The drive was quiet. Auntie Rachael hummed an ancient tune to herself as they wound their way up the mountain. Twilight was in full bloom. The thick forests lining the mountain roads were shaded like an oil canvas painting. Textures and underbrush blend into one another and the trees waved their stickly arms into the blackening sky.

                Charlie had only been to the church once and that was when he was a child, the last time he saw his parents. Time and trauma erased the precise memories. He forgot it was twenty minutes up the mountain and into the deep forest. Shooting a glance toward the happy, humming Auntie, Charlie vaguely wondered if he could drive the car. He’d never had the chance, but he operated tractors for the farmers around town, they couldn’t be too different right?

                “Nervous?” Auntie Rachael asked, breaking the silence. She had this peculiar, contented smile stretched across her face. It made Charlie uncomfortable.

                He faked a cough, “A little… I uh… I just don’t know what to expect I guess.” Charlie was unable to keep the fear out of his voice and he was conspicuously aware of his sweating palms.

                “Oh it’s normal, Sweetie, ain’t often we earthly folks get to be apart of something bigger.” The headlights seemed brighter to Charlie.

                He rubbed his palms on his jeans and looked out the passenger window, “Have you… have you had to do this often?”

                Auntie Rachael giggled, her old cigarette voice adopting its once youthful tenor, “Oh darlin’, I’ve done this more often than you’d ever think.” There was something in her voice that raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It was then, just as she slowed to take a sharp left onto a dirt road, that she began to sing.

Oh… Horizon, Oh

Please show me the way

Oh… Horizon, Oh

Take me from the day

And Oh… Horizon Oh
I’ll hear what you say

                The car barely fit on the class four road. Low hanging trees scraped against the windshield and screeched through the car’s paint. Charlie unconsciously gripped the passenger door tight, whiting his knuckles and causing cramps in his thumb. The moon was fey that night and placed perfectly above the tree line, like the road was made to frame it. Its glare almost forced Charlie to squint his eyes. Charlie felt his pulse quicken as he realized the moon framed the steeple of the church so that it cast a shadow even at night. Like it was calculated. Like it was on purpose.

Oh… Horizon, oh

Let me eat your stars

Oh… Horizon, oh

Let me feast your heart

Oh… Horizon, oh

Please, take me so far

                Charlie was sweating now, he didn’t see Auntie Rachael turn up the heat, but she must have. He rolled down the window and stuck his head as far out the window as he could. The road was slowly opening and the trees had stopped molesting the car. To his surprise he smelled a fire, or at least something like a fire. Where he expected to smell pine sap and fresh petrichor, he got liquid smoke and welded metal.

                “Its not time for that yet, sweetie, close the window.” Auntie Rachael chided. Charlie only took a moment to glance at Rachael. Her face was serene and a rapturous smile stretched her lips.

                “Sorry, Auntie.” He murmured, slowly rolling up his window.

                “Don’t apologize, I just don’t want to spoil the surprise.” She was showing teeth now. Her face was framed with shadows cast by the luminous astral body smiling upon the dingy back road.              

                He spent the next minute wiping his brow and rubbing his hands on his pants. Occasionally he’d glance to the back seat, making sure his bag was still there. When Auntie came to a rocking stop Charlie got a full view of the chapel. It was just like he remembered it.

                If it weren’t for the shaded meadow, coughing rough moonlit shadows, he might have assumed this was schoolhouse. Instead of crosses or mosaics or the usual Jesus stuff, the chapel had no windows. Instead, two slashes were cut in the walls parallel to the top of the massive door. They were perfectly horizontal and, through some apparatus that Charlie had yet to understand, glowed white with moonlight.

                Auntie Rachael must have seen him gawking, “Beautiful isn’t it? It never ceases to still my heart, even if I were to come here every night, I’d always be amazed.”

                Charlie murmured something akin to agreement while he grabbed his backpack. Auntie was at the door of the chapel already, her head bowed while she crossed her heart with the sign of the Horizon. Glancing at the ignition he couldn’t help but notice she’d left the keys there.

After he shut the car door, he walked up slowly, forcing his legs to move and tried to ignore the concentric circles centered upon the chapel and etched into the grass.

                Auntie turned back to Charlie, her face seeped in moon shadow. All he could make out was her teeth and a couple of stars in her eyes. “Charlie, before we enter…” she sighed and crossed her arms, cocking one hip off to the side, “I just want you to know how proud I am of you.” When Charlie answered with silence she continued, “After your parents I…” Charlie started tearing up even as he saw her smile lessen, “I didn’t know if we could go on… If we could continue down the righteous path. But you… you made me stronger. I saw how you put up with your responsibilities, with your… destiny in a way no other before has done.”

                She titled her head to stare at the ground, covering her head in moonlit shadow, “And I hope you know just how wonderful this is going to be… just how… rapturous it will be. You’ve never seen anything like this, honey.” She took a deep breath in and Charlie watched her shoulder’s heave. “Truth is there is no service tomorrow.” Charlie felt panic rise in his throat and felt the circular clearing shrink on him. “Tonight is.”

                It was then Charlie noticed the moving and shifting forest. From beneath the shadowed canopies inscrutable figures stalked through the forest. Each was naked, and in their nakedness they each glowed in the mucus of night. A black paint streak was scrawled across each chest, small glowing twinkles spackled within. Charlie saw Bear, his rotund figure jiggled and his ugly stretch-mark pocked skin rubbed against itself. Old man Tommy was there too, his sagging, almost distended belly distracted from floppy, grey old man breasts. Moose hung back in the trees, eyes aglow with the fervor of the moon. And Janice too, she was there. Charlie felt a wave of shame as his eyes fell on her glistening pubic hair, wrought with strangled silver threads and puffier than he thought possible. Her breasts would have hung lower were it not for her little protruding stomach.

                Charlie kept looking around and he recognized more and more of the town’s residents and, if he could count, he would have counted the exact population count of Burburry: three hundred twenty seven adults. But he couldn’t count. No. he was too busy staring at each person’s distended stomach. All the three hundred twenty people stalking nude from the woods looked like they were pregnant, and in that pregnancy, had broken down. The men, the women, it didn’t matter. Some were worse than others.

One man was left to drag his unwanted passenger along the forest floor, the stomach forcing a small shhhhttt-shhhhttt sound to echo throughout the clearing. Another, a woman this time, held hers tenderly in her arms, as if she were carrying triplets triple their normal size.

                Charlie felt a cold, hot, hand on his face. Auntie Rachael pulled his chin so he was gazing into her eyes. “Ignore them, Charlie, ignore them and know they are only here as witnesses to your ascension.” And she turned, opened the chapel door and beckoned him follow her.

                Charlie was relieved to close the massive chapel door behind him. He pretended that he didn’t see what he just saw. That his plan was still valid. When he turned to look at the interior of the chapel, all that optimism evaporated. It was cold, like silver jewelry on a supermodel.

                Instead of pews and bibles and a preacher’s podium, the chapel was empty save for a single glowing pool of water. At first, Charlie thought there were neon blue lights placed at the corners, but he quickly realized it was focused moon light.

                The back wall had the same rough horizontal lines cut into it and the moonlight refracted through them. Then, the primal shadow of a glowing smile crested in the back of the room, just below the shining fetich of the horizon. Jack Harlow held a silver knife made of liquid star, there, his face alit by the dim light. The pool before him shifted and contorted by itself. Small waves rising, creating the illusion that the water all glowed blue.

                Auntie Rachael had her back to him and Charlie took that moment to set his backpack on one shoulder. The zipper was quiet. So quiet that Charlie was sure Auntie could not have heard anything. “See Charlie?” She said. “The horizon blesses us, it illuminates us, it changes us.” Charlie swallowed, unable to say anything.

                “The moon is but one bit of the horizon, just a gift. Just as the sun and the stars are tiny blessings framing an otherwise infinite space of wonder and rapture.” She sighed, then began to unbutton her jeans.

                Wailing. Everyone outside began wailing. The dissonance held multitudes: guttural grunts, ecstatic screams, and orgasmic hums.

                “The thing is, Charlie,” Rachael said as she took her shirt off, “The Horizon cannot control the gifts it gives. Madness. Love. Happiness. All come from the Horizon. All return to it.” Her skin was pockmarked and varicose veins twirled about her legs, spinning up and around like robust vines.

Jack stalked into the still pool.

                The wailing was louder and Charlie forced his arms down, one holding the backpack, the other searching within. Rachael removed her underwear, “But It yearns for you, Charlie. It wants to welcome you into its bosom, just like your parents.” When she removed her bra, she looked back at him. “Witness me, Charlie, this is what awaits. All you have to do it hold your breath and lay yourself across these moonlit waters.”

                When she placed her first toe into the pool, the wailing became a low rumble, shaking the walls of the church. Her next toe coincided with her moans as those outside finished their guttural howls and the church filled with the sloshing sounds of her movements in the water. She then began to sink without moving, like there was pocket of quicksand within the pool. At first, she tilted her head back and Charlie could see her eyes. They were black. And she was moaning.

                Jack’s knife flashed across her throat and her blood spluttered onto the surface of the water.

                But she continued to wail and groan; her exultations were almost sexual, sensual, but then she began to scream despite the crater in her neck. Her body kept descending into the shallow pool, but she was being flung to and fro, as if there was a leviathan within those waters feeding upon her flesh.

Just behind her, Jack sunk in serenely, arms held about as if he was a messiah. She splashed back and forth and back and forth until she cracked her head on the floor and went silent.

                The pool bubbled, but then became still.

                Her silence begat total silence. Charlie watched her head sink beneath the luminescent waters and disappear into the opaque depths. At first silence ruled the room. Charlie dropped his backpack, but kept his right hand on the handle of the hatchet he packed earlier.

                Swallowing, he stalked up to the pool, hoping to see Auntie Rachael’s corpse floating within those waters. Hoping to see the shadow of Jack drowned in the pool. Instead he was confronted with the night sky and the void held within. The water had thickened and shifted, reminding Charlie of a stock pot filled with thick marinara sauce.

                Just as he considered turning and walking out the door to brave the sudden silence, a small sphere began to rise from the center of the pool. It was grey and almost mottled, old. Charlie reflexively hid the hatchet behind his back.

                He realized, probably too late, that the sphere was rising. Then he saw the outline of a face. It was the head of a creature at least seven feet tall and its arms and legs were at least twice the size of a human’s. Its torso couldn’t have been more than a foot and half long, and it stopped so abruptly that Charlie wasn’t sure if it had hips or genitals or anything he could relate too.

                Where there should have been a mouth there was a patch of warbling skin vibrating like water conducting sound waves. Two small perfectly horizontal slits must have been its eyes, but they were exactly in the middle of its small head, where the cheeks would be on a human.

                Charlie. A voice said in his head. No, it wasn’t a voice. It was a thick rumbling that conveyed thoughts. CHARLIE. It rumbled again, holding its raptor-like hands out Come with me. Join us in the sky.

                It took a step forward and Charlie didn’t hesitate. The hatchet cleaved into the creatures throat. The feeling was smoother  than Charlie thought it would be. He expected to feel a crunch or bones breaking. Instead it felt like he was moving a butter knife through gelatin. The black spray of blood crusted his face with a burning exhaust-like smell. He would have retched if he weren’t determined to live. Stepping to his side, he avoided the creature’s clumsy attempt to grab him and he swung again. It fell to the ground, outside of the pool and Charlie leapt upon its back. An animal screech escaped his lips and he kept swinging. He swung for his mother and father. He swung for over a decade in solitude. He swung for all those shitty meals of shitty mac and cheese. Each time his hand came above his head he pursed his mouth against another spray of black blood.

                He swung twenty times in all. One for each year of his life. When it was done the creature twitched on the ground, its grey mottled skin beginning to slough off like some science experiment. It didn’t take him long to gather his breath and his things.

                He didn’t look back and he didn’t bother keeping the hatchet. It was useless against three hundred people outside.

                When he opened the door, however, he wasn’t greeted by throngs of naked townsfolk. Instead the retch he contained earlier spewed from his mouth as he lost all that mac and cheese. He couldn’t see it all, but the lumps of motionless bodies and overwhelming scent of spent feces told him all he needed to know. Their distended, pregnant bellies had ruptured in a morass of moonlit gore.

                He looked away, instead focusing on the car. He should be able to drive it, he’d driven tractors before. Yeah, he could do this.

                The car rocked as he settled into the driver’s seait. Closing his eyes, he gingerly twisted the car keys and breathed a sigh of relief as it rumbled to life. He ignored what the lights enabled him to see. The black streaks leaking away from their exploded bodies. The piles of human innards left to steam in the cool September night.

                Instead he put the car into reverse, braced himself for a single thunk as he trampled the only body in the way, and got the fuck out of there.

Had he waited another moment. Had he taken a second to process what he’d seen, he might have witnessed the rising intestines twirling and contorting from each of those birthed bodies. He wouldn’t have seen blood or gore or writhing masses of flesh. Instead, those tendrils became slivers of the night sky. They glowed blue and black and white and purple and from within radiated a voluminous silver. Sparkles of starlight scattered like mushrooms puffing out spores, and in the moonlight looked like a rainbow if that rainbow had taken to the night. Like it had stolen away, dressed itself in silver and darker, warmer hues never seen before. And the moon, it sat in the horizon and gobbled it all, the tendrils and the bodies and the lunar rainbow.