Fly

The first time it happened she thought it was just one of those things.

A crazy dream that’s so real you can touch it, grab it with both hands and hold it close to your heart for as long as the night will let you. But when the morning came she could still sense it, the sun’s warmth, the feeling of clouds at her fingertips and the pockets of hot air rushing past against her skin. After the third time it became a familiar pattern, the take off, throwing her fragile body from a cliff so high the bottom didn’t even register on her eyelids. There was just her and the horizon in a heart beat and a whoosh of wings she couldn’t see.

When the dreams stopped she tried to get them back, wrote them down, thought about them for hours, but it was too late. She got into the habit of sitting on the roof of her house to watch to sun go down and seeing the birds hit the updraft near her neighbour’s swimming pool. Then, when that wasn’t enough any more, she walked to the top of the tallest building and looked down at the people like tiny dots in the fabric of a canvas that made it so beautiful with all that detail.

Pedestrians on the pavement called the police and they came with sirens calling a hero’s anthem to the bottom of the building. There was a young man there who coaxed her down from the ledge where she had been sitting, waiting for the sunset. She told him that she didn’t intend to jump, but she just had to feel it, just had to know that once it had been real.
He never understood that, and he thought about it again when they’d dragged her down from another building a week later, and then once more the week after that. Each time she just said the same thing and it came to be a kind of obscure ritual for the boys in the force. They would sit on late shift and ponder the pathways in her brain that drew such strange conclusions.

The week after they’d locked all the rooftop doors and posted her picture with security guards in lobbies, they found her on the bridge over the quarry. It was a drop so deep you’d lose the light before you hit the bottom. She just sat there on a crossbeam, eyes closed like she was waiting for something to happen, waiting for something to change.

Usually it was easy. Call her name, get her down, a blanket, a visit with the shrink. But this time she stood to a gasp from the gathered crowd, who thought they’d seen it all, but never this. With a breath and a sigh she spread her arms and watching her he imagined her shadow had furled out its wings. They thought she would leap then, and moved forward in a pulse to stop her. But they didn't need to bother because her arms felt too naked and she folded them to her sides, defeated.

When they committed her he visited, brought her flowers and watched her watch the birds outside her window in envy.
“You know,” she would sometimes say, “I used to be able to fly.”