The Boy Flies Again

The cold wind in his face felt like home. The low temperature, usually a sticking point for most people, the kind of thing they complain about to strangers when they are left with nothing else to say, was as comforting to him as a warm living room. Or some hug from a mother he would probably secretly despise anyway.

This flight was nothing short of defiant. An act of rebellion. He curled up his body, knees to his chest, and then extended it straight as he could, accelerating to a speed faster than he ever remembered. With all the changes that he had experienced in the eleven years since he had last leapt into the sky, it had never occurred to him that his speed would have increased. In retrospect, it was a stupid thing to have never crossed his mind.

The rain froze as it hit his hair and he approached the clouds. It started to turn to hail. He took one more deep breath before the air got too thin, not too sure if he would be back down quickly enough to not pass out. He imagined himself running out of air. His face turning blue and the sound of wind fading away, spinning and flopping and plummeting his way to the ground, eventually hitting the concrete with an impact that would leave him beyond recognition, and the street walking Manhattanite witnesses to his death would assume he had just leapt off of one of the countless skyscrapers or high rises around them. It would be a sad yet conceivable story, a once troubled youth finding his demise in such a tragic way. The misconception would be fitting, and they would go on believing it for the same reason they never believed him at all: impossibility. Surely, he could not have been higher than those buildings. There is no way, indeed, that he could have just fallen from the clouds. Oh God, he could not have been flying. Human beings are not meant to fly, and he was in fact a human being, therefore he could not fly. The assumption of his death would be the same reasoning the doctors once gave him as a child to stop doing it.

He flew through the haze of the clouds, feeling the density of moisture, and broke out into crisp air. There was no rain, or hail, or wind. He could feel the water on his face start to crystallize as he looked up at the moon, big and full and bright and clean. He flew as close as he could and let go, the momentum carrying him a few more feet toward space before he stopped, for just an instant, somewhere between rising and falling.

He spread out his arms, closed his eyes, and let himself fall. Past the crispness, through the clouds, into the hail, into the wind, racing the rain toward the sparkling lights, past the antennas, past the windows of businesses where cleaning ladies listened to their small battery-powered radios, past the billboards that told people what to buy and what to see, past the trees, toward the sidewalk.

He grabbed back on, maybe inches from the ground, flying down the street, dodging pedestrians who witnessed him in awe. He came to the park and turned around, heading back down Broadway. He wanted them to see him. He wanted them all to see the impossible.