The first morning of sixth grade, that’s when it happens. You wake early, floating over your bed. Blankets and bed sheets have fallen away at night, and there you are, three feet above the mattress, in your pajamas, just hovering.
Sure, you’ve dreamed about flying; even pretended to fly on hot summer afternoons coasting downhill on your mountain bike, arms outstretched in the breeze, no handlebars. Now, the confusion, the reality of it, is overwhelming. Some primitive element of your anatomy has awakened overnight. You roll in the air, unsure of your balance at first. You turn a few corkscrews, summersaults, and a backflip before you get the hang of it.
You have to focus. Will your feet back down to the floor when your mother knocks on your bedroom door to check that you are up and getting ready for school?
And that burning sensation in your lungs doesn’t make any sense. You cough forcefully while brushing your teeth, splatter saliva and toothpaste on the mirror as you exhale a puff of smoke.
At breakfast, you have no appetite. You try to explain your queasy sensation to your mother. “Butterflies.” She nods. “Nerves. Completely normal. First day of school jitters.” She feeds you a chalky spoonful of Pepto-Bismol, which seems to help a little.
***
In those early autumn weeks, you practice after school. Alone, down past the soccer fields, near the transfer station, you perfect your aim, burning up piles of brush and leaves. You practice breathing fire into neighborhood garbage bins and incinerating stinky trash bags. You practice until the neighborhood watch committee mails out alerts about unexplained arson. Your mother tells you to avoid neighborhood kids with firecrackers.
You don’t want to grow reckless with this gift, so you save your fire-breathing skill for handy things like toasting grilled cheese sandwiches and making s’mores for afterschool snacks.
***
Flight is the best part anyway. You never really liked riding the school bus and getting teased by the teenagers, so you start flying home after school. Looking down at your neighborhood, you marvel at how tiny and insignificant it is compared to the vast, wild world beyond.
And it’s funny how nobody even notices you up there in the air. You realize that at any given time, only a handful of people are actually looking up. People are so busy with their own lives, immersed in their comfortable routines. Most everyone is looking down, eyeballs glued to smartphones or devices. Other people are driving, walking, and looking straight ahead at their path.
Once in a while someone does glimpse you. An old man on a park bench is gazing wistfully at a violet sunset when he spots your silhouette. He rubs his eye, wipes his glasses clean, and then surveys the sky again.
But you are long gone by that point. You’ve learned to be fast and deceptive. At a playground one morning, a small child is watching clouds.
“Look, mama!” The child shrieks, pointing effusively. “There’s a dragon in the sky!”
“Marvelous, honey.” Coos the mother, from behind the pages of her tabloid.
A few religious types also notice you. They believe you are an angel or a ghostly apparition. It depends upon the person. The tabloids run stories about a wave of biblical visions sweeping your city.
***
You try to explain to your parents that you are changing. You try to explain that you’re noticing some very different things about your body. Your mother blushes and has a quiet conversation with you about how babies are made. Your father shuffles his feet, coughs, and offers to buy you a book.
“It’s all perfectly normal,” your father reassures you. “A natural process. Just part of growing up.”
***
Perhaps this whole flying thing is best kept to yourself. There are those who might truly wonder. Doctors, scientists, experts… might open you up, look for whatever anomaly it is that grants you these powers, pushing aside everything that matters just to get in. Just to own it, name it, commodify it.
Fear compels you to become more circumspect about your flights. You only go out of your bedroom window at night now, when the world is dark, long after your parents are asleep. Bats and ghostly barn owls are your companions on night flights through the countryside. The barn owls watch you intently, their gold eyes glowing with the cold fire of ancient stars. You notice their talons. Your fingernails are thickening and curling.
***
At school, the desire for flight is a strange twinge, a restlessness that keeps tugging you out of your chair. Teachers are exasperated.
“Your child simply can’t seem to stay in a seat,” they tell your parents. You receive an F for attentiveness on your first report card. “Fidgeting, flapping, jumping up in class, can’t ever sit still.”
***
You never expected this is what you’d become. This is something primeval, primordial, reptilian, and wild. You are on a different path. You start spending nights perched on the branch of a spruce tree that towers high above your home. Stars glitter through pine needles; the moon drifts through its phases on its slow arc above your dark neighborhood.
You scratch a dry, flaky skin patch above your left shoulder blade. As you scratch, your skin peels away. You feel smooth, sharp, bony ridges emerging through flesh. You tug something glossy from your shoulder blade. You raise your hand to examine the scale; it gleams like an onyx shell in the moonlight.
