Free Plasma Frequency Magazine: Issue 14 by Jes Page B

faded into yellow.
    I put a hand to my head.
    “I'm sorry for your loss,” said General Keenan. I swallowed the urge to punch him in his fat belly. His children were all grown up. HIS children were safe on the ship. Besides, he had never given birth to any of them. Never grown any of them, never suckled or cuddled or LOVED –
    One of the Generals asked if I wanted to watch the demolition. I declined, and instead retreated to the elevator and, eventually, my room. The mattress was a plush comfort beneath my legs. I dimmed the lights until the ceiling was only a few faint blue degrees above black.
    For a moment, in my head, I was watching Earth. Seeing red fire shoot out from the center, blowing off layers of atmosphere as they burned. The fire grew, the oceans were vaporized in a salty haze … then the ground cracked apart and blew outward, boiling deep red. And then it was over.
    ABOUT THE AUTHOR
    Nicole Tanquary is a writer who enjoys working with the 'speculative' genres. She has had pieces published by a menagerie of venues, including Something Wicked, The Colored Lens, Isotropic Fiction, The Again, Kzine, and, most recently, Plasma Frequency Magazine. She lives in central New York State, where she attends school and spends a lot of time in her head, which, fortunately, is an interesting place to be.

Leiden Jar
    By John Zaharick
    Alvin was tired of seeing his daughter.  He wanted to sell the house and get away from her, but no one was buying in the current market.  Worse, rumor had gotten out that the entire street sat on top of a quartz deposit.  No one would want a place where the old residents kept reappearing.
    He checked the weather forecast for the predicted high and low nanotesla levels.  The solar flare was less than an hour away, and the rise in geomagnetic radiation would trigger an apparition storm.
    He had found Kendra's body and the pills when no one answered his knock on the bathroom door and he entered.  Hitting the wood, yelling, "Come on, I gotta go."  The situation was routine until he opened the door.
    Limestone and quartz trapped spirits.  That's why Gettysburg was so haunted.  He had been to the replay of the battle once, watching the energies of the soldiers fight each other in endless repetition.  He felt sad for them.
    He didn't feel much for his daughter anymore.  At the time, picking her off the floor, there had been panic.  There had been confusion when the EMTs told him they couldn't do anything.  Later, there had been hope that her mother might return for the funeral, but after all these years there was no one he knew to contact, and if word on the street had reached his ex-wife, she hadn't been interested enough to come.  He felt sad at one point, after his family left him alone in the house, surrounded by flowers he didn't want to be responsible for watering.  That was when the loss first became real to him.
    Then Kendra returned.  About a month after the funeral the Sun sparkled the Earth, and she appeared.  He shattered a cup in his hand at the sight of her.
    There was no need to grieve as she wasn't really gone.  He saw her on a regular basis, so he didn't feel loss. But he couldn't interact with her much, so he didn't feel joy either.
    The TV animation showed spirals coming out of the Sun.  They were the same symbols for wind, but yellow.  The picture switched to a NASA video, fire curling off the surface of larger fire.  Orange and black spiked fibers composed the star, like molten carpet.  The storms altered Earth's magnetic field, the radiation stimulating the pineal gland, which in turn released endogenous DMT and increased psychic phenomena.
    Kendra's ghost didn't speak, but Alvin didn't have to hear anything she might say.  The pressure in her eyes was enough.  He hadn't noticed her pain in life, and but now he would be reminded of it in death.
    She arrived first in sound, then in image.  Footsteps descended the wooden stairs.  Alvin stared at the