He first noticed something off when the DVD froze as Frosty the Snowman was about to begin the soliloquy by Shakespeak, something about “Now is the winter of our discontent made manifest.”

He peered into the pixels of Frosty’s white countenance, desiring only that he wouldn’t have to get up from his Barcalounger to pull the DVD out of the player.

As his impatient eyes stared at the snowman’s frozen image, the pixels began moving (ah, he thought, I won’t have to get up). Rather than reforming into Frosty, though, the pixels began reorganizing into some other form, the tiny boxes gathering like the swallows of Capistrano in a mesmerism of form and movement. A white horse reared out from the screen, reforming into a swan which swept across the panel, then a swan-shaped cloud puffed out from the TV.

The trippy form then turned and looked at him as it transformed into a beluga whale … a what? He peered at the amphibious creature growing out of the TV screen.

The whale slashed its tail and leapt into the living room. Splashing water followed the beluga onto the floor in front of him.

Step back, he thought, not thinking. Too late, the whale blubbered larger. He pounded the controls of the Barcalounger to get the damn chair to recline so he could roll off of it before the whale suffocated him with its massive body.

A queer notion scattered across his brain. He imagined he could simply teleport from the chair to the outdoors to escape the TV assault by the transformed snowman. As the thought occurred, he indeed was suddenly somewhere else, but not just to the outdoors. Somewhere he hadn’t expected.

He was sitting on a Barcalounger, alright, but not his. This one was a dark blue, almost black. His was a comforting burgundy.

The whale was no longer looming over him as he took his bearings.

The color of the lounge chair caused him to realize he was sitting in the one owned by his neighbor Ralph. But that was three, no, four doors down the street from his house. How the … ?

He had never gotten along with Ralph, nor his obese wife Kate, whom he knew to cast dispersions on him while smiling to his face.

He had spilled some wine on their lounger during a Christmas party the previous season, and Kate told everyone she was sorry for her alcoholic neighbor who drank the party dry that evening. She said she couldn’t mention the other absurd and gross acts of the party-hat binge she claimed he had perpetrated. The truth was, yes, he had drank more holiday cheer than he would have normally, but he simply had tripped on their throw rug, causing him to lurch toward the chair. Barely two drops had leapt from the goblet, not a half a bottle of wine like Kate had whispered to others.

So, he knew he would catch holy hell from the Flanagans for showing up uninvited and taking over Ralph’s throne. He heard their voices drifting down the hallway. The kitchen was at the end of the short hall to the right while the bedrooms were to the left. They wouldn’t be able to see him from either room. At this time of evening, he guessed they were in the kitchen, and that was soon confirmed by the clatter of dishware as Kate set the table.

Their massive screen TV suddenly flickered to life just as he considered whether he could leap out the front door without his neighbors being any the wiser.

But the TV had other intentions. The same white pixels that had grown out of Frosty’s body now transformed into an eagle. Frosty’s stone eyes became the eagle’s black orbs while his legs melted into massive wings stretching across the wall screen. The talons held tight to the bottom of the TV set as the eagle perched there momentarily. Its head swiveled swiftly as it looked into the Flanagan’s living room.

The eagle stretched out and its wings reached beyond the edges of the TV. The white eagle then leapt from the screen, screeching past him, then breaking through the two-story plate glass window in the entryway.

The Flanagans felt that almost before they heard it.

Johan gathered his wits and rushed after the eagle which had turned into a snowstorm that blew down the cul-de-sac, bending the trees and light poles in its path.

Very odd, indeed, he noted, as the phantasm scattered into a dozen, no, two dozen, white Trumpeter swans, identical in every respect.

He closed his eyes to the kaleidoscope of images careening down the street. He muttered that none of it could be real, that he had fallen asleep in front of the TV after his usual consumption of a six pack of high-octane beer.

The cacophony of molecules continued to swirl down the street and through his mind.

When did he first notice something a little odd about his DVD player? He thought back to those two guys he met at the DSHS office who convinced him to hold onto a heavy leather satchel for a day or two. They handed him three gold sovereigns, so he thought like Rickie Lee Jones, “Easy Money.”

He later discovered they had made off with his pain medication. That pissed him off, so he decided to open the satchel to see what was worth three sovereigns.

When was that? Last Sunday? No, longer ago. A week, two weeks? Fuck, that was, like, a long time ago, his sodden brain realized.

He had reluctantly agreed to hold onto the small briefcase for a few days after the two guys raised the ante to three gold coins. Maybe they weren’t coming back, he finally realized the day he peered into the satchel.

Shit. All it held was an odd-looking silver tube reminiscent of a cigar holder. Only a few grits of luminous sand settled inside the tube. Nothing else. No diamonds. No bonds and stocks. Nothing. Just some useless glowing sand.

He took the tube out from the satchel, absent-mindedly putting it in a kitchen drawer at some point.

“I could use the satchel to maybe impresss Gladys at the gas station,” he daydreamed. Maybe she would take notice of him if he were carrying such a nice satchel.

He opened his eyes as a chorus of screeches sounded overhead. The birds swept over him, then the form split apart in six directions, but soon coalesced into a bunny, a white bunny the size of a Volkswagen.

He had done the required course in psychedelics in college as part of the Quantum Qurriculum but he knew the images he had seen were not drug-induced. And though he had been drinking beer per usual, he had never seen the pixels of his TV turn into anything that could fly out the window.

This was very different than those hallucinations. It was real, he knew despite being inebriated.

Sirens confirmed his conjecture. They were flying from their stations in a wild frenzy of response to a report of a whale suddenly flopping out of a house down the street, or a white eagle smashing the windows of another house, or a flock of seagulls singing about running.

Several houses were now in ruins up and down the street.

The various 911 calls reported a giant white boa constrictor crawling into a street drain. Other callers reported a snowstorm had cast lightning around their houses and the bolts turned into tiny chicklets. Another caller, screaming at the top of her lungs, reported she and her husband had seen the neighbor lunging out of her husband’s lounge chair after they heard/felt something shake their entire house. They were the only people reporting a real human rather than some fantastic swirl of white pixels. Had Kate not been screaming, she might’ve been taken seriously, but the dispatchers had a dozen other more disturbing reports to handle.

Johan sat motionless in the middle of the street as he saw the TV mayhem all around him. He guessed that his DVD was not the only one to freeze and transform into other things because he now counted about four, maybe five, separate clumps of pixels rearranging themselves as they caromed down the cul-de-sac. One clump would encounter another one and the two shapes – a flying sturgeon 20 feet long and a two-meter bubble – merged into yet another form but soon separated into other forms.

He went into a trance-like state, shocked by the experience. The sounds of the sirens, the shrieks of the shrew neighbor, the caterwauling of cats, the howling of dogs, overloaded his senses. The mayhem multiplied around him as he felt woozy.

An ambulance barreled right for him, its sirens blaring like a stuck pig, its light blinding him with the strobes. He didn’t move. He couldn’t move.

Louder. Closer. Now too close to leap if he could.

The ambulance then flowed right through him. He felt the emergency vehicle’s molecules tickling his own in pulsing waves as the metal and plastic and glass and flesh swept through him.

Sparks ignited every cell. Briefly. Too briefly like cocaine that wears off way too fast. But what fucking ecstasy for those milliseconds! Like touching the robe of God herself.

The ambulance cruised through him and down the street, unaffected by having run through, not over him. But he was fine. His fingers and toes still tingled, but he stood up and shook off the lingering electrical charges still crackling across his body.

He looked around and everywhere were people and cats and bricks and splinters and glass shards scattering infinitely out in every direction, all rushing away from him like the universe from the Big Bang.

His heart raced. His breath jerked rapidly. Too rapidly. He was hyperventilating. He knew he … would .. soon … pass out.

A little boy, a toe-headed toddler of maybe three years, tugged on his slacks as he gasped for air. The annoying brat tugged harder just as Johan fell sideways from asphyxiation.

The boy scooted out of the way just as his body crashed onto the sidewalk. The sharp force knocked the wind back in him as he clawed at the pavement, writhing in pain from the fall.

He awoke, coughing and spitting fuck, damn, shit, cunt, bastard ….

The kid now loomed over him. The boy cocked his head sideways as Johan soiled the air with epithets.

“My daddy says you shouldn’t talk like him,” the toddler screeched.

“Oh, fu … forget about it,” Johan said. He held his tongue as the toddler stepped on his right hand, ready to apprehend the swear word villain.

“Why, yes, those aren’t nice words,” Johan said as serenely as he could. But the boy seemed intent on hauling him in to do hard time for saying those nasty words.

“I’m Johnny,” the tike said. “What’s your name?”

Oh, no. In a flash, Johan recognized the denim britches, the saddle shoes and surfer socks, the red bandana around the boy’s neck. No, his neck as a child of three, he realized. He could feel the scratchy wool long johns his mom always made him wear in the snow. A smile of fond memory curled across his face as he thought about those red-and-black surfer socks.

Johnny reached up to his straw hat and shifted it to block the sun so he could get a better look at the fallen man.

“Mister? You OK?” the boy, Johnny, said to himself, Johan.

“Well, no, I believe I can affirm that I am not, definitely not, yes, I can agree that it’s not, that I’m, uh, what did you say?”

He felt woozier as he gazed around his old neighborhood – the Smith’s driveway cluttered with two old Chevy split-window trucks, the manicured flower garden of the Methows just across the street, the brightly painted mailboxes at the far end of the cul-de-sac, the basketball hoop set up in front of the Nelson house.

Though, of course, the trucks had been overturned by a whale or a snake; the flower garden had been ripped out by a flock of white geese; and the mailboxes were scattered to the four winds,  carried off by a swarm of fruit flies.

And little Johnny. Johan. He was always called Johnny as a child because his classmates couldn’t pronounce his real name. At least, that’s what his parents told him in their thick Norwegian accent. He learned much later in life that they wanted to shield him from the bullies who would surely taunt him for his unusual name.

None of that mattered right then as the toddler pulled his foot off Johan’s fingers. The man rolled on his side, then sat up. The boy backed up a little but then another cloud of pixels swept back down the street and pulled little Johnny into it.

Johan saw his small body swirling into the center of a vortex. Suddenly, the image reminded him of an old TV series about time travel. As the boy fell into the whirlpool, the storm pulled the other pixelated forms into it.

A great rushing sound of wind deafened his ears and silenced the ambulance sirens. The pixels all merged into the vortex, then disappeared into a singularity.

When was that? Where was I? Actually, where were you just now? Had you also been caught up in the pixels? Like I was?

Johan sneezed as he regained consciousness sometime hours or days following the pixilated miasma.

The next day, he was told, nothing was amiss. No whales had flown out of houses on the cul-de-sac and within a few days, no one had any memory of what happened that evening.

Even the daily news had to retract some assertions that aliens had somehow taken control of all the earth’s communications channels after several government officials retracted their off-the-record, that is, off-the-cuff statements. They claimed were the comments had been taken out of context.

Other media outlets reported in the first few hours after the miasma that an hallucinogenic drug had been in the public water system for some time. That assertion, however, went unsubstantiated like many others at that time.

What no one recalled, though, was good news for whatever malevolent force caused the psycho emergency. And Johan was the only one who remembered that.

He also was the only one, so far as he knew, well, except for those two guys in the hazy past who left the Mars sand, that’s what they were, tiny crystals of some unknown element. And he had to figure out what to do with the damn sachel, infected, he was sure, with the glow of another planet.

I mean, he said, if they can do that to a neighborhood, what can they do to the city? No, that wouldn’t do to have a city overrun by pixelated images. No matter that they are only pixels, no matter doesn’t matter because they seemed damn real. They even make noise like the Northern lights crackling and murmuring over the cold polar ice.

He was back in his house somehow. The image of little Johnny quickly faded like last night’s dreams. An inkling tickled his right hemisphere though too faint to from into a memory.

What to do? What to fucking do?

Everything seemed normal here. The Barcalounger wasn’t barking anymore. The TV screen was blank, turned off, but not shattered by a whale’s tail, after all.

The crystals were there in the silver tube the strangers had left behind. The shape of the tube was odd, almost suggesting an ancient culture, with a crown of ivy leaves on its round cap. The tube tapered down its three-inch length.

(First draft: It was tapered from top to bottom. The cap was round like a crown, indeed, with a ridge of ivy around the top.)

The top popped off as if exhausting knowledge. Perhaps it really did contain the secrets of the universe. Or the end of all kind.

The tube was among the knick-knacks in the kitchen utility draw. Screwdrivers, X-Acto knife blades, batteries, tape, cell phone cords, spent pens, unsharpened pencils, scissors, a few marbles, and other unnecessary necessary stuff or necessary unnecessary stuff.

He opened the unhinged screen door and placed the key in the lock. Nothing amiss, nothing perking his nostril hairs. No one had connected him with the pixel miasma.

The door creaked open. A rush of cold air accosted him. His two cats stared blandly at his reappearance. They were completely unaware that he had made it out of the mess by the skin of his teeth.

He wondered if there was any long-term change to his molecular structure from having been run through by an ambulance. Or was that the dream?

He clicked on a light, meowed back at the gray cat and the tabby, and quickly moved to the kitchen where he was pretty sure he had left the tube along with some of his marbles. But the brief exposure to the crystals may well have altered his entire DNA.

Ugh, I hope not, he thought.

Ah, there it is. He grasped the tube and held it to his sternum. He dared not open it. The crystal was like a deadly flower whose blooms spit a venom at those who lean in too close to smell the intoxicating aroma.

He reached into the fridge for something to drink. A can of cream soda excited his senses. A few slices of cheese and salami left over from the party a week ago appealed to his palate.

He walked into the living and sat back in the barcolounger. He placed the silver tube on the stand to his right and closed his eyes, still grasping the unimaginable whatever it was.

Got to think this through.