Business Man: 6

I’m in the kitchen darkness. The laptop is shouting light. My hands glow, tap-tap-tap. My daughter lies in bed, asleep, and I cannot describe the ache in my chest when I think of her. My suit is burning on me like an infection; I want to rip it off, get into some old jeans, into a t-shirt, barefoot, plain. I want to make Cheerios and waffles. I want to spill milk on the counter, I want to hear her coming down the stairs and saying my name. But there’s still four hours until dawn, when the sitter cracks the eggs and burns the toast, slides the paper in under the door, leaves. I’m the shadow-father. This is why my body falls only as imagination. I struggle to keep writing this. I stare at the last sentence for fattening seconds. My fingers are shaking. I’m squeezing them in, but they’re dripping, the tears. I’m in the kitchen darkness. She’s sleeping, and goodness reigns.

Fly

For sport, nothing beat cloud diving. He manoeuvred his twin-engine upwards, tugging on the throttle-bar. One hand flashed out to grab his sunglasses – big round reflective things – and he pushed them on his face. Up, up, pressed against the back of the seat, gravity pulling him gently, stretching his face. It felt as though he were pushing through something dense, like jelly.

A wall of white enveloped him and muffled the engines. So slow now, and the roaring, high-pitched and throated. He could see the iron pistons, hammering, the combusting gas an infinite stream of fire and vanishing heat. He punched on the radio and turned it up full blast.

When he broke, mist trailing off her wings, he let out an adrenal whoop of joy. For a moment he rose suspended, almost going nowhere, the engines beginning to stall. He pushed her forward and levelled her off. Out before him, forested, vast acreages of tumbling cumulus lay frozen in time, sun-sprayed. It was almost another land, and he could not help but thinking that there were indeed people up here, living in the slow-changing landscape, cloud-bound. To the left a great ridge of rolling puff could have been mountains or cliffs. Straight ahead were foothills and curling embankments, hiding invisible rivers of air, where those who lived here spent their days catching slippery wind-fish, or netting packets of flashing light. To the right a hallway of bursting trees vaulted cathedral-like, heavy-laden with sky-fruit, ambrosial, oranges of oxygen balling on branches of white smoke. And directly below – a field, ribbed into rows, hiding the seeds of heaven.

He prepared himself for a dive.

But just ahead something caught his attention. Two tendrils, maybe three, twisting on the field. They were moving quicker than the landscape, almost detached from the surroundings. He arced the plane in their direction, turning down the radio. As he approached they began to shrink, melting down into the rest of the clouds. Curiosity scampered up his shoulder, bit his ear, spoke sharp nothings.

And that! A shimmering flash of black! Almost mirror-like, a glistening scale. He dropped her into a dive, his heart racing. The tendrils appeared again, bobbing, then slipped back beneath the surface. “What the hell is going…” he spoke aloud, but his voice caught in his throat.

An impossibility.

Endless rows of jagged teeth. A wide and bottomless pink throat, billowing. A tongue, forked, lashing the air. Two caverns, nostrils, and above those a pair of reptilian eyes, milky and cold. He tried to pull her up, but the engines shrieked in refusal, and he screamed his way down into the end of the world.