So maybe she shouldn’a touched it. Maybe when you live next to a factory constantly pouring thick storm clouds of pollution into the air, you’re supposed to think twice before you let some strange substance that fell from the sky come into contact with your bare skin.
Yeah. She probably shoulda poked it with a stick first. But no point in dwelling on that now.
She closes her eyes. Sweeps her hands out to feel the grass. Ordinarily, she would hate the crunchy, uneven feeling of it beneath her body. The idea of bugs being able to crawl inside her sleeves and up her pant legs. Ordinarily, she would never close her eyes when other people are around. You give up a certain amount of control over your situation, when you close your eyes.
But the world isn’t ordinarily anymore. In fact, she can barely feel the grass beneath her. Almost like she’s floating.
Without really thinking, she brings her hand to her mouth. Lets the strange substance touch the tip of her tongue.
It tastes like lightning and glitter. Like magic and bad ideas and ancient secrets hidden under the floorboards.
Someone is calling her name.
Aracely opens her eyes, makes sure she’s not dreaming before she turns to look at the porch. The manager of her group home is watching with a bemused smile on her face.
Panic tries to invade the calm bubble around her, but Aracely fights it. Or maybe the magic substance fights it. Either way, Aracely knows she won’t be in trouble; she’s never in trouble anymore, and that should feel good but it doesn’t. It feels fake.
Aracely looks at the sky and uses the position of the sun to gauge how much time she has spent out here. She must have missed lunch, maybe even dinner, but she doesn’t feel hungry. it almost feels like she will never need to eat again, like her body will just…sustain itself.
An insect flits across her vision, long and thin and bearing multiple pairs of wings. A dragonfly. But that can’t be right; it isn’t dragonfly season.
Aracely frowns, sits up straighter in the grass. She feels a little lightheaded. And a little lightbodied, too.
“Did you see it?” Aracely asks, scrambling to her feet. She almost falls at first, but finds her balance and swivels slowly, scanning the backyard for the bug.
The porch steps creak as Kelly walks down them. “See what, love?”
“It was like a…like a dragonfly, but…” Aracely holds her hands about a foot apart to show the size of it. “But big.”
“No, I didn’t see—”
There it is again. By the treeline. Aracely dashes off after the creature as it dips and swoops all erratic-like, but it disappears.
Not disappears like she loses track of it. Disappears like gone. Just there one second and gone the next, like it slips behind some invisible tree.
The grass feels itchy under her feet. Crunchy. Aracely looks back, and realizes the strange substance is gone, too. Like it dried up while she wasn’t looking.
Aracely‘s stomach growls. Maybe she should go in and eat.
The evening is chaos. A good chaos, with people joking and eating and having fun, but chaos nevertheless. Aracely can never predict how the night will go, with different staff working each day, people calling out, her housemates’ behaviors varying with their moods.
At least there’s minimal screaming tonight. She just can’t take the screaming. But happy sounds…are still sounds. Still too noisy, too much to process.
Everyone else–all of the neurotypical people, anyway–seem oblivious to the disorder around them. Like they aren’t constantly calculating the best place to sit in the room, the exact words to say that won’t get them in trouble. Like they can still think clearly even when someone is laughing over there, someone else is clinking silverware over there, and the whole house smells like garlic.
She goes outside. Probably should tell someone, but she‘s had enough of asking permission in her life.
She sits out on the porch, watching the last bits of sunlight fade on the dry grass, watching the lights come on in the neighbor‘s house. Watching the smokestacks turn the sunset toxic.
She misses home.
Not the abuse. Never the abuse. But she knew what to expect, and she had learned to live with it. On the days when her mom was good to her, she knew that she had to enjoy it while it lasted, because it never lasted, because it was all just an illusion.
She figures it was like the coyote and the roadrunner. Sometimes the coyote puts out birdseed or a lady roadrunner, because the roadrunner ain’t gonna keep coming back if all he gets is anvils and bombs. If there were no good days, Aracely could have left earlier, could have realized the birdseed was poisoned and the lady roadrunner was made of straw.
Here, every day is birdseed and she can’t make herself believe it isn’t poisoned.
She tilts her head skyward. What was that substance that made her feel like everything would be okay? Did it fall from the sky, like some sort of miraculous rain? More importantly, will it ever come back?
The pink and orange clouds morph, growing and shrinking and twisting as they move across the sky, each shape fleeting and impermanent. The hippopotamuses become boats become angels become mist, the dragon becomes a snake becomes three little ducklings following their mom becomes nothing but a memory in the sky.
But the whale… the whale doesn’t become anything, just swims across the horizon, her tail slowly propelling her with graceful movements.
“Beautiful night it’s shaping up to be,” says a voice beside her. Soft and motherly. How a mother is supposed to sound, anyway.
Aracely scoots a little farther away as Kelly sits down. Just far enough that Kelly can’t hug her.
“Not for the whale.” When Kelly doesn’t answer right away, Aracely points out the creature, and the black tendrils of smoke curling toward her. Pursuing her. Wrapping around her tail and grabbing on tight.
“That one looks like a chicken,” Kelly says, pointing.
She doesn’t get it. Can she not see the whale struggling in the sky? Thrashing and pulling at the bindings of pollution, moving in directions and speeds that the other clouds can’t match?
No, Aracely realizes. Kelly can’t see it. Maybe there’s still a little bit of magic from this morning left in Aracely‘s eyes.
More of those strange insects flit across her vision, some of them glowing a soft white in the twilight. She doesn’t bother asking if Kelly can see them, not because she knows the answer and not because she thinks she’ll get in trouble for seeing things that aren’t there but because she won’t get in trouble. Because no one ever yells at her or punishes her or tells her what a terrible, inobservant, inconsiderate child she is, and it’s weird.
Not as weird as the whale suddenly falling from the sky, though.
She just drops, motionless, perhaps wondering whether or not the ground will be friends with her.
Aracely can’t breathe, almost as if that choking pollution has wound its way into her lungs. She doesn’t know that cloud, and empathy has never been high on her list of skills (unlike the ability to memorize numbers, recite Jurassic Park scenes in their entirety, and make people think she’s making eye contact when she’s really making nose contact), and yet she can’t put into words how much this falling cloud hurts her to watch.
Her own heart is falling. About to go splat on the ground.
She stands, looks at Kelly. She knows she shouldn’t run off, that there’s rules and stuff to living in a group home. And rules are everything.
But no one has yelled at her yet. It’s got to happen someday, she figures. Might as well be today.
She runs out toward the edge of the property. No one yells at her.
Night seems to have fallen fast and hard on this side of the yard. She’s only gone a few hundred feet, but already Aracely‘s vision is swarming with the grains of twilight.
No sign of the whale, but the ground here sparkles with moisture.
She drops to her knees, her bare skin on the wet grass, and that’s when she realizes. The visual static is not a symptom of her poor human night vision; it’s the insects. Thousands of them, some as short as a mosquito, some as long as her arm, but all with the same pattern of flagellum-like wings alternating down either side of the body.
She can see them in slow motion, streaking and blurring like a lagging computer cursor.
She reaches out a hand, and one of the smaller creatures lands on her outstretched finger like she’s a Disney princess singing to songbirds in the woods. Its touch is infinitely light. Almost immaterial. Like it could pass through her finger and come out unscathed on the other side.
Maybe they’re made of air molecules, Aracely wonders, bringing the insect close to her face. Because it sure doesn’t look like any bug she’s ever seen. No segments, no real body parts to speak of. Just a long, thin tube, like a drinking straw, with those wavy wings on either side. She can see right through it.
Now, maybe she shouldn’ a touched this, either. Maybe, just like glistening jelly that sits lightly upon the grass like the first, unexpected snowfall, maybe she shoulda poked this with a stick, too.
But Aracely has trouble thinking before she acts. That was the kind of thing that used to get her in trouble, back when she lived with her mom.
This isn’t trouble. She can feel it, deep in her bones. A lightness, entirely unlike the dense knots of fear and guilt that she’s been trying to untangle in the months since she came to the group home. Those knots are still there, she knows they are. But right now?
Right now, she can’t feel them.
Right now, she is okay. She is good. She is…
She’s floating.
Aracely kicks her feet. The tips of the grass tickles her toes.
She doesn’t dare look down, in case this is like cartoons, too. You can walk straight off a cliff and never fall, so long as you don’t realize you’re breaking the rules of physics.
That’s what everything feels like lately. Like nothing is real, like it’s all going to end if she looks at it too hard, realizes she was walking on air instead of solid ground all this time.
The creatures, the insects… the beings. That’s the word for them. Beings. They twirl around her, a cyclone of soft white light and bliss. And Aracely rises higher above the earth.
She isn’t sure about what she’s done, but there’s no going back now.
If she was home right now, she’d be worrying about the beating she would get when she landed. She worried about that a lot. She even worried about what would happen when her mom found out she’d left, but she doesn’t have to. There’s no going back.
One of the beings lands lightly on the tip of her nose, illuminating her entire face with its ethereal glow. She smiles, laughs. By now, she’s high enough that falling would do some serious damage, but she tries not to calculate her potential velocity. She fails, but she tries.
The beings change as she gains elevation, turning from dragonfly-like insects to unidentifiable things that scamper through the sky like diaphanous jellyfish and rabbits.
She’s at eye level with the tops of the trees now, and still rising as the bounding jellyfish and tentacle rabbits give way to shapes that she can only describe as spindly wolves and millipede gazelles.
She reaches out to touch them, to stroke their luxurious fiber-optic fur. Her hand goes right through them, dispersing their molecules briefly as goosebumps and tiny sparks erupt on her skin. Once her hand has passed through them, the beings reform, seemingly unperturbed.
Higher and higher Aracely climbs, leaving the treetops behind as she encounters celestial bears and snakes as long as the Milky Way. She wonders whether anyone is looking up at her.
If anyone is looking for her. If anyone cares.
Aracely does not look down.
She knows she should be cold. It’s night, the wind is rattling the trees down below, and she is floating higher into the atmosphere with every passing second.
She knows she should be worried about running out of air. She knows she should find a way down, in case she keeps going up and up and up forever, moving into the universe.
She knows all this, in the same way she knows she should poke weird stuff with a stick before she touches it.
The sounds of society, of people, have faded. No more chaos of the house, no raspy breath of highway traffic. And no uncomfortable conversation, no fear that the good days will turn bad if she says the wrong thing… only the muffled sound of her heartbeat in her ears, only the sensation of weightlessness and magic.
Aracely is at peace, which is odd because she doesn’t know what that feels like, yet she knows she is feeling it now.
She can see through her hand. Not all the way, not like she’s made of glass, but it looks like she’s turning ethereal, turning into one of the beings. When she moves her hand across the sky, wispy particles drag behind. Is she made of air molecules?
She knows she should be scared, but she isn’t. Maybe she can stay up here forever, maybe–
There’s a sound. Not one she can hear with her ears, but a low, bellowing song. More a feeling than a noise.
She turns toward it, and almost can’t see the being at first. Larger than even the bears and the snakes, it encompasses her entire field of vision.
Another sky whale. The mate of the one that fell, maybe.
Smoke from the factory is still curling upward. Day and night, it never stops, always churning out choking black smoke.
The whale sings, and Aracely has never heard a more sad sound. Not even when she would cry herself to sleep every night, trying to keep her sobs quiet so her mom wouldn’t hear. He misses his mate.
Is that what the strange substance is? The soul of an unearthly being?
The way Aracely figures it, earth beings have solid bodies and immaterial souls that float upward when they die. Immaterial beings maybe have solid souls that fall down.
It makes about as much sense as anything has today, and somewhere deep down inside, she knows this is the truth. Just like she knows the beings don’t belong here. They came from somewhere else, some other dimension maybe, because it wasn’t safe for them there. The air was too toxic.
So they came here, with the promise of birdseed, only to find poison. And not metaphorical poison, either. No, even now, a long tendril of smoke is snaking out of the factory, winding its way around the night sky like a choking vine.
Aracely doesn’t know what to do, only that she needs to fix it. Maybe she could go back down to earth, have people protest the factory until they promise to reduce their carbon emissions over the next decade.
It would be good for the town, good for the future of humanity. But it won’t do anything for the whales, for the wolves and gazelles and the rabbits and jellyfish. It won’t do anything for those little dragonfly-type insects, and it sure won’t do anything for Aracely. But then, staying up here isn’t an option anymore. The pollution will kill them all.
She knows what to do. She knows it the same way she knows the whale’s misery, and she doesn’t like it one bit.
Aracely looks down.
When Aracely looks down, she expects to have her illusion shattered, to suddenly plummet, weighed down by the truth about the world. She expects the sky beings to dissipate like clouds on a sunny day, while she falls down to a world that neither wants nor cares about her.
She does not expect to see the entire staff and all the residents of the group home out in the backyard, looking for her. She does not expect the manager to be crying, so distraught at the idea of losing her favorite new resident. But that is what happens, and it makes it all the harder to go through with her plan.
Just as the smoke is reaching for the sky whale, Aracely thrusts her hand in its way. She definitely shoulda poked it with a stick.
The instant the swirling dark substance comes into contact with her skin, or what used to be skin before she turned into a sky being, everything comes back. The pain, the memories, the anxiety burning in her stomach.
The pollution strips the sky being right out of her, kills the magic and lets it fall down in a thick, mysterious rain, right on the smokestack of the factory.
Aracely is falling, too, but not because she walked off a cliff and forgot to see reality. She’s falling because she wants to see reality, because people are worried about her down there and she thinks she could learn to worry about them, too. She thinks maybe she could trust them someday.
The strange substance, the physical manifestation of her one chance to escape this world, falls on the smokestack, smothering whatever fire or furnace is burning in there. It is not a permanent fix, but it’s a start.
Aracely lands on the itchy grass that crunches unpleasantly under her bare feet. Traffic noise on the highway grates at her ears, but she hears people in the distance. Looking for her, worrying about her.
The long, dragonfly insects are gone now, leaving the night empty save for the occasional mosquito or beetle. Aracely looks up, and she doesn’t see the bears or snakes, the spindly wolves or millipede gazelles.
She doesn’t see the sky whale, but she knows it’s up there because she doesn’t see the smoke from the factory, either. Just a clear night sky filled with all the invisible creatures watching over the house that will someday feel like home.
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Jennifer Lee Rossman (they/them) is a queer, disabled, and autistic author and editor from the land of carousels and Rod Serling. Follow them on Twitter @JenLRossman and find more of their work on their website jenniferleerossman.blogspot.com. |
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