Joshua Mohr - Fight Song

Dwight sounds all mild manners and green tea and multivitamins at first, starting off with, “A couple inches of snow, fine, I can chock that up to a blip.” Then he gets a bit more mania in his voice, “But we’re talking two and a half feet over a few hours?” And finally full-throttle naked obscene chaos rumbles up his guts and throat and rockets out with space shuttles from his mouth, “This is insane! The beginning of the end! My advice to all is buy canned goods and water! Lots of canned goods! Hole up with loved ones and hoard your canned goods! If this keeps up, canned goods will be worth $100 a pop! Listen up, people, canned goods! Buy every canned good you can get your hands on!”

“Thanks, Dwight,” says the disc jockey, “for that public service announcement. You heard it here first, people. Canned goods will be the new currency. Up next is Judy. Hi, Judy.”

“Do you know what I’ve been doing since the snow started?”

“Do tell us.”

“I’ve taken my binoculars out on my patio and have been searching the sky. My eyes have been combing the horizon, which ain’t easy with the poor visibility from the snow, but I’m doing my best. Guess what I’m looking for?”

“Why, I’m sure I don’t know, Judy, but I’ll venture a guess to play along. Is the answer terrorists?”

“Fat chance, my friend,” Judy says. “I’m out scouring the sky for flying pigs.”

“Pigs can’t fly,” Brent says.

“It can’t snow at sea level at this longitude and latitude, and that’s happening,” Margot says.

“Maybe it’s time to turn that off,” Jane says to Bob, molding the cookie dough into dime-sized balls, then placing them on a baking sheet.

“One sec,” says Coffen.

“Brigades of flying pigs!” Judy says. “Squadrons of them. Because believe it or not, that’s the only thing that will make any sense of this. An innocent snowstorm? No way. It’s never happened before. But if I see pigs fly into our town, then I’ll know that this is the end of days and anything is possible. Sit back and wait for the invasion of the flying pigs.”

“You heard it here first, folks. Judy’s got her eyes peeled for pigs. And let’s hope she doesn’t see any. I don’t know about you, but I’m not quite ready for the end of days. My queue is stuffed with classics and I still haven’t climbed Everest. We need to take a quick break so enjoy these messages from our lovely sponsors … ”

“Turn it off, Bob,” Jane says. “We need you right now.”

He clicks the radio off and walks into the kitchen. Coffen says to them, “The cookies smell great.”

They’re all waiting for the first batch to be done.

“Is it dangerous?” Brent says.

“The snow?” Bob asks.

“Maybe,” Margot says.

“Of course it’s not dangerous,” Bob says.

“It’s just like rain, sweetie,” Jane says, “except it’s frozen.”

“Can we play in it?” Brent asks.

Bob and Jane look at each other, shrug.

Once the cookies are finished and they’ve each eaten one, they take the snowy bull by the horns, bundling themselves up and trekking out into the storm. Outside, it surprises Coffen how empty the streets are. He figured at least the subdivision children would be out building snowmen, having fights with mounds of pressed powder, something. Must be the mania of their parents keeping them cooped up inside, forced to stare out windows and wishing for a chance to play in it.

The four of them stand in the driveway, staring up at the night rainbow. It’s showing all the colors of the spectrum, even purple. It’s extra vivid because of the sky’s blackness. The clouds around it light the rainbow with a hazy shimmer.

“It looks like it touches the ground over there,” Brent says, pointing in the direction of the small park in the center of the subdivision’s Y-shape. “Can we go look?”

“I don’t see why not,” Coffen says. “Jane?”

“Sure,” she says.

“This is impossible,” Margot says. “Rainbows aren’t real at night.”

“Maybe there’s a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end,” says Brent.

“It’s an optical illusion,” his sister says. “It doesn’t touch down over there. The rainbow is based on where you’re standing. There’s no such thing as the end of the rainbow.”

“Maybe this one does touch down,” Jane says to her. “According to you, there can’t even be a rainbow at night.”

Margot sighs and says, “This is stupid.”

Coffen says to Brent, “If there is a pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, we’ll split any loot with you.”

“Can I stay home? It’s freezing,” says Margot.

Bob talks in a terrible pirate accent: “You don’t get a cut of the treasure unless you come along for the adventure.”

She doesn’t laugh. But she does sigh and come along. So there’s that …

“Maybe you won’t need a new job,” Jane says, “if we strike it rich tonight.”

“Try to talk the kids out of college,” Bob says. “Then we can squeak by. Plus, now that Ace is teaching me to play the bass, I might become a rock star.”

“That sounds really probable,” she says and smiles at him.

And so the four of them push on into the snowy, rainbowed night. Tough trudging through the powder with their wonky, sinking steps. They walk to the end of the cul-de-sac. Coffen takes in the cars — how they’re hidden under a blanket of snow. He remembers calling himself a fluorescent orange monster, covered in so much of the artificial stuff, hidden under all his failures. He rubs his hand across a car’s bumper, knocking the snow off, inspecting what’s underneath. Then he turns his gaze skyward, looking at all the flakes coming down, all of them white, not one orange flake targeting him.

They get to the park eventually. Smack in the middle of the snowy field is the rainbow’s end. It comes down and kisses the snow.

Bob wonders how the HOA will handle this: Who shall be the recipient of a belligerent, bullying email about an unauthorized rainbow?

The Coffens are the only people out; they’ve got the place to themselves.

As they stand gawking at the thing, there’s a lovely barrage of adjectives, one from each member of the family:

“Unbelievable!”

“Stupefying!”

“Cool!”

“Impossible!”

Then Coffen says, “I want to touch it.”

He starts walking toward it.

His family follows.

They all reach the rainbow’s end. It’s about two feet wide, shaped cylindrically, and Bob puts his hand into the rainbow. For some reason, he’d expected the colors to be hot, like steam releasing from a teakettle, but it’s no different temperature than the cold, snowy air. He moves his hand around in the light, watching it shift from red to orange to yellow, then green, blue, purple.

“Can I do it too?” Brent says.

“We all can,” Coffen says.

And they all do, hands sticking in the colors. They are all deep in the night rainbow. Everyone’s laughing! Margot moves her hand around in a motion like dribbling a basketball.

“Isn’t this better than pretending to be at the Great Barrier Reef?” Coffen asks her, gloating that she’s seeing something in the real world that she’ll never see online.

But she doesn’t answer, watches her colored hand continue to bounce the invisible ball, mesmerized.

“There’s no treasure,” says Brent.

“Yeah, there is,” Coffen says.

“Why is the magic rainbow here?” Brent asks.

“That’s a great question,” Jane says.

“Probably Armageddon,” Margot says.

“What’s that?” Brent asks.

“It’s nothing,” Coffen says.

“I hope it never leaves,” Brent says.

“That would be insane,” Margot throws in, still bouncing her invisible basketball.