The world around you is constantly spinning. Sometimes moving in such perfect synchronicity with you that you feel like you might be spinning yourself. Sometimes so rapidly your head reels as you try to figure out where the days went, memories blurred, jumbled in your mind.

Trees transform into bursts of orange as if the sunlight they’d been soaking up all summer has finally saturated the skin of each leaf. A deep inhale of the trees’ musty odor burns your nostrils. The air is as crips as the leaves littering the ground, the limbs detaching the leaves like a mother with a child’s hand on the first day of Kindergarten. Salivary glands spontaneously combust and your mouth tingles with a sweet spice, reminding you of the approaching holidays. Soon, the bright colors of the trees will be blotted out with spray-painted frost, and then bleached. Soft snow will encase everything with a haunting silence.
Arm hairs rise as puppets pulled by strings, electricity coursing through your body, begging for a way out. Your icy fingers brush a metal lamppost with a zap, and an image is cast before your eyes. A flash of color moving around, it evades your perception at first, playing tag with your synapses until you finally catch it. A kaleidoscope. Text. A story of yours. Published. In a little magazine called – what’s this – Kaleidoscopic Resonance? You chalk it up to temporary insanity, but the image tugs at the corners of your mind.
When you get home, stomping the snow off your shoes, smelling the heat from the furnace as your skin de-thaws, you take your coat off and hang it up on the metal hook of the shelf. Zap. “Ouch!” You snatch your hand in towards your body, shutting your eyes tight for an instant. As you stagger into the kitchen to nuke some leftovers, your vision is clouded by a negative of words burned into your retinas – “Issue Two.” Followed by your name.
You plop down on the couch and pop open your laptop, satisfying the growl in your stomach with the congealed mess in the plastic container as you check your messages. The web pages flip, colors turning on top of each other. You can’t shake the image of the kaleidoscope, so you click on your keyboard, expecting to see nothing but random, inconsequential blue links. But illuminating the dust particles covering your screen are the words you didn’t know you were looking for – “Kaleidoscopic Resonance: Accepting Submissions.”

Photograph © Kathrine Mattes 2008