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“Dad!” I shout through the rain.
The engine floods and cuts out. The truck shifts within the current and scrapes against rock. The sound causes my jaw to clench, my ears to ring. I stumble when my foot becomes stuck, splashing my face down into the water, the cold a numbing thing, immediately forcing its way down my throat. I scrabble into the riverbed with my left hand, but it too becomes entrenched in mud. I gag and start to choke. I force my eyes open, blinking away the sting, but I can’t see, the water is moving too swiftly. The more I fight, the more tired I get. Lights begin to flash behind my eyes as the water enters my lungs.
My right hand floats up near my face. The feather is still there, clutched tightly. The silky blue flutters slowly. It brushes my face. Oh, please, I think. I’m drowning. Oh, please. Help me.
A big hand clamps down on my shoulder, the grip tight and biting, and all I can see is blue and all I think is blue and all I can hear is blue. My head breaches the surface, water spraying in all directions. I vomit a thick stream of river and begin to gasp for air. I open my eyes and the sky around me is filled with feathers, all dark, all blue, all raining down from the sky.
The hand slips from my shoulder and wraps around my chest, pulling me back until I’m pressed against something large and warm. I look down at the arm around me, thick and strong, a fine layer of auburn hair running up to the back of the gigantic hand. I’m lifted up with this one arm, pulled up the body behind me, through a shower of blue feathers that continues to fall. I struggle, but the strength around me is too great, and I catch a last glimpse of the truck upside down in the river before my vision is blocked by a moving wall of dark blue from either side of me that carries a rustling that sounds like wind over bones. I’m wrapped into this cocoon and I breathe it in. Earth, I think.
“You shouldn’t be here,” a voice says in my ear, the arm around me clenching tighter. “This is not a place for you. You are not ready to cross. You will drown. I cannot allow that to happen.” As he speaks, his lips scrape against my neck and I shiver, droplets of water falling from my hair.
“But—”
The two sides of the cocoon flash open in front of me, and even as I recognize them for what they are, there is a bright flash of blue and I am flung upward, toward the gray clouds above me, the sky bending inward, to a point, as if being pulled from the other side. I fly up through this apex and feel a flash of extreme vertigo as my world flips upside down and I fall from the ceiling of Little House and land in my bed with a crash, the frame groaning beneath me.
I sit up, gasping, my eyes flashing open, kicking the covers away from me, pushing up against the backboard.
A dream. It was just a dream.
My skin is slick with sweat, not wet with river water.
My legs are not covered in mud.
I did not almost drown.
I did not just witness my father’s accident as if it just happened.
I was not pulled from the water and wrapped in a cocoon.
But even though I know this, know all of this, even though I am a rational person living in the real world where nothing extraordinary ever happens, even with all of this, I am at a loss to explain what is in my right hand.
A large feather, of the deepest blue.
Not a cocoon.
No.
Wings.
the man who fell from the sky
“Are you coming down with something?” my mother asks me the next morning
in the kitchen of Big House as she puts a cup of coffee in front of me. “You look really pale.” The Trio stop their chatter and lean in closer to me, trying to determine themselves if I am sick.
“Oh,” Mary says, glancing at her twin. “You do look ill.”
“Ill,” Nina parrots with a giggle. “So deathly ill. Sickly.”
“He just needs to take a day off,” Christie decides. “How many days have you worked in a row now?”
“Not that many,” I grumble. “I’m not sick. I just didn’t sleep well last night.” And apparently I was saved by a bird-man that I took a feather from and it became real. So… that’s a thing too.
“Thirty-two,” my mother says as she rifles through the desk calendar. “You’ve worked thirty-two straight days. No wonder you’re getting sick.”
“I’m not sick!”
“You need to take a break,” Christie says.
