Sitting on top of a picnic table, she pulls the hemmed edge of her gym shorts along her muscular thighs toward her knees. Not to become more modest, but to stop the ticklish prickling of the splinters curving up from the weathered wood. She looks across the glowing pond. The mercury surface proves that the fish aren’t biting. The field between the pond’s far edge and the woods shifts rapidly from Prussian blue to smoky cadmium yellow. The pressure drops fast. Her ears pop.
There is little time to heed the warning. She lifts her feet and pivots away from the wooded edge of the pond to face the clearing on her right. Her eyes widen to take in the intensity of the horizon.
Clear cobalt expands above a band of charred indigo clouds that rest heavily on the green glow of a disturbed atmosphere. Cool air and hot air dance in black swirls that suddenly drop from the bottom of the cloud-line. Like strands of hair being whipped into a braid, the earth pulls them to the ground. They zip across the pasture. Split rail fences and rusted metal sheets spiral upward, thickening the braid.
Energized by fear, she leaps from the table. She sprints up the rolling hill. Running as fast as she can, her mind darts through the wall of the house and into the scene at the dining room table. She hears the laughter, the clanking of dishes. Her children and her parents are as oblivious to the whirling debris outside as they are to the weight of their burdens that caused her to storm out an hour earlier. They laugh as they use rote motions to set the Sunday supper on the table.
Still running toward the house to warn them and corral them into the cellar, her mind zooms back to her body.
She feels gravity lose its grip. Still in motion, her legs slow their gait; their effort is lost on her weightlessness. As each muscle gives way to the ease of flight, her heart follows. Her mind is the last to release the weight, the dread. As her jaw relaxes, a tender smile forms. Now in full flight she turns toward the wind. Like the tulle that used to gracefully arc and flow when she leapt as a child, she rolls on the invisible waves, in tune, at peace. Without a worry, she flies.

post #298