PART 1 — Farmer’s Log — March 30th, 2022

It all started at a Town Council meeting.

I’m not on the Town council myself, but this time I was there to be heard. Ever since that Nikole Tesla came to town, strange things had been happening in the sky.

I’d gotten to wonderin’ if her bizarre high-tech experiments with electricity were to blame for the unnatural green spiral cloud that sometimes appears in the sky over yonder above Perch Hill. Turns out it wasn’t her fault, but that night I was ready to raise a fuss about the pollutin’ of our beauty of a big sky view with odd shapes and colors of clouds.

There was a heated debate about the increasing price of gasoline and how it would affect our deliveries. One Council member said everyone should drive little mopeds instead of cars. Then the meeting was completely side tracked while everyone talked about a young man who used to run deliveries round these parts… A young man named Jimmy.

No one had mentioned Jimmy in some time. The boy decided early last year that he needed a vacation. He up and started traveling the world. He wrote to Town Hall for a while, but his messages were cryptic, then barely believable, and finally, nonsense that often bordered on gibberish. Then one day the letters and messages just stopped coming.

At first we just all figured he was shacked up somewhere where he could put off adulthood for a few more years. But a crazy rumor started getting around that he’d been abducted by outer space aliens. Then a lady from Nextville (the next town over) started coming into town, said she was Jimmy’s mama. She was a wide-eyed, sweatpants-wearing, tote-bag toting mess of a lady who looked like she hadn’t slept in her life.

To anyone who’d listen, Jimmy’s mama would spout the same story, and it was completely bananas. There were some parts about some kind of worldwide supergovernment, then she’d transition perfectly into how the aliens who abducted Jimmy were actually not aliens, but robots from another dimension.

She’d go on to explain that in addition to being the world’s largest coverup conspiracy, the interdimensional alien robots were somehow connected directly to Jimmy. She thought he had done something stupid (Jimmy was never the brightest) and opened up some kind of interdimensional wormhole.

We’d say something like “Gert…” (that’s her name, Gert) “Gert… When we look for that wormhole, it’s never where you say it’s gonna be.”

She’d wave her Diet Coke in our faces and shout “It’s always moving! You’ll see! Unimaginable things will start coming out of that portal!”

Ol’ Gert hung out in town a lot those days, spent her time convincing the more gullible folk that there was a wormhole in the sky that was impossibly hard to spot. The alien rumor continued to spread, and before long everyone was really confused. No one knew if it was the government, aliens, robots, wormholes, high gas prices, or all of the above.

One sleepless night the details of the last few months came together for me. The green spiral cloud I was seeing in the sky. Gert’s ravings about portals, and Nikole Tesla’s strange experiments with electricity. The cloud was none other than the portal in the sky from Gert’s ravings!

Apparently energy escaping from Nikole’s lab was occasionally stopping the portal just over Perch Hill. Maybe the portal is like a revolving door that opens to hundreds (or thousands, or more) of different dimensions or realities. Makes you wonder what may come out of that green portal over Perch Hill, doesn’t it?

To be honest I’m still confused about what happened to Jimmy, but this isn’t about Jimmy. It’s about a dragon, whose arrival would eventually lead to not only one of the best friendships of my life, but a business endeavor that could really do some good for the whole town.

Part 2 coming soon…