falling
Tierrascence
became weightlessness.
In
a loss of form,
Georgia
Dragoon was three again, swaddled in a black rubber swing, geese flying above
her as she soared over the sand pit. Arms outstretched for a split-second
gravity held her as she held her breath, unpoppable. “Again, again!” She cried
for another push as she fell down to earth, another moment of weightless
splendor.
Georgia
tried to open her eyes, realizing she no longer had them. In fact, she no
longer had any organs, sinews, or patches of fat she’d grown accustom to in the
27 years of her life. The usual ache of her left knee was gone. The bunion on
her pinky toe from the time she crushed it under her closet door,
and her sad conjoined kidneys spread like dew atop the leaves.
They were both part of her and part of the soil she had become through her
peculiar unraveling.
She
felt heat rise off decomposing matter.
The
wriggle of an earth worm tickled where her belly used to be.
Language
was the clamor of termite teeth and the stretch of moss reaching for patches of
sun. Everything was both new and familiar, a reconstitution of understanding as
if it had happened once before. Maybe even more than once. This state, however,
couldn’t be good according to Georgia, but she couldn’t shake the high of
euphoria.
Georgia
remembered the laws of Newton. Science, she believed, could explain any
predicament, no matter how strange. She remembered herself as an object in
motion, her skin and bits flying away with the swarm of fire orange butterflies,
before the ground brought her to rest. Equal or opposite reaction? She was
unsure except that only the force of another object could move whatever she had
become: layers of terraform, mulch, debris, memories.
Stasis
was only temporary.
She
sensed the prodding of ladybug feed over her distant ovaries.
A
salamander’s moist belly slid over the shadow of her scapula, briefly sticking
to a leaf.
Georgia
remembered the swing. Her stomach’s knot each time her father pushed her far
enough she was afraid of flipping over the pole. The moment when direction no
longer seemed predetermined—she could go up or down. In that split-second she
was infinite.
A
snail slunk across the shadow of Georgia, cold as the moon rose, leaves
reflected the sequined floor. The sun rose as moisture evaporated, leaving her
bodiless state dry in the mid-day air. Time passed, she imagined.
The
rain came. Each droplet pushing Georgia’s essence into motion as she fell
through earth. Inconceivable, the formless-bodiless-self falling felt just like
falling from the crook of the tree she used to sit in and read while her mother
worked in the garden. She devoured Narnia, the Worlds of Chrestomanci, any
other-place where magic transformed mundance. That is what all children did,
she told herself—believed in the unbelievable to make light of what exists. The
day she fell the six feet from the crook to the lumpy patches of dried grass,
no one ran out of the house to tend her. In fact, no one even noticed the first
time Georgia Dragoon felt herself fall into the depths of dirt.
The
memory of the just-before, her falling organs suspended screaming as she
careened through the earth as if she were a solid object and the earth were
hollow. Voiceless, oping the gap of space where her mouth once was, if Georgia
could scream she would but for now she waited for inevitable landing…
Could
a person fall through the whole earth? Without a body, would her essence melt
in earth’s core? Would it feel like cooking in molten layers as she descended? Why
was experience always fraught with overthought?
Lost
in questions, Georgia didn’t realize her fall slowing to a float as the ground
around her began to open into a dark expanse. She settled like dust on a hardwood
floor, her particles sparked, began reassembling. Atoms attracting atoms
through the magnetism of nature; limbs grew where they once were like the time
lapse of germinating seeds. Transfiguration in an instant, engulfed by the
flame of sensation, Georgia’s body returned. Blood pounding between her ears,
her collarbone rising with each breath she once again felt tethered to herself.
Inexplainable.
Or was it? Had someone slipped her something before her run? Would she wake up
soon from this surreal dream? And if it were a dream, physics still made sense
as Georgia shook her head and blinked to her surroundings, though she saw
nothing in the hollow dark earth that smelled like parking lots just after rain.
If it were a dream, the impossible was possible.
She
squeezed her hands together, all fingers had returned. The pads flicked against
nails, strong and solid. She wiggled her toes and sensed some sort of
homecoming in her revived form. She closed her eyes again, searching her mind’s
index for and semblance of rational thought when––
In
a click a light flickered on above her. A single incandescent, as a voice said,
“Welcome to the Post Office.”
