A Sad Short Story – To Fly and To Be Famous
To Fly and To Be Famous – A Sad Short Story
I have always dreamt of flying, high above the ground, face to face with the horizon, like the wild ducks going to foreign land, like a paper plane gliding down into a clear puddle. Haven’t you? Oh, you must have! At least once? Then you must have dreamt of being famous? Ah! There you are! But you know? You could do it! Fly and be famous. How? This is what I will lead you into.
Tonight when everyone is asleep, climb up to the roof. You stand on the edge. Are you afraid of heights? You should not. At least not now! Anyway you are blinded, by sleep. Go back two steps. One! Two! Breathe in deep, deeper, deeper, and stop! Force your left calf. Push yourself forward. One and two and JUMP!
Your arms are spread out. The fingers of air stroll across your hair. Can you feel it? The feathered cushion that’s holding you up in the air. Your eyes water out of happiness, or is it the air tickling them? Loose flaps of your pyjama flapping like little wings:
“Flap, flap, flap, flap”
You look down at your feet. Dark windows follow each other, flying away from your feet. Invisible hands turn you over like a pancake over the pan, with the ease of a mother turning over the baby for now massaging his chest. And the flapping continues:
“Flap, flap, flap, flap”
You are now head up, backstroke over the horizon. You are picking up speed. Your arm aching from wounds of lost battles, now aches no more. Smiling faces of all those whom you hurt and cherished, all look at you alike, and you smile.
“Flap, flap, flap, THUD!”
A short crashing sound. Your bones are now no longer hard. Articulations are now in greater number, under your elastic gown of the skin. Darkened by the night, a steady river of hot blood now flows from your crushed cranium. You feel no pain, nothing, no guilt, no more. Your eyes slowly drop, and as the heat leaves you, you grow cold, chilly, icy. And you see a tunnel of light going up, with no end.
“Flap, flap, flap, flap”
You now have wings, or is it the flash of cameras, which is capturing moments of you, to be put beneath the headlines:
‘FORMER SOLDIER COMMITS SUICIDE’
But the article forgot to mention the premature rictus that formed even before the death.
Flap, flap, flap, flap…
__END__
