October 25, 2017

PodCastle 493: The Fall Shall Further the Flight In Me

32 minutes

* Author : Rachael K. Jones

* Narrator : Tina Connolly

* Host : Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

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The Fall Shall Further the Flight In Me

By Rachael K. Jones

There are things that fly and things that fall. You must remember this distinction, because they are not the same.

Devils are flying things that learn to fall. Lovers are falling things that learn to fly. Do not confuse them.

Saints do not fly, precisely, although they may seem to as they bear our prayers up the sky. They merely learn not to fall. It takes long years of repentance to master this art, and even then, some saints fall anyway, like my mother did.

I repented of my first sin at the age of eight. I do not remember the reason, but I recall the lonely, still hours in the garden, kneeling among the wild onions, the sun’s heat my only company, and warm blood beneath the rose stems wound round and round my wrists. High above the willows, my grandmother cut a dark shape from the sky as slowly she raised a naked foot for the next step.

Even then, I dreaded the day I would climb the air to take her place. I feared it more than falling. From the time her feet left the ground, years before my birth, no one had spoken a word to her, lest they cause her to sin and fall. I couldn’t fathom a life spent with only the darting chimney swifts for company, and seeds for food.

I prayed I might be spared, but there was no saint to carry the prayer upwards, save for me, and my time of ascent drew near. If I did not go, who would walk to Heaven to ask for rain?

One evening, as I peeled rose stems from my stinging legs, I looked up at the darkling sky and saw a dazzling thing, neither bird nor saint, plummeting toward my garden.

Imagine a star falling to Earth.

From a distance, it appears to fly across the dark shell of the atmosphere. If you are too close – if it is falling straight toward you – it seems fixed like a star whose inner fire is growing brighter and brighter until the illusion breaks, and the heat is upon you, and the light, and the sound, and then the collision, flesh on stone, flesh on bone.

Imagine finding it was not a star at all.

A taxonomy of flight:

Flying things stay aloft in different ways. There are gliders, floaters, and Mab-like things that catch and ride atoms of air. Certain fish glide by leaping with kitelike fins, while spiders make silken parasols and float like balloons. Still others fly on deep, booming music loud enough to stop your heart. These include shooting stars. Some eschew music and ride on light and heat, like the falcons who soar on the ever-changing thermal winds near Heaven.

Some things only appear to fly, like the sun and moon, which are actually falling like arrows away from the universe’s birthplace, toward some unknown thing. In the same way, given enough distance, raindrops would become racing comets with tails of ice.

Falling is not always failing.

She was not like any angel I ever imagined, but I knew her nature by her wings. She had six: two on her left ankle, one on her right, one sweeping down from each collarbone, and one sticking straight out from her back like a stabbing knife. Her feathers glistened, dark as the night sky, black to my brown. Blood slicked her limbs, congealing into black scabs. Jagged white bones protruded from the wreck of her skin. She had too many wounds to count, too many sharp bones for one body. They reminded me of prickles on a plucked hen.

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