Flight

Oh how we stretched our new wings on the day that everyone learnt how to fly! We left the room through the window and joined the aerial throngs milling and swooping around Sydney’s metal and glass peaks. A thin stream twirled in a loop around Centrepoint, gulls hurtling around the rocks of Eden. People laughing and flocking, their exuberance a delight against the dour illustrated angels in the city’s cathedral. Wings of thought and fancy sprouted from everyone’s backs, feathery masterpieces that shifted and spun like otherworldly ferns of unimaginable hue. For days we played in the air! We sucked what sustenance our bodies needed from human joy and delight, our mingling and our togetherness. To be anywhere! To see everything!

And yet, as time went on and into the second week, members of us became bored. Their senses became dulled by the experience of the unbelievable and impossible. It started with the physicists and philosophers, who joined the priesthood on the ground, who had been determined to avoid the sin of flight from the start, figuring the will of god to manifest itself in corporeal wings, not imaginary ones. The wise-men nodded their heads and stroked their beards, agreeing that these thought-tassels worn shamelessly around the shoulders were a foul temptation. Thus the men of religion found new unity on earth while their congregations flew as one in the sky. The physicists and philosophers, closer to the priesthood than they would have liked to hear, rejected the material manifestation of an immaterial wish. New age baloney! cried the physicists, hating the downfall of their faith. The philosophers were mortally jealous that they had lost the exclusive ability to soar, within the four walls of their heads yes, but soar unbound nonetheless. Next the financiers, bankers, stockmarket-men, gangsters and entrepreneurs. There was no niche in the perfect sky, no profit, no suckers or roll-overs. The ground is for us, they decided. On the ground we can escape these shackles of equality, we can excel, dominate and subjugate. The world needs ditchdiggers, they say, and thus it must need people who demand ditches be dug in the first place, around and under their fabulous palaces. Soon followed in their own wave high society, fashionistas, magazine editors, Anna Wintour (a category all by herself), scenesters, models, designers and tastemakers. Flying? Everyone (anyone) can do that. Others gave up their wings, those who would always need a place among others.

But who to sew the dresses? To thread the needles? Who to take the loans? Who to fill the pews and pay the taxes and read the books and go round and round and on the mill? Not us in the sky, no, we wheeled and screamed and hollered our joy! We were expected to relinquish our pretty sky-silks and come to the ground, pulled down by stern glances and a palpable wave of condescension. As we ignored the call to give up our gift and get on with our lives, our ‘real’ lives, our two worlds pulled apart. New fashions appeared on the ground, caps with brims and visors blocking the joyous melee of colour above from view, we were unmentioned, unmentionable. Those below did not leave their warrens and their cities extended underground, fabulous burrows of activity and squalor extending miles into the crust. Our intransigence to part with what they could not have, what they were now too bitter to take back, was intolerable. Underground for years they missed what we did to the earth, how we decked the even the tallest buildings in haunting skyscapes of golden colours, each piece of ironwork interwoven with a glisteningly soft filigree of imagination made manifest.

* * *

In time, those below have forgotten, they call us the angels, bad luck by night and good by day, beings of light and splendour, mystical creatures somehow left over from an age of legend. They occasionally venture up and outside, not ever to live, but simply to see. For the world does not look like a home any more, it is too beautiful, too heartrendingly plumed with our endless thought. The polar lights are a flickering bulb against our glory. The earth-people take their young up to see us, to prove we are not like manticores or dragons or mermaids, that we are real. The children see our magnificence, but do not know that their ancestors gave up our effortless flight. They have new wonders to see each time they leave their anthills; we work slowly and painstakingly, for we have forever; we shall never die.

Rebecca was a girl

Rebecca lived in a tiny terrace in the inner city. Her room was in the attic, accessible only through a complex hierarchy of staircases that narrowed progressively as they climbed higher. One could, possibly, enter through the single window at the top of the high brick side of the house, but that would entail scaling foliage too meagre for any romantic tryst. Her neighbourhood was a jumble of old warehouse facades, only brick-thin, pubs, cornerstores, coffeeshops, vintage stores and Bollywood video rentals. The house was one in an identical row, each unit distinguished by the relative dilapidation of what had once been enthusiastic paint colours.

Rebecca was a dour girl, yet prone to laughter. When she failed to stop herself smiling she would shake it off like chicken feathers on a petulant fox. When it rained she would sit at the window looking out at the grey, reduced city, affecting a moody face. It would only last a few minutes because she became terribly bored. This was just as well, because it gave her more time to indulge in her passion. Rebecca’s favourite pastime was making costumes for parties she never went to. When a sci-fi party was announced she would immediately begin work on a towering robotic creature, equipped with flashing lights, glowing tubes and tantalising buttons, for her to crawl inside and metallically rage and roar. When the neighbours threw a Halloween party she locked her door for three days, eating only Saladas, making a the most grotesquely gothic gargoyle she could imagine.

The point was not to go to parties, because while Rebecca liked people by themselves, she detested their plural. No, the point was to know that, had she gone, she would have had the best costume and thus be the most fascinating creature there. She was satisfied with potentiality, so much the better to denounce those merry congregations.