it certainly had manifested.

"Holy shit," I said. Or I thought I said it. I meant to say it. I felt the words in my throat, in my mouth, but I wasn't sure I heard them when they emerged into the room. I wasn't sure I could hear anything just then. My blood was roaring in my ears, drowning everything out. Filtering my reality. Buffering me from it. "Holy shit," I said again.

Omma turned toward the door, toward the camera, and Humpty paused the video. She looked powerful. She looked fierce. She looked ecstatic. I had the disturbing thought that I probably knew what my grandmother's orgasm face looked like. I tried to scrub that idea from my brain but my brain scrubbers were not working very well right now. And who could blame them? I'd just watched a sword appear out of nowhere. Either I was losing my mind or reality was just... not.

I looked away from my grandmother holding the sword and toward Humpty and Dumpty. They were both staring at her, eyes wide. Almost transfixed. They must have seen the same thing I did, it was the only way to explain their sudden slack jaws and stunned expressions. So I wasn't losing my mind. Not unless it was some sort of group insanity. That was a thing, right? Mass hysteria? But Omma wasn't here right now and she'd been the first person to say the sword had manifested. Surely that wasn't how mass delusions worked—spreading themselves out over different times and groups of people.

So this was real.

It was really, really, real and my grandmother had just plucked a sword out of thin air.

"Holy shit," I said for the third time.

"It happened," Dumpty said, elbowing Humpty and looking from the screen to him. "It happened!"

"About bloody—" I felt like Humpty was about to say "Time". About bloody time. But when he looked over to see Dumpty he caught sight of me and shut up. He elbowed her and she turned to look at me as well.

I watched the change come over them. It happened in the same way the glow had surrounded my grandmother in the video. Slow at first and then all at once. Their shoulders snapped back, their jaws became less slack, their gaze sharper. The mood in the room changed, electrified. They didn't feel menacing, but I felt the potential of menace. The room was heavy with it. Thick like the air right before a blizzard, and just as cold.

Humpty pressed a button on the remote control and the monitor made a snapping noise and then went black.