Fictitious 52 #10

Ever wonder why I don't do drugs?

Because it's crazy enough up here unaided.

No idea where this one came from. "Shift"

 You inhale deeply and hold the breath deep inside of your chest. Your muscles are coiled, primed, ready and waiting to be sprung at a moment's notice. Stretching before you for miles and miles is nothing but smooth flatland. It's as if it were designed for you, or you for it. In fact, you were designed for it. To traverse it at a top speed nothing else on the land is capable of. This is your playground, and you give it purpose.

As you exhale your muscles fire, legs stretching as far behind you as they can in order to propel you forward. As far in front as possible so that when they come in contact with the ground you can pull yourself forward and repeat the process. Over and over, again and again, quickly building speed, blazing across the landscape. The wind parting before and sliding around and off you.

Your breath comes in heavy puffs, your muscles burn with effort, but not strain. You can feel yourself building towards something as you put more and more yards behind you. Your legs pull close and fire again, but this is different. Stronger. More angled. Behind you your legs tuck close. In front your pattern changes, instead of front to back changes to one of up and down.

You rise into the air, facing less resistance to your forward momentum the higher you go as the air thins. Your body grows lighter and, like the unsheathing of small daggers, feathers begin to emerge, layered one on top of another. Your heart rate doubles, triples, quadruples, pounding away like lightning. The only thing louder than the sound of blood rushing through your veins is the rhythm of the beating of your wings as you climb ever higher.

Finally you level out, spreading your wings to their full span and coasting on the warm air rising up from the ground. They hold you aloft as your body cuts through the wind. A floor of clouds below, you share the infinite blue expanse with no one and no thing other than the very sun itself.

You begin to angle yourself downward, back towards the earth. Before piercing the barrier of clouds you tuck your wings close to your body and crash through. Slowly you begin to rotate. At first it is slight, but it builds to the point you emerge from the mass in a full spiral, corkscrewing down to another field of blue, this one deeper, sun reflecting off of it. Trailing behind you is a stream of feathers that peel off as you descend. The skin below is gray an rubbery and as you molt from front to back your body extends along with it.

The world explodes as you make contact with the water below you. Without missing a beat your tail kicks into gear, plunging you further downwards with its full strength. The resistance is greater than the wind you faced on land, but it's no match for you. As you descend, fewer senses matter to you. Brightly colored schools of fish disappear as you fall into the blackness of the deep ocean. The only sound you hear is the same repetition of water being pushed out of your way and around your body. Smell is moot. But you can feel. You can feel the pressure build as you propel yourself deeper. You can feel yourself pushing yourself harder.

And then, silence. You can still feel yourself moving but there is no sound. The resistance disappears, as does your sense of up or down. You realize your eyes are shut and you open them only to see a broad blanket of black speckled with little white dots.

You've lost all point of reference. What you're experiencing, no other living thing has. No other living thing, to your knowledge, can. You impel yourself through space by methods you can't quite describe. You don't breathe, as there is nothing to breathe. You've, ironically, lost your sense of space in the middle of space. You have no idea where your body begins or where it ends. You simply drift, ever onwards.

Slowly the white grows from small dots, to full on spots. The darkness shrinks from canvas to paint, switching places with the white and then dwindling to nothing. You're enveloped in pure white, a quiet, but constant, tone ringing in your ears.

You wake up.