Ebony Wings

13

~Ali~

For a moment I am blinded - by fear or the wind or maybe just because I closed my eyes at the time - but everything goes black and all I can feel is the movement of my stomach pressing up against my lungs, pushing everything into my diaphragm until my throat feels crushed and no sound can escape. I imagine the feeling of my bones cracking as they hit the ground, how all the air will leave my body, leaving my limbs in an orchestrated tangle across the grass, like the final pose of an acrobat, frozen on the bed of grass forever.

But there is another deeper part of me that doesn't feel suffocated by the thought of falling - a part of me that imagines nothing of beautifully broken limbs but instead of the freedom that comes with the weightlessness of the air. I am sure that if I look back on this moment in a couple of hours, minutes or even the few seconds that this fall will last, I will realise that falling is the easiest thing I ever did. I simply took one step forwards and gravity took care of the rest. I was flying.

My body pulls against the restraints of Ethan's arms as he uses our downward momentum to lift us high into the sky, his wings angled upwards as we hurtle into the atmosphere. My hair is flattened away from my face and my eyes are held closed against the weight of the moving air around us, but my mouth is agape and my scream is lost somewhere back on the ground. There is a damp chill in the air as we level out but my body is aflame and no clouds touch me. The wind settles into a steady beat against my skin and cautiously, I squint my left eye open.

If I put aside the fact that I am literally struggling to breathe up here where the air has thinned to eggshells and the wind rushes against my face so fast it feels like I am held beneath the currents of a river, I would say that the view is breathtaking. A minute shift of Ethan's wings and he carries us higher into the horizonless sky, hidden amongst the sun-roasted clouds. The world tumbles past me in a haze, the earth a body of green and brown and curling blue veins. The sun feels warm and comforting against the icy shock of the wind.

I tuck my chin into my chest and cradle my hand around my nose, creating an eddy of air in which I can suck in a full breath. I hold my nose in this little pocket, breathe and let the tears slip free, dragged out by the force of the wind and the overwhelming sight of the blue-tinted earth.

I throw my arms out in rapture, stretching them as far as they will go as if I were the one flying in this sapphire expanse. Puffs of clouds explode as we slice through them, churning the fluffy waterbodies, leaving them in streaks behind us. We approach a cloud so dense I fear we may just rebound off it's solid front but we dive through it like Kingfishers into the water, the world around me grey and milky as we are engulfed by the heavy vapour. We break out through the other side, clarity opening my vision once again as tiny droplets of water condense over my arms, collecting and shimmering over my coat before they are plucked from the fabric like ripened apples and dropped to the world below.

Having experienced the beauty below I shuffle myself around in Ethan's grasp to bathe in the beauty above. We are chest to chest now, Ethan's grip tightening once again, one hand cradled under my neck to support my head. His hair, always so unruly and dashed across his forehead is pulled backwards to showcase the soft curve of his ears and point of his jaw. His eyes are ablaze with emotions that only flight can elicit.

"How are you holding up?" He shouts roughly over the high speed winds. It takes a careful straining of the ears paired with some tentative lip reading to decipher his words as they are thrown behind us.

"I... I'm..." I gasp, groping around my head for the right word to describe the emotions I am feeling right now. A single word or the longest speech cannot begin to explain the sensations I feel, so I settle for something simple and completely inadequate, knowing that my eyes cannot lie. "Just amazing!" Unsurprisingly my voice is flung carelessly into the wind, tumbling chaotically through the air before at least a few syllables reaches his ears. We look to each other for a moment longer before I wriggle back into my original position, casting my eyes over the curving earth, a soft blue haze shrouding the planet.