“Wizards with Emerald Screens” by A. Townsend

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary and B.A. from Vassar. Her work has or will be published in Agape Review, The Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Dappled Things, Feminine Collective, and The Young Ravens Literary Review, among others. Angie loves life dearly.

Wizards With Emerald Screens

If they press imperious buttons, they turn the sea to blood. If they strum “severes,” our ballads boil like magma. If they wear the wrong color on the green screen, they become disembodied heads.
They can make my mother’s body rattle like a helicopter. They can absorb my afternoon in prophecy. They can make a fortune for their sponsors even if the skies don’t make a peep.
We think the world is run by despots and vulgar billionaires, but Hurricane Dave and Blizzard Biff hold the power.
Like history’s all-star tyrants, they come long-lashed and bashful, nuclear warheads dressed as newborn fawns. See them staggering in the monsoon, yelping beneath the thundersnow, baby bunnies born to tremble over bombogenesis.
Like the best heist-meisters, they come bearing gifts free of charge. They are here to help us, they croon, poets and prophets in service to truth.
Like all storytellers, they are right often enough that we hang on every word.
Do not trust them. They are Genghis Khan in galoshes, Narnia’s White Witch in waterproof pants. They have come to increase sales of Gain and gutter helmets and Toaster Strudel and fear.
They know that we have endured real disasters, dastardly days that vomited up vicious nights. Ice engulfed all visible light. Bridges and levees handed in their resignation. Electrical storms seduced us into believing we had lost the power. Milk went bad, and Battleship got boring, and we found ourselves giddy as squirrels just to find shelf-stable pudding. Three days by flashlight left us feral, fear-swaddled, figs ripe for picking by persons wielding Dopplers.
Stay on your tree. Stay on your toes. Stay off Snowpocalypse Watch at all costs.
If the meteorologists cannot throw comets, they will try to throw us off our axis. But we are not without power, even if the last lantern runs out of batteries. We are jaguars and kookaburras wild enough for weather. We write stories and throw axes and stencil kitchens and raise generations. We impress our ancestors and express our essences and confess our love with the courage of the cosmos.
We are not going to tremble all afternoon for a tornado that has yet to decide if it will be a work of creative nonfiction.
We are not going to dread red screens like the end of days.
We are not going to seep like corn syrup into the trough of the terrified.
We will not become figgy pudding under fear’s power lines, plum pickin’ for purveyors of panic.
We will not turn to tapioca when the voices turn grim.
We will remember that we are the species that invented symphonies and string cheese, prone to shop when scared but holy enough to stay neon all night.
We will check the weather report once a day, then have a good day.
We will wish Dave and Biff the best, but we will not give them our nights.
Whether the screen is green or red, we will stay pink as sunrise. And if they remind us “red sky by morning, sailor take warning,” we will remind them that we have wings that span the sea.

From the Editor:

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