Flash by Lucy Zhang
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Our Paths Diverge When You Want to Play Hero
We dance on the surface of the stratosphere, my heels and your dress shoes tapping the transparent tiles of a ballroom etched into an infinite plane. I raise my chin to meet your eyes and wonder if you can catch a glimpse of the down below: the whites of mountain caps and the ocean crashing onto a coastline where waters fade from turquoise to brown, crests of breaking waves scattered like wrinkles in linen. My gaze wanders away from your face to the arcs above us, curving across the sky in reds, greens, blues, pulsating and undulating, auroras gradually approaching a single point of divergence. You pull my waist close and guide my arm across your chest as our feet move to the rhythm of a shamisen’s thrum. You begin to hum when the ocarina begins to sing; air pulses in and out of the cavity and the vessel resonates until we can no longer hear our feet hitting glass, no longer think of the splotches of lakes and forests, the heavy layer of yellow-black fog muddling our view of the world beneath our feet as we travel across the floor and you twirl me around and around, right over the surface of ashes and rock and unseen skeletons buried in soot. When we finish the dance, you let go of my hand and pull open a hatch, a rectangular piece of glass on the dance floor, lined with metal so its edges don’t chip the adjacent tiles. When it springs free from the latch, smoke escapes into our ballroom and suddenly I can hear everything: chirps of hatched birds trapped in nests of burning trees, the orcas’ whistles fading until the wind buries their voices entirely, heartbeats–many heartbeats in dissonance. You lean down to kiss my forehead, tie the red bandana around your wrist–the one I gave you when we were kids so you’d feel brave enough to shout at the tiny dancer girl who stole my pencil case, slip on a cosplay eyepatch you claimed made you feel like a fallen hero walking the tragic path of redemption, calculate the mana and power ups you’d need as I had once calculated our tax returns. Then you step into the opening and fall. I don’t wait to hear your feet thudding against earth. I close the door. Then I leave for the mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere. The ghost of an ocarina whispers in my head as I travel further through the vacuum. But I keep going; your hums echo. |
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Lucy Zhang is a writer masquerading around as a software engineer. She watches anime and sleeps in on weekends like a normal human being. Her work has appeared in Atlas & Alice, Okay Donkey, Jellyfish Review, trampset, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. She can be found at https://kowaretasekai.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @Dango_Ramen.
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