Sky Swimmer

Night Visions, Part 1

She's been here before. And it always ends the same way. She dies. And it sucks big time.

You wouldn't think it to be a savage battlefield now, looking at the peaceful landscape shimmering under a lofty sun. Landscape? It is like no landscape she has ever seen down on earth below her. This is an endless cloudscape. Floe gazes out over a horizon of epic proportions, a mountainous cloudscape that stretches away in all directions.

As she makes her way across one of the broad, frothy valleys her feet kick up little wisps of cloud. A trail of vapor marks her passage. She wears a tight fitting t-shirt that does nothing to hide her maturing body. Printed black wings grace the back of her shirt. Her thick, dark hair hangs unnaturally about her shoulders, at times appearing to float, as if undulating within a body of water. But she is not under water, she walks the clouds themselves. And Floe walks with the poise of a Michelangelo angel.

Her face, no matter how beautiful, is far from angelic. It is scoured with anger, hardened with purpose. Her strong eyebrows arch dangerously forward toward her nose. Long, dark lashes ceaselessly fan the embers of her smoldering, brown eyes.

She scans the clouds ahead for danger. Senses it. Halts. Her hands contract into two fists of defiance, she catches the instinctual move and relaxes her fingers. But it's no use, the adrenaline kicks in, the sense of panic rises like an acid flame within her ... here we go again.

The surface of the distant hilly clouds erupt with a pustulant foreboding and dark shapes coalesce from within them, thousands of shapes. Broiling into existence.

The shapes are not of this place; they are dirty, armored, dark, and lethal.

Floe is doomed.

---

The sky is cloudless above Manhattan Beach. Floe Konsera has forgotten the dream. It is an old one anyway and she has learned to disregard the ones that kill her. What's the point? She always wakes at the moment of defeat, her skin slick with sweat, her heart pounding with the terror of another panic attack, a condition she has been struggling with since she was five years old. She awakens, realizes it was all a dream and falls back into a fitful slumber until her favorite dubstep alarm pushes her toward another dull day of school.

She leaves the house before anyone else is up, without breakfast, without flossing. But I did brush and rinse with mouthwash. That has got to count for something!

She walks mechanically to school, to her classroom, never looking up to meet the eyes of other jostling students in the busy hallway. Never seeing the boys as they follow her effortless dance of slipping in and out between the masses of bodies. She manages to never once be touched by any of them. She hates being touched. Her foster father told her that when she was just a baby she would cry every time he or her foster mother would hug her, or simply pull a shirt over her head. Touching was a thing for people who knew where they belonged and who they belonged with. People who slept in peace at night, knowing the new day would greet them to a place without anxiety, without a feeling of ... being ... an outsider.

Floe takes her seat in the back of the class. Unconsciously she takes a pencil out of her bag, lowers it to her lap where no one can see what she is doing. She allows a hint of "anxiety" to race across her nervous system and a small flurry of tiny bubbles appear around the pencil; it begins to rise up off her hand. It levitates. Floe absentmindedly spins the utensil by wagging her finger beneath it. She watches other students file into the class with their highly intolerable, unnecessary air of exuberance.

She hates school.

The only thing she looks forward to is track. Track is not a bad thing, it was a pretty near good thing is what she was thinking when Eric walks in and she has to admit, yeah, Eric Stoble was absolutely, definitely a very good thing too.