Dylan lies on the roof of her car and waits to fall into the night sky.
It is impossible. Dylan is not a child, nor magical, nor tied to one hundred thousand helium balloons, but it’s a game she has played on quiet nights since she was young. It happens usually as it is happening tonight, on the top floors of parking garages, with the messy Floridian skyline completely out of sight. Tonight the clouds are out in force, taking great care to obscure as many stars as possible, leaving the remaining few to be drowned the light-pollution from the endless row beachfront hotels. But a clear sky is not necessary, not for this. Though Dylan has no desire to understand the exact mechanisms years of these near take-offs have made clear to her the basic rules:
1) Look up into the sky so nothing else is in view (cup your hands around your eyes if necessary)
2) Wait until the sky seems larger than the earth, infinitely wide and infinitely deep.
3) Wait until you feel small and powerless.
4) Fear the sky like it hides a beast, but do not act on your fear. Be afraid, but not scared.
Once the sky is nothing short of immense it will come, triggered by some ancient fear. Suddenly there is no car. To fall now is to fall forever. But this isn’t falling, this is being pulled—taken up by something ravenous and unknowable.
And like this for a moment Dylan floats. Gravity devolves from truth to belief and flying is as easy as changing your mind. No one awake is as weightless as this. She drifts, fighting the welling fear back as it slowly overwhelms her. It’s rule number four that is always broken eventually, as is happening now, when uncertainty turns to fright and a hypnagogic jerk brings her back to the flimsy aluminum below.
The drives home are alien, as though her hometown is a place she has never been. The streets are not deserted, but she gets the distinct sensation that everyone she sees is lost. Every building looks misplaced, the grass seems sharp and ominous, palm trees twist upwards at weird angles, and the light from streetlamps glow with hazy rings as though through fog.
Dylan tells no one what she does. Any explanation might break the magic and make it impossible to recapture. In understanding she fears she might unravel the carefully crafted deceits that make it all possible. Or worse that she might master it completely and rob it of its power over her.
-Excerpt from opening of short-story-in-progress Infidel
No one will see this, I imagine. Less likely even that someone would leave a comment. But I just wanted to post it up, see it on its own. (and, duh, do not steal or reprint without permission)
