Tomorrow

“They’re wings!“

Cara circled around the elaborate contraption before her, her breath tight in her chest, held by excitement. Wings! All rusty metal and canvas-colored polyplastics, but still, she could see them, see the beauty of them amidst the grime and the grease and the ropes stretched taut, holding them upright from either side. The dull red-gold light fell through the polyplastic membranes where they tapered into points six feet above her, leaving a fluttery feeling in her heart and a crimson stain of light across her face.

“They’re not quite finished yet,” Matthias warned her from his place in the corner, propped back on his three-legged chair. She dragged her eyes from the beautiful mass of bolts and careful wires before her and turned to glare at him, having to guess at his expression because his whole upper half was swathed in the shadow creeping down the wall as the sun set below the rim of the half-dissolved ceiling high above them. Cara’s hands found her hips in a familiar defiant gesture–the one that always made Matt sigh and tip forward in his chair. His face came into view all at once, a bizarre mix of hard angles and definitive shadows slashing across the planes of his face in the dust-red light of the fading day. His hands and arms were streaked and smudged with oil, and she knew that he had probably been here for days, playing and prodding and bending those beautiful, spectacular wings into shape again, just because he knew she’d like them. Because all she’d ever wanted to do, for as long as she could think or speak, was fly away from here, just for a split second, on wings that flashed and glimmered in the sunlight.

“There are still a few things that need working on,” he said again, suppression in his tone. Cara bristled.

His cautious practicality, usually accepted with reluctant quietness from his companion, felt as dark and out of touch as the shadows streaking across the room behind Cara’s steadfast pose. She refused to let him talk her out of this today. Especially when she knew that he’d done all this for her, and he had brought her here to make sure she saw them. Instead of answering, she turned again to watch the sunlight play across the half-burnished metal clasps where the shoulders of the harness met the ultra-light material of the wingspan on either side.  “Wings,” she breathed again, reverently. It was so perfect that she knew this memory would be shiny around the edges, and the hope in her throat was so hard that it hurt to swallow.

She felt Matthias rustle to his feet behind her, his feet making no noise on the hard floor because there wasn’t enough of him left to even disturb the coating of metal shavings covering everything in sight. He came to stand beside her and for a moment the two of them were silent, just staring at the remarkable flying contraption as the world began to darken outside, the cool night air wafting in from above and all around. Too many cracks and holes in the doors and windows and walls to repair in here, of course. But Matt had managed to rig up a few lights along the walls, and Cara could hear the metallic hum as they blinked on, one by one, in preparation of the coming dark cycle. She turned to look at him when the one directly above his head on the far wall didn’t turn on. He gave a sigh, and his thin shoulders seemed to collapse in on themselves like an old spring.

Broken, of course. Cara couldn’t remember a time when something in the world wasn’t broken, wasn’t falling apart before her eyes. Even Matthias, who looked less substantial every time she looked at him, like he was wisping away in his own genius, getting picked apart by his own sky-high longings for things (for people?) that Cara never asked about, because she knew that she wouldn’t get an answer. She didn’t want one. Everyone was broken, and everything was falling apart litlte by little before her eyes, fading away with the last remnants of the day. It seemed silly–superficial, a word that Matt had just taught her last week–to draw attention to the fact that the pieces of their world were turning slowly into dust.

“From dust we came, and to dust we will return,” she murmured to herself, because the words were hard to keep inside her head, where they’d been bouncing around ever since Matthias read them to her, years and years ago. She could feel his concerned gaze trace her face, but she ignored him, staring at the wings again. They reflected silver now, the faint white lights on the walls turning the membranes and the hard lining of the metal the same color as the stars that shimmered outside the atmospheric veil on clearer nights.

She turned her head to face him, and her voice was firm and full of a kind of fierce joy that she hadn’t felt once in her whole life, before seeing the wings. “I’m using them.”

He gave another one of his long sighs, and Cara thought she could see the metal shavings fall off the sound like a cloud of resignation. “Tomorrow, Cara. Please? I have to finish them. We’ll try them in the morning.”

The thought of waiting another second–of being stuck here, both feet on the slowly turning, quickly crumbling earth when the sky and the stars and the dream of her life waited above her–was nearly her undoing. For a long moment she could see it in her mind’s eye, as she rushed past him and buckled herself into the harness. She could feel the singing adrenaline in her veins, the rushing in her head as she grasped that control with her left hand and pushed the green button at its tip. She felt the wind rush against her face and heard herself laugh with delight, Matthias’ panicked yell erased in the beautiful, stunning sound of the polyplastics charging and her feet leaving the ground and the sky opening up above her like the only gift she had ever been given in her life.

Flying.

But then her eyes cleared, and she was looking at Matt’s worried face again, and she felt her heart beating strongly in her chest. She wondered, for the first time, why Matthias did these things for her. He didn’t want the wings for himself, had never even considered it. He only wanted to watch her taking off, and know that he was the one to put the last bolts and the fiddly pieces in place. The understanding weighed her down, grounded her, and when she looked at the wings again, she could brace herself against their pull.

“Tomorrow?” she asked him, her voice hesitant and hopeful and a hundred other things she wished it wasn’t. “You promise? Tomorrow they’ll be ready?”

The smile in his eyes was new to her, but the affectionate tone in his voice was all familiar memory. “I promise, Cara. Tomorrow, you can fly.”

Dreaming, Eyes Open

Some kind of storm was building out on the horizon. She wasn’t sure why there should be a storm at all, really, or even where the horizon ended and the nearness began. But she did know that the huge, massed, yellow-bellied clouds were slowly, oh so slowly, coming towards her. She felt an odd reluctance at the thought, and she deliberately lifted her eyes away from the dull flashes of lightning deep within the belly of the stormy beast.

The view above her was much more pleasant, in any case. She leaned back to settle on the grass and took a deep breath of the warm, sweet air. The sky above her was all dark purple-black, and shiny with stars and galaxies, soft with the velvet of half-formed wishes. It was like looking into a pool of water that never ended, that just consisted of ripples all the way down, deeper and deeper into…something. Or maybe nothing. She thought, for a moment, that maybe it was supposed to be both. Almost despite herself, her eyes twitched to watch the coming thunderheads, just for a second.

It wasn’t fair. She didn’t want to leave this place. Whatever it was. Better than where she’d been before, anyway, of that she was sure.

Where she’d been before was…she didn’t want to think about that, either. Besides, not thinking about it was easier. She couldn’t remember much of it anyway, except for a big blast of light, and a sound almost like a voice. Maybe hers? She wasn’t sure; she’d never heard it. She didn’t really want to know anyway.

Her eyes drifted towards the storm again. It was getting closer; she could feel the first wisps of water in the wind that tugged playfully at the ends of her hair.

A nightmare.

The word wandered through her head and stuck on the big, black-yellow bruise of a cloud moving in from the horizon. Yes, that seemed right. Nightmares, coming to block out the pretty swirl of galaxies and nebulae in the sky that seemed just a breadth away from her outstretched fingertips.

Well. That would make this a dream, then. The idea didn’t disturb her as it probably should have. It did seem a bit like a dream. A good one, at least. Her head lolled back and she watched the stars again. She noted absently that they moved a little; the swirls and whorls of far-off stars and planets glided silently in concentric circles, meshing and moving and somehow never meeting.

Never meeting. Lonely. Secluded and held in warm, comforting blackness, with only the light of other bodies for context and company.

Like her. She understood them, and she wondered if that was part of the dream too, or just part of her.

Maybe this wasn’t her dream at all. Maybe it belonged to someone else entirely. That thought gave her pause for the first time. Maybe the nightmare coming towards her on the wind was there for someone else. Even as she considered this, she knew that it couldn’t be true. It was coming for her, alright. She could feel it, behind her eyes and in the small place in her mind that wondered if she was sleeping or awake.

There was an ominous rumbling in the distance. The sound was more felt than heard. Thunder in her bones, and surely that would wake her up, wouldn’t it? But nothing changed, except that the wind grew colder.

Maybe she really was awake, then. It didn’t matter, in the end. Or maybe it did. Maybe dreams were all there was to begin with anyway.

Maybe she was always asleep. Maybe everyone was.

That must be it, she decided. This could be her dream, and still be someone else’s, everyone else’s, too. It was both.

The storm was nearly on her, now. Somehow, getting up and moving, running, trying to outpace the great outpouring of the dooming clouds never occurred to her. This wasn’t that kind of dream. She looked up at the sky again, but now half of it was covered with the dark gray storm. The thunder grew louder, and the rain began to pelt her face.

She was forced to squint a bit in order to see the stars, now. They were being blotted out, one by one. She wondered if the clusters and galaxies of lights still moved in their vast, tireless circles far above her, or if they ceased to be as soon as they were blocked from her sight.

For a moment, she wished she knew the answer. Then she would know if this was her dream, or someone else’s.

As the lightning started to crackle overhead, she had one last look at the huge, firefly-twinkling sky of revolving stars, and she had a strange, still feeling that she was looking at herself. Perhaps that was it. Maybe each of those lights, those stars floating up above her just out of reach behind the clouds, were all just girls sitting on hills. Maybe there was someone just like her, staring up and watching as one light in the thousand million grayed out, swallowed by an unseen cloud of nightmares.

In a way, that gave her comfort. At least it meant that someone was watching. Someone, at least, knew her. Even if this was just a dream. She hoped it was going better for the other lights in the sky.

And then the nightmare broke over her in lashing wind and pounding rain, and lightning scorched the sky and hurt her eyes. In the midst of the deluge and the roaring sound, she saw a bright light and heard a horrible sound, and she wondered if this wasn’t the real nightmare after all.

She closed her eyes and curled up in the wet grass, and hugged her knees to her chest and began to rock.

She remembered, now.

“Please,” she whispered, lost in the unhearing clouds and the faraway sky and the strength of the storm. “Please, don’t wake up.”

But it was too late. Because this wasn’t her dream after all, and even as her eyes began to droop, she fought the inevitable long enough to watch the clouds above her dissolve, fade away, blow into the something and the nothing of the starry sky.

And then her eyes closed, and the dream ended.

Somewhere on another hilltop, a boy looking up at the great wheeling of the cosmos saw a tiny little star go out, and wondered why the sight of it made him shiver.