Brighter Dawns

Miranda woke up crashed upon a pillow like an ancient shipwreck. Lifting her head she found the pillow made of clouds, and that she seemed to be falling. She idly cursed the timing of events, remembering in the back of her mind the psych test they had that day. She reached out blindly and grabbed hold of the sun, which was much closer than they had led her to believe in school.

Keeping her hand on the blazing orb was enough to suspend her fall, apparently. She looked around to get her bearings and found herself face to face with a marionette of a snow-white stork. It flapped its wooden wings, the two of them hovering in the light blue abyss.

"Yeah, they all give me that look at first," the puppeted stork told her. Thick woolen threads laced from underneath joints and hardpoints on its body. It blinked its painted eyebrows and the two considered each other.

"What-" she started, but for some reason her tongue felt like cotton candy, and tasted like socks.

"-are you doing here? I knew you'd ask that." She found herself impressed by the bird's precognition. Why was she calling it a bird?

"Well that's rude," it clicked its tongue. The sound reminded her of Dutch clogs. 

"Were you waiting for me here?" she asked.

"They all seem to turn up here," it shrugged. "By the way, I'm not an "it", and my name is Nathaniel."

"What - how am I supposed to live up here?" Miranda asked, still clinging onto her little star of a companion.

"Well, it's easier once you've done your ropes. Here, I'll show you how I was taught." The bird took a spool of bright white thread and started binding it around Miranda's limbs. For each pass pulled tighter around her, she felt her body strangely loosen, becoming lighter in the breeze. This is a fine breeze, after all, she thought.

Looking at her arms, Miranda was startled to see that similar strings now adorned her body, holding it upright thanks to some unseen force. She shook her arm; the strings waved along with her. She lifted one arm then dropped it hard and yelped to find her body start to fall. One yank back upward brought her back to balance. 

Miranda looked out across the wide open skies. "So then how do you- you know-"

"It's more like running than flying. You don't have to hold your arms out like that, you know."

Something within her knew that was false. Keeping arms outstretched, Miranda began to walk across the open void. With each miss of solid ground beneath her, her foot found a springstep, launching her forward. Her arms began to loosen, and on their own accord they began pumping like old pressurized steam engines, up and down, working up that initial heat. Soon her steam started piping, then billowing more and more until she was a full mast in a Caribbean afternoon.

"That's three different metaphors," it noted. No, just one big one, she thought.

Miranda noticed the blazing sun from before shyly courting her ankles as she soared through the air.

The bird watched all this with some worry. "They don't take to it so well, usually. Usually buys me a bit of time." Its eyes darted around the heavens, as if caught in an act whose guilt was judged on sight. "The tour stops there, kid. Watch your head."

"I can fly higher than you," she shouted against the wind. She felt it, too, her feathers deftly sorting the gusts to either side, an unseen warmth lapping at her. She burst open her wings and drank deeply of the winds like a charging river. The old angel statues at her childhood church would be green with envy, she thought, as she dove upward and downward, her little sun following suit, the colors warping around them into early sunsets and sunrises. She closed her eyes and let her muscles reach every corner of this sensation.

She opened them to see the wooden stork with an oversized fishing net, a grim expression on his face. It sliced the air with the opening of the net, which passed over Miranda without ensnaring her. Yet she found that she could no longer move. 

The stork pulled out a pair of scissors and began to flap over to her. Her little sun companion turned a deep shade of red and darted away beyond the periphery.

"You gave these to me!" she bellowed.

"And health to the cantankerous youth," said the artificial deliverybird, snipping Miranda's strings and watching her plummet downward.

Her eyes opened, her body unmoved, untrusting of the space around her. She reasoned through her surroundings before daring to stretch out and confirm them. She leaned upright as her head slipped from her shoulders and thudded back down onto her cushion. Groping over at her side table, she took a plastic sandwich bag full of light pink pills and tossed them in the trash. The red dotted lines of her antique brown alarm clock, ancient centurion of time, impartially stated her tardiness.

She didn't do well on her exam.