Here is a short piece I wrote for potential inclusion in an anthology. It wasn’t picked up for the broader work – so I thought I’d share it here.
Flight
By the time Amanda realized she was dead, Johnny was already rifling through her belongings. Twenty-six dollars and some change. A half-eaten chocolate bar. A lighter and three lonely cigarettes. A faded picture of Amanda and her sister Elaine as kids – the sole reminder of home that she had carried with her since she’d made her escape from Iowa. These and Amanda’s other personal effects Johnny spilled out onto the sidewalk as he searched her pockets.
Now, as she stared at her crumpled body on the pavement almost four years after leaving home she had to admit that things hadn’t really turned out the way she’d hoped. Instead of becoming a famous musician, she’d ended up an addict. Instead of proving to her parents that she was an adult and didn’t need their help, she’d ended up selling sex to men on the street – many of whom reminded her of the father she so badly wanted to make proud. She wasn’t living her best life, she was lifeless in a doorway on a rain and urine-soaked Seattle street.
It hadn’t started out badly. She’d managed to get a few gigs early on – coffee shops mostly along with the occasional open mic night at clubs – but small town midwestern songwriting hadn’t translated to the gritty Seattle scene. She’d been waiting tables to make ends meet when the pandemic hit and everything shut down. Before she knew it, she’d blown through her savings just trying to pay her rent – and soon enough she was out on the street.
Johnny continued his search, muttering all the while to himself. Finally, Amanda heard him shout – high-pitched and excited – as he retrieved his prize from inside her bra: a small plastic bag with a handful of pills. Jabbering incoherently, he stuffed the bag and cigarettes into the pocket of his grimy sweatshirt, pulled the hood over his head, and started down the street. Amanda watched as he ducked into a crowd of people waiting for a bus a short distance away.
“He’s just going to leave me there” she sighed aloud – though as she caught herself saying these words she didn’t recognize her voice. Gone was the childlike tenor and cadence of her words, replaced with a resonance and clarity she’d not heard before. As she marveled at this, she began to discern a panoply of other sensations. The coldness of the rain, which she could see sprinkling down on her body, no longer chilled her. It was refreshing – a gentle tickle of coolness with the impact of each individual drop. Gone too was the discomfort in her shoulder, a memento of an encounter with an overly enthusiastic client. On Johnny’s suggestion, she’d started taking the pills to soothe the pain. But now the ache was gone.
Somehow, detached as she was from her physical form she quickly found she could attend to external sensations with much greater clarity – greater specificity. And as this realization washed over her she began to explore it. Focusing her attention, she turned away from the caress of the raindrops and noticed the texture of the concrete under her body – smooth and slick from millions of footsteps. Next, she noted the sense impressions of the murmuring crowd nearby – each suddenly discrete and distinct as if individual stations on a radio dial. This man speaking to an infant. That woman talking on her phone. The panhandler asking for change. The swishing wings of the crow as it fluttered down to snatch a soggy crumb from the sidewalk, the scrape of her beak on the pavement, and the scent of her prize.
Amanda began to float upward – a child’s balloon suddenly released from grasping fingers. Untethered to her body, she careened through the city, buffeted by wind currents flowing between skyscrapers. As she ascended, the sensory input of the streets below gradually diminished. In its place, she found herself eavesdropping on the conversations within the office and residential towers dotting the urban landscape. The mundane and the profane of these discussions assaulted her consciousness. Despite her newfound altitude, little had changed except the tambour of the voices. The content – complaints, worries, words of love and lies – shifted little during her ascent.
Gradually, Amanda began to realize that these were not simply the words of the building’s occupants – she was also privy to their thoughts. The hopes and fears of these multitudes assaulted her from all directions. Seeking relief from this onslaught of suffering, she willed herself to rise still higher until, finally, she floated above the tallest of the towers.
She lingered, taking in the view of the city and its surroundings. From this aspect, the griminess of Seattle’s streets was overcome by the beauty of the topography: mountains tumbling down into the Puget Sound, their slopes lush and green. The lights of the city shone in the dim mid-afternoon autumn light. All around her, gulls whirled and spun playfully on invisible vortices. At this distance, Seattle seemed a magical place, filled with promise and excitement. In fact, it seemed as if it were the place she’d imagined it would be before she’d left home.
“Home” she thought. She wanted to go home. To see once again her parents. To tell them she was sorry for leaving – sorry for disappointing them and the way things had turned out. Reflecting on this, she noticed again the gulls and how they seemed to surf on unseen currents. Could she do that? Could she find a way to travel back to Iowa?
As she had with the sounds on the street below, she turned her intention to sensing the movements of the air. Soon enough, she discerned a subtle but powerful energy surrounding her – flowing strongly all about. It wasn’t the breezy playground equipment of the gulls, but something far more powerful and omnipresent. Looking toward the darkening skies in the east, she leaned into this energy with her thoughts and began to move – accelerating quickly until in an instant, she was projected past the peaks of the Cascades and was rapidly approaching the Rockies. Shocked by the success of the effort, she focused her thoughts on returning home and in an instant she was there – floating above the small farmhouse of her childhood.
She drifted down toward the house, alighting on the front porch, and peered into the picture window in the front. Her mother and Elaine stood in the living room. Each looked older than Amanda remembered. Elaine, now age seventeen, was tall and lanky – seeming to tower over her mother. She was gesturing angrily.
“You don’t know him!” Elaine shouted. “He isn’t like that – he loves me! And I’m not going to let you control me like this. I’m old enough to make decisions for myself and you can’t stop me.”
“Elaine,” her mother started, only to be cut off.
“No. I’m not listening to you. I’m done listening to you! Don’t you get it? This isn’t about me – it’s about you. You always needing to be in charge. Well you’re not – at least not anymore. You’re so goddamn controlling and I’m done with it. Amanda was right – she made it out of here and she never looked back. Why can’t you wake up? Don’t you see – that’s why we haven’t heard from her – she’s happy now that she’s away from this place! Away from you!”
Amanda watched as Elaine continued to berate their mother. She could see the impact of Elaine’s words – cruel, hurtful, and yet also partially accurate. She had felt unable to escape her parents’ control – unable to grow into an adult in their home. But that wasn’t the only reason she’d left; it hadn’t been just about their mother. And it certainly wasn’t true that she’d broken contact because she was happy. She’d broken contact because – well – she wasn’t sure. It was a jumbled mix of reasons. But first among those was the embarrassment of having been so wrong about how sure she was that things would turn out better if she was on her own. She couldn’t bear the thought of admitting she’d been wrong – and hadn’t felt like she could reach out to them until she’d found a way to make things work – to find happiness and success and all the things she’d wanted to achieve. All the things that would have made them say she was right and they were wrong, and how sorry they were for treating her so unfairly. And now it was too late.
Amanda shut out the sound of the argument – the words too hurtful to hear. As she stepped back from the window she saw her mother strike Elaine: an open-handed slap across her face. Elaine, stunned briefly by their mother’s action, clenched her fist and struck back with a solid punch to their mother’s jaw.
“NO!” screamed Amanda. “STOP IT!”.
Her screams unheard by the two women, Amanda lurched forward and pounded on the glass. This too went unnoticed – but the impact of her energy served to launch Amanda backward and upward at tremendous speed, off the porch and out into the blackness of the night. She wept as she sped away from her home and her family, filled with remorse at being unable to rejoin them, unable to make amends for the hurt she felt she’d caused – for her contribution to the dysfunction she’d seen.
“So what am I supposed to do now?”
Now a great distance away from the house, she turned her gaze upward and – for the first time in years, she noticed a sky filled with stars. They weren’t visible in Seattle. On most nights the Seattle sky held a thick blanket of clouds – looming ominously and oppressively over the city. And on the rare occasion when the sky was clear, the light pollution from the city made the stars all but invisible. But here and now, on a moonless night in rural Iowa, the stars were astonishing. She gasped as she traced the path of the Milky Way across the sky, wondering to herself why she’d not appreciated their beauty until this moment.
Amanda drifted ever upward – toward the beckoning heavens. As she ascended through the upper reaches of the atmosphere, the shimmering quality of the stars waned, replaced by a steady glow and a symphony of harmonious sound. The warmth of the cosmos washed over her and for the first time in her awareness she felt contentment – as if she belonged. Gone was any lingering anxiety or unhappiness. She felt loved and fully at peace. She basked in these sensations, wallowing in them, allowing each newfound pleasure to wash over her and to fill her utterly. She felt at home.
In her reverie, she noticed the Earth – a pale blue sphere far below her. It appeared so insignificant in the context of the universe she’d only recently discovered. A solitary orb – moving through space – discrete and detached from its surroundings and yet wholly part of them, much like the countless lives on its surface and in its oceans: an interconnected web of beings living and dying within a larger ecosystem. A fleshy prison which she’d managed to escape.
Amanda felt her self begin to merge with her surroundings. “Will I become part of this? Part of the stars?” she wondered. She laughed at her question. She would like that outcome, but found in her own questioning a sense of equanimity. Whatever was to happen to her in this glorious and shining existence, she knew it would be wondrous.
Gradually, she noticed a change in the music that surrounded her. Adding to the gentle harmonies of the stars was a new sound – high pitched and alternating – a claxon of some sort. She listened curiously, wondering about the source of this new instrument. It was not unpleasant – she wasn’t sure anything could be unpleasant in this environment – it simply seemed out of place – as if one violinist within an orchestra had begun to play from a different score than her fellow musicians.
The new song grew louder and more insistent until, as Amanda searched for its source, it suddenly stopped. Amanda turned her attention from seeking out the source of siren and listened once more to the music and beauty of the surrounding universe.
Suddenly, her senses came under assault. An acrid scent filled her left nostril – bitter and sharp – the first moment of what seemed to be physical discomfort she’d experienced since escaping her body.
Amanda began to drift back downward, away from the beauty of the cosmos and back toward the Earth. The music began to fade.
“No.” she said to herself. “That isn’t where I want to go. I want to keep going upward.”
Focusing her intention, she stopped her descent. The splendid music once again began to swell in intensity. Amanda swooned, swaying with the rhythm of its embrace.
Both nostrils filled with that same biting scent. Waves of pain shot through her body and she began falling again – slowly at first, but accelerating exponentially. As she shot toward the Earth it began to consume an ever larger portion of her awareness. Gone was the beautiful music. She could no longer feel the warmth of the cosmos. In its place was a sense of dread and a feeling of tremendous loss, as if she were mourning the death of a part of herself, along with a familiar dull ache in her shoulder.
In an instant, she was back on the street. Masked faces hovered over her. The sidewalk was cold, wet and strewn with garbage. Curious onlookers gawked.
“Another junkie,” said one of the masked faces. “That’s the fourth one today.”
“Took three doses of Narcan to bring her around,” replied a second face. “She’s lucky to be back.”
The omnipresent Seattle rain fell around her as the men loaded Amanda onto a stretcher and into the back of an ambulance.
“Lucky?” Amanda wondered.