Eagle/Hawk Dolphin/Shark

Sandra was pretty plain. Pretty and plain. Her hair was brown and took on a dull grey in the sun. Her body was flattish and unassuming. He face was pretty and got a lot of second looks, but no feature stood out enough to recommend stayed interest.

To her friends she was loyal and they loved her, but to new acquaintances well, they didn't really make an effort to get to the Real Sandra. She drank little and when she did it was a Rusty Nail, which no one liked but reminded her of Christmas. Christmas's growing up were quietish and unrevealing. No one drank Rusty Nails. She always got one thing she wanted and five things they wanted for her. She entertained the idea of being jealous of families that drank on holidays, like Greeks or Irish people, but not really because she didn't know what their holiday foods tasted like and that was the measure of a good holiday for her. Like cranberry sauce existed to no one except in Sandra's household three times a year.

It's easy to sympathize with Sandra but it's useless. She's oblivious to feeling down about not being exciting, so empathy just sits there across the room wondering why it's there, bored out of it's mind. She had one great hobby which was probably the worst hobby to have. It was not fixing things. Well it was fixing things, but they never got fixed. Two Saturdays previous there came a leak in the trapway of her toilet, on the water side of the weir, so it started letting water loose all in the shag toilet-carpet thing that's shaped like a U. She readied herself with many a tool, epoxy, watertight cement, tape, and a file. She flushed the toilet and it stopped, so she started knocking away of the trapway to get a hole big enough to fill with substance, understanding that you can't simply "fill" a crack that small. TAP TAP FWOOOSH. Clean toilet water flooded the floor. It didn't occur to her to turn off the water at the ballcock before flushing. Regardless of this not being the way to handle the situation at all she had to call the landlord and not use the toilet for a day and a half. The landlord informed her she would not be receiving her security deposit if and when she moved.

Two days ago a light burnt out. It was in the kitchen and was on a dimmer. She replaced the bulb but it blinked like crazy. She decided it was the bulb, not understanding how filaments work, and replaced it again. This one didn't turn on. She re-replaced the previous one and it didn't work. Her powers of deduction ended here, but her fearless resolve did not. She decided there must be a problem with the ground at the switch. She got a phillips head and took off the switch cover. She wasn't afraid of wires. She used the screwdriver again on the light switch and loosened it from the box. She stuck her finger in behind and gave a tug to pull it out to get a better view. A good jolt of 110 scoured her body for a split second and she forgot where she was. She bought a lot of candles yesterday and duct taped the entire light switch.

These are two of many situations in which Sandra had tried her hand and been bitten. She never gave up though. Her attitude was that if someone else could figure it out, she could. Not untrue, but not at all accurate either. Her self-esteem remained untainted by failure. She was resilient, but rather boring.

She went on a date two months ago and they ate in near silence the entire night. They talked more during the movie than dinner. She had no idea "how it went" but never heard from the male again. It crossed her mind that he might have been a prude or didn't understand her advances. Her advances consisted of 2 1/2 smiles at dinner, and using the armrest between them in the movie.

It was next Tuesday night when she remembered her dream from the previous Monday, tomorrow. (Oh, she has a cat the same colour as her hair, named John.) It was one of those falling dreams where you wake upon fall. Not impact, just fall. The moment your fingers give out gripping the ledge, the loose gravel that resists your foothold, the catch-line that snaps in two just as you lean out to enjoy the view 1/2 mile up a rock face. She had never had these dreams before and wondered why now. That Wednesday night she had another such dream. They just seemed so real. She would awake perspiring, catching her breath. She almost made an appointment with a doctor but realised how stupid it sounded.

The dreams became more frequent. She read on the internet about myclonic jerks and the idea of insecurities or instability in life playing out in the dream world in this manner, but couldn't really connect the dots. The Freudian idea of wanting to give in to a sexual urge seemed stupid. She never felt urged to do anything except fix things. She masturbated on a regular basis once a month, usually to Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting where he was real dirty English hot, or Scottish or something, but disapproved of his addiction in the film.

After three months of uninterrupted falling dreams she decided on a few things. The main thing that bothered her was that she felt her myclonic jerks were more severe than normal. Eight times now she had found a bruise or two on her body, usually an extremity. What was more, she found herself twice on her stomach (she NEVER slept on her stomach) and once with her head where her feet should be. The most serious concern was sleep walking. Why she would sleep walk at all, much less follow it up with a falling dream to wake herself, was a point of major confusion. So the first thing was she was going to record herself during sleep. If she was sleep walking she had planned on a series of bindings to hold her down, but first things first. She went to the local camera store and explained what she needed a camera to record her while she slept. "All night?" "Yeah all night." The salesman didn't argue but did fantasize about her later, about what he wasn't sure. She ended up with a Sony, regardless of her dislike for the brand. It had a patented nightvision mode which was green and sharp and would get the best picture.

That night she set it up on a cheap $30 tripod she bought from the grocery store. The salesman had taught her how to work it. She plugged it into the wall so it wouldn't lose battery. She had bought one with 128GB of memory to hold the night's adventures. She set it to the highest compression as well to take up as little space as possible. She wanted to record ALL night, but knew that most falling dreams occur soon after the chokehold of sleep, while your brain is still reminiscing about the tortures of life.

Three nights in a row she slept like a baby, but felt anxious all day. Nothing on the camera. No jerks, no walking, nothing. She kept filming, though, believing that her body would break down and give in to being found out. Why did her body not want her to know what the hell she was up to at night made her all the more resolute to find the answer.

Two weeks later, not well rested, feeling constant electricity in her body and sort of a dead adrenaline rush every minute of the day, it finally happened. She jerked awake all of the sudden, having felt the loss the gravity and the panic of certain doom. Her heart settled after a minute or two and she worked through the satisfaction of dread.

Her eyes popped open! It had happened. She ran over to the camera and shut it down. She got out the HDMI cable the salesman had sold her and found that she didn't have a connection for it (she didn't have an HD television like she thought). She found the box for the camera and grabbed the A/V cable it came with. Everything plugged in, she rewound and pressed play. The sight that blipped to life on the screen stole her breath. She was watching herself levitating above her bed about four feet. The covers were off. She never realised that before, that she always woke with no covers on. She was just up there, right above her bed, no panic, just asleep. She moved a little on the screen. She decided that she wasn't levitating, she was floating. She had a definite sense of control over movement, but unconscious. Her recorded self then made a movement which made her real self jump a little. In the picture she wrapped her arms back and folded them behind her head, calmly, like it was comfortable. It was a strange sight, just black underwear and a black bra on her flattish body floating above the bed. She started to spin her body a little, slowly. She moved up and down. She stretched out which looked like it felt really good, specially because while watching she was extremely tensed. This made her aware of her body all of the sudden. In a very new way, too. Her body, the one she was wearing right then, was apparently capable of flight. Or float. What really freaked her out was that she realised she was floating at that very moment.

It all made sense in a way, that once her conscious knew about her midnight renegade flying parties her physical body would in turn reveal the ability. She dropped suddenly to the chair, only an inch but it felt like gravity times ten. She almost lost her breath. In the video five second later she lowered to the bed, and at the last 10 inches or so dropped onto the bed. She watched herself pop suddenly awake and have her feeling of panic.

She couldn't sleep the rest of the night. She watched the video 7 times in awe until she realised there were no more clues and the same thing happened every time. She was almost afraid to go to sleep, like an idea of her sleeping self being different from her awake self was a threat. She did actually doze off a number of times, but not enough to tempt fate or flight or whatever.

The next morning she went to open her bedroom door to go take a shower and the handle fell off in her hand. She stood there puzzled. What to do. The door was shut. She had heard the other side of the handle fall to the floor on the outside. She didn't have windows in this room. No other entrances. No tools. She went to the bedside to get her phone to call the landlord but realised she must have brought it into the living room the night before and left it there. She sat for a while, wondering about being late to work but more importantly how long she could go without food and water. Her body began to float. She held her breath in fear for a long while. She just floated. She thought about concentrating on a certain direction and her body followed suit and went in that direction. That was cool. She concentrated on turning over in mid-air. Her body did so. She was fascinated with this for a good four hours and then finally realised that she still couldn't get out of her room. She concentrated on landing. She lowered herself successfully and readied for the drop onto the bed.

Nothing.

No drop. She thought and thought and tried and tried but couldn't release weightlessness. She couldn't retrieve gravity no matter what she did. Every bit of her body, including her hair, was weightless. Nothing she could do could change her position. She could get against the bed, the floor, a chair, but she could land, couldn't release into or onto these things. This was a bigger problem. It lasted, too.

Four days later she finally fell to the ground. She wasn't ready. She died four seconds earlier. It was a heart attack, panic. Her consciousness of flight had filled her body and refused to let go. Sandra's hair looked brown in the lack of sunlight, her face still pretty. Her flattish body deflated against lack of nourishment, gravity, and finally death. I don't think this was what she wanted, but it was probably still some relief.

Written by RALEIGHXXX at 12:40:00 AM

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