Harken

9 Cessation

I dreamt of flying.

One moment I was frozen in a chemical blackness, and the other I was surrounded by blue and white, soaring and free of the wooden, dirty smell that had enveloped the secret room. Warmth ran against my back, down my legs and arms as the wind flew in my face and up through my mouth into my lungs. The smell of salt water rushing up from below awakened me.

My eyes were already open but it took some time for anything I was looking at to sink in. I was soaring high above the coastline, the people below me little more than specks and the cars and houses like faraway models. Like a toy town. It was so peaceful, so silent besides the muted hiss of air as it pressed around my head like bees. My eyes were not bothered by the rushing: it was as if a glass cone was over my head like a helmet, keeping me safe, sealing me from the air and the sky. Gravity couldn’t keep its fingers on me. I floated free of the Earth. I was invincible, and I was silver.

It startled me only slightly. I had looked down and seen my hands firmly pressed to my sides and noticed something was different. Silver covered the outside of my hands from my knuckles to my wrist in overlapping, reflective scales like the skin of a snake. They moved when I clenched my fist, part of me as if it’d been under my skin all along and I’d only uncovered it. The scales gleamed like mirrors that echoed the sun into my face.

In the dream, this didn’t feel strange at all: the glow of the silver on my hands seemed no more unusual than that of the ring still on my finger. And the flying too. I simply willed myself to go higher and suddenly I was heading upward on my own accord, legs and arms pressed together like I was a long silver bullet. I was actually flying.

I wasn’t alone either. The girl from my dream suddenly appeared from over my shoulder, hands with scales just like mine pressed to her sides. The magnificent silver was even more vibrant in the sunlight. I grinned then leapt higher, as if trying to tempt her into racing against me. I heard her laugh from over my shoulder, a sound I’d never heard from this girl in any dream before. It was enough of a distraction for her to dart ahead.

On a plane, the quiet would have been drowned out by a jet engine and babbling passengers, a static of noise ripping through the skies. But here, where we were alone, the silence was omnipresent: a beautiful emptiness of yellow sun and perfect clouds that made all the vast cities and shining coasts and bustling cars below seem insignificant.

She stopped to float as I tried to catch up. Her feet dangled lightly in the air, arms crossed now. I could see every line between the scales on her hands, like miniature black creases dividing tiny mirrors.

I took a labored breath of air and let it out in contentment.