Everyone dreams about falling, but I don't, and I think I know why...

  The wind was an impatient child tugging at Alice's shirt. The shirt was old, soft, and steadily becoming grayer than pink with every wash. The movement of the night air made it billow around her like a parachute. It would have been funny if she weren't balanced on the rail surrounding the balcony of her new apartment.

  She started when her foot slipped, nearly causing her to tumble headfirst off the rail. When her heart came down from her own throat, she shook her head at herself. If she wasn't crazy, if she was still the girl she had been years ago, then slipping off was no danger to her, not even from this height. The chilly metal of the rail under her feet made her wish she'd worn shoes, but she wouldn't need them where she was going.

  Frank Sinatra's voice was warm honey that poured from her ear buds into her head, and Alice stole a glance at the crescent moon peeking from behind the clouds with a cold light. Alice listened to "Fly Me to the Moon", trying to imagine what it really would be like to drift up there beyond the clouds. It was old, but it was a really good song, she thought. Why don't more people listen to Sinatra? she asked herself. Normally, listening to music, especially her father's music, was the way she calmed herself, the way she found a quiet place inside, but nothing could settle her thumping heart or the roaring of her breath in her own ears tonight. Not when she was about to do something like this.

  She tried to focus on the song, the way it seemed to be written especially for her. "This is an all-about-me song," she said out loud, though no one was around to hear her. She did not normally say the things she wanted to say to her father out loud, but the habit of the game they'd played together was too strong. The words came out on their own, whether he was there to hear them or not.

  The game was simple. She would listen to music, whether it was old or new, popular or not. If it was a song that reminded her of herself, something that seemed to be written about her, she would say, "all-about-me song," and offer an explanation. Her father would do the same for songs that reminded him of himself, and sometimes the two of them would even suggest songs for each other. It had begun when they were on a long car trip together when she was only six years old. He'd taken all three of them on a road trip to Alaska, and it had been a game they invented to pass the time as they skipped from one radio station to the next. Soon it was less a game than it was an obsession, and the two of them had logged over fifty songs, her father adding all of them to a swiftly growing "All About Me" playlist they could listen to over and over again. By the time he was gone, the two of them had added hundreds more to the list.

  Of all the things he'd left behind, she was sure this was something that made her think of him the most. She loved photos of him, but the songs on the playlist seemed to make him seem alive again, and sometimes she thought she could still hear him singing along.

  Alice tried to keep her eyes off of her feet, where her toes flexed and curled, trying to grip the thin rail. Instead, she looked out over the tops of the trees. Everything in Virginia was so green. It was a humid, warm, wet place in the summer, and it seemed every inch of it was overflowing with unchecked plant life. It was so different from the places where she'd lived before. Everything there was so dry, and the only trees had been those purposefully planted and painstakingly maintained to keep them alive against the desert heat.

  She'd lived in this place once before, when she was a little girl, but after her father passed, her mother had taken them around the world, taking positions as a nurse in American compounds in foreign countries. But now Alice was older. She had graduated from an overseas academy, and life for Americans was steadily becoming more dangerous abroad. Her mother decided it was time for them to finally go back home, though things had changed and moved on in the decade since they'd been away.

  It was their first night in the new apartment. The walls were still sterile, and the kitchen cupboards bare, but piles of boxes of their belongings had grown in the middle of the rooms like anthills. It was on the seventh floor, the balcony outside the French doors rising so far above the cobbled sidewalk below that it made her head spin when she looked down.

  It still made her head spin, especially now that she had one foot outstretched, poised to take a step into nothing.

  The wind hissed through the trees, tall, proud poplars with broad leaves that blocked her balcony from the view of people walking below. Not that there were any people out walking at this time of night. There was no one to watch her. No audience.

  Her outstretched hand that pressed against the cool, red brick slowly let go until she stood teetering on that rail like the world's most awkward tightrope walker.

  There was no one to hold her hand now. Her mom had just left minutes ago after helping her haul the last of their things into the elevator and down the hall. Alice could have done it herself. She was strong and tall, and her long, muscular legs could have taken the stairs with ease, but her mom had insisted on them doing it together, and so she'd helped.

  When they'd finally finished, her mom leaned against the door frame and caught her breath. She'd looked at Alice for a long time then, and the girl wondered if her mother knew what she'd been planning on doing. If she did, she didn't say so, and she'd simply said that she was going out to find something for them to eat, if anything at all was still open at that time of night.

  After a reflective pause, she reached up to give her girl a hug and a kiss. Alice was taller than her mom, taller than many boys she knew, but that never made her feel less like a little girl when her mom did that. She embraced the feel of her mom's love, warming the skin above her eyes.

  She squeezed the old touch screen phone in her hand and thought of her dad as it played the familiar playlist. She thought about the last night she'd seen him and how it had changed her forever. It had set her on an inevitable course to where she stood now.

  That night, ten years ago, Alice had experienced grief and pain and unimaginable loss. She had also learned something about herself, something extraordinary that she could do, though she hadn't done it again since. How much do people change? In ten years, can someone stop being who they were? Can someone forget how to do what she did? Alice didn't think so. She could feel it, an instinct still tickling at the back of her mind, something buzzing at her fingertips, a little extra spring in every step that reminded her there was something more, something she needed to do, and all she needed was to let it happen. She was right. She knew it beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  But to prove it, she had to do the unthinkable.

  Listening to her dad's music, still feeling the kiss of her mother on her brow, Alice closed her eyes and surrendered herself to the night sky, letting go of everything that kept her tied to the Earth. She stepped out into nothing...

  ...and she didn't fall. She hung there, silently suspended in the night air, gently turning as if held there by invisible strings, a snowflake in the dark, a tiny ballerina spinning in a music box. Her face was turned upwards towards the sky, her eyes closed as she remembered the last time she'd done this. The memory of that night, though already a decade past, was still fresh as spring rain.

  **********

  10 Years ago...

  Alice couldn't remember falling asleep.

  Consciousness fluttered back to her like tiny scraps of color and texture alighting on a canvas to slowly reveal the complete picture. Her first awareness was the smell of gasoline. The heady vapors stung her nostrils with every breath. The air was so thick with the stuff she could taste it. She wanted to spit.

  The second thing she was aware of was that she was upside-down. The alien landscape in front of her eyes slowly resolved into something she could recognize: she was in her father's Ford SUV, but the sky outside the rear window was the hard, black pavement of the street.

  Am I dreaming? she wondered as she looked out her window. Far below her, the bare sliver of a moon shone bone white.

  Sinatra's voice crackled from only one ear bud, the other dangling above her, defying gravity to tangle in her thick, dark hair. Stuck to the roof of the car was her dad's phone, its touch screen cracked and discolored.

  How did that happen? she asked herself. I was so careful with it.

  She loved that phone. She loved her father's music. Whenever she asked him what his favorite kind of music was, he always answered with "whatever sounds good." Studying his play list, Alice found that his taste was eclectic and chaotic, a little of every decade mashed together into one melting pot. Alice loved it. She loved listening to artists and albums no one remembered anymore. To her, listening to his play list was following a map to hidden treasures, buried where most people would never find them. She often wondered why most people didn't listen to Sinatra anymore.

  A vivid picture began to emerge from her hazy memories. Her dad had been driving, and she was in the back seat. They had been talking, and she had taken one ear bud out to listen to what her dad had to say. It was about something important to her. What had they been talking about? Then there were bright lights, the headlights of another car, growing and growing until they filled the whole windshield. Then the world shook and tilted and rolled. And then nothing.

  "Alice."

  She heard but didn't comprehend. The voice was familiar, but different somehow.

  She realized she was suspended from her seat by her seatbelt. She wanted to be upright, but she had to take the seatbelt off. The button wouldn't budge. She tried again. Nothing. She gripped the belt near the buckle in her small hands and pulled. When the belt still didn't move, she breathed out sharply and pulled harder. There was a creaking, cracking sound as safety-inspected metal and hard plastic components split and tore. She spilled onto the ceiling of the SUV and landed in a heap, which was now the floor.

  "Alice. Can you hear me?"

  The voice was coming from the front of the car, from the driver's seat. For some reason it hurt her to hear it. She loved that voice. So familiar and warm. Now it was weak. Quiet. Wet. She didn't like hearing it like that.

  The SUV seemed smaller somehow. She thought for a moment that it was simply because it was upside down. Then she realized it had been crushed a little. Looking at the warped walls around her, she saw that the ceiling now reached the tops of the seats. She wanted to get to the front seats, but there wasn't enough room for her to squeeze through. Instead, she decided to crawl out through the window.

  The night air prickled her skin, raising goosebumps on her arms. She rubbed them for warmth. Her sweater was somewhere inside the SUV. She turned to look at the vehicle. This far out of town there were no streetlights, but the nearly full moon bathed the mutilated wreck in a bluish white light that washed out any color from the scene. The SUV rested on its roof, partially crumpled as though it had been stepped on by a giant foot. The front end was a ruined mass of torn, twisted parts.

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  Staring at the wreckage, it dawned on her that she was unhurt. She ran her hands along her arms, her stomach, her legs, and her head. Not a scratch, not so much as a skinned knee. She'd long since accepted that she never got sick or injured like the other kids. She'd never had a bump on her head. Never had the flu. Never sprained an ankle or scraped an elbow or had a paper cut. If only her good fortune could extend to the man in the driver's seat.

  "Alice, sweet girl, please say something." The voice came from the dark recesses of what had once been the driver's seat. The girl took short, shuffling steps towards the battered, crumpled door. The bleached moonlight made the shadows in the car impenetrable. Alice wrapped her arms around herself and shivered from the cold and much besides. Why hadn't she answered him? He'd called to her three times now, but something kept her tongue plastered to the roof of her mouth. Finally, she stammered an answer.

  "I'm here, Dad. Are you okay?"

  There wasn't an answer for a while. It felt like a long time.

  "Dad?" she croaked. Her throat felt like it had a hard rock in it. It hurt to breathe.

  "Go find help, Alice, please. Run and get help."

  Alice felt as though ice water were filling her stomach, making her cringe. She whimpered and took more shuffling steps towards the driver's door.

  "No, Dad, let me help you get out. I can open the door. I know I can." She reached forward and gripped the door on the frame where the now shattered window had been. Metal screeched and crumpled under her white, tight fingers.

  "No," said the voice. A large hand, rough and stained black in the moonlight, reached out from the velvet shadows and rested weak, gentle fingers on her hands. She let go of the door and squeezed them and sobbed. "Go get help. Then come back for me. Do what I say."

  She sobbed again as she let go of those fingers. "Okay," she choked out. "Okay. Okay, I'll be right back."

  She knew this road. It twisted through dense woods for three miles before emptying out onto a main road lined with businesses. She guessed it wasn't yet nine o'clock, and many businesses would still be open. She might find someone with a phone she could use. Maybe someone could drive her back.

  "Go," he said again. "Go now. I love you more than everything."

  She ran, not looking back over her shoulder as she sprinted down the black and white landscape towards the end of the road. She passed the wrecked remains of another vehicle, a pickup truck, lying on its side on the other side of the road. There were no cries coming from the cab's dark, quiet interior. Soon it and her father's SUV were far behind her, lost in the dense tangle of trees that crowded the edge of the road.

  "I love you, Dad," she whispered as she willed her feet to pound harder. Soon her legs were a blur. "Don't die, Dad, I love you more than everything. Don't die." Then her strides became leaps, then bounds, and then she flew. She rose into the night sky like a bird, soaring above the treetops and reaching the main road faster than any child could have hoped, faster than any car could have driven through that tight, narrow lane.

  It was not her imagination, or some daydream brought on by her desperation. Her arms windmilled and swam, her feet kicking awkwardly at the air, like someone learning to swim for the first time. Within a few minutes, she had learned to lean into it, to make herself as small as possible to the wind and to simply allow herself to fall up and forward, as though the only thing that had been holding her to the ground all along was a gentle grip of a parent's hand. It was easy as pulling away and allowing herself to simply drop towards the sky, the most natural thing in the world. She could feel the wind pulling at her shirt, which flapped and rustled like a flag tangled around a pole by a storm. She could feel the cool droplets of night mist parting for her like beaded curtains. Something about this place, somewhere between the heavens and the land, filled her with mad hope. She'd always known something was special about her. She'd always felt the strength in her hands and the pull to the sky, but she'd obeyed her parents who said to wait and keep it all a secret. And now she was doing something with it, acting on parts of her that slept, hidden from the world. It was a sign from heaven, a good omen. How could he die? How could anything bad happen to him if she could do all of this?

  But the ground and the cold reality came back to her all too soon. She saw the street where she wished to be, and whatever force was in her that let her fly now propelled her to it, as naturally as her feet when she walked. As soon as her shoes touched pavement, the sound of her father's voice came back to her, the wet, hoarse rumble in his chest, like someone with the flu. He had not been sick before the crash. Fear suddenly filled her stomach like a ball of ice, and she desperately stumbled into a bar where country music and the smell of hops and wine filled the thick air.

  It was then that her memory began to play tricks on her. She could remember nothing of the faces of those people who listened to her cries and called the police for her. She couldn't remember the name of the officer who drove her back to the scene of the accident, nor the smell of his vehicle. She could only remember returning to the scene of the upside-down car, this time illuminated by the strobe of blue and red emergency lights and surrounded by people and vehicles. The narrow road was suddenly full of people, so much more crowded than it was when she'd left it. And yet, it was so much emptier. The driver's seat of her father's car was vacant, and it would be forever.

  Why couldn't I save him, she asked inside. Was she talking to herself, or was she praying? If there was a god listening to her, she got no answer more than the soft sighing of the wind through the leaves in the trees, like the hushed voices of reverent mourners at a funeral.

  Just then she had the strangest feeling. She looked to the tops of the trees that made a black wall around the place where her father died. Somewhere beyond those trees, she thought she could feel something, or maybe someone. There was something out there, and it was trying to see her just as surely as she was trying to see it.

  **********

  Alice returned from her memories, still bobbing up and down like she was floating on the gentle swells of a lake. She could feel the tangible pull of gravity, tugging at every inch of her like a thousand strands of spider's web, frail and invisible, so, so easily broken. She'd been careful to hold them in place for her whole life. It was difficult to hold herself to the ground, keeping those delicate threads in place. To finally let go, breaking those ties and letting herself fall up, it was as though she'd been holding her breath her whole life and had never known it.

  The only thing that had kept her tethered to the ground all these years was her word to her mother. Alice remembered them standing beside her father's grave the day before they left this continent to live on another. He'd only been buried a few days. Her mother had made her promise not to use her gifts, to live her life as a normal child. She had explained that it was to protect her, to give her the privacy she needed for a happy life, just like her mother's decision to live overseas. There, no one would know she was the girl who'd somehow traveled three miles of twisted roads in just as many minutes. There, her mother could adjust medical records to hide the fact that her daughter had never been cut, never had a shot, never been sick. Far away from home, Alice and her mother could live in anonymity, so long as the girl obeyed the rule to never show her strength, to never fly, until her childhood was over.

  But she wasn't a child anymore.

  She flew higher, breathing in the dew forming in the night air. That night was dark, with only a sliver of moon left, and that mostly covered by heavy, gray clouds that threatened to rain. It was early June, and the nights were not yet as muggy and warm as they would be in the summer months to come. She tumbled at first as she tried to rise higher into the sky, and she felt the temperature drop as she ascended towards the rain clouds.

  Her eyes were focused heavenward for the first couple of minutes, hypnotized as the clouds above her came closer and closer. Only when she began to pass through them did she permit herself to look down.

  Williamsburg was spread below her like a glittering electronics board. Lights flickered on and off, and tiny car lights traveled in intricate circuits through neighborhoods of Lilliputian houses. She could see the difference between the glittering, holographic, modern city and the old, traditional, colonial town center where the city's historic past was preserved in cobblestones and red brick and white columns, all invisible to her now except in tiny circles of lamp light.

  She realized she was crying as she watched the world below her. The beauty before her eyes, the freedom she felt in the sky, it was all too much to hold inside. Besides, she was alone here, and there was no one to wonder why the tears streaked down her cheeks and followed the creases of her wide smile.

  Moments later, she was slowly becoming aware that she was shivering. Her hair, shirt, and pants were soaking wet from the tiny cloud droplets that clung to her. The wind was much stronger this high up, and she could feel her limbs starting to go numb. She wrapped her arms around her body as she descended, utterly failing to rid herself of the chill. Even when she reached treetop level, where the world had resumed its early summer temperature, she was still soaking wet, and she was lost to boot. The wind had blown her some distance away from where she'd started without her noticing. She flew, perhaps more confidently this time, towards city lights and the dancing, flashing holograms that advertised those businesses and restaurants that would be open for the Fourth of July fireworks show coming in just a few weeks. When she'd left the states as an eight-year-old, there were a few holographic advertisements in the big cities, but now that she was back from her ten-year exile overseas, they were everywhere. She wandered the sky until she recognized a restaurant, as well as the billboard above it. A hologram moved along the surface of it, a twenty-foot-tall pirate captain beckoning anyone in sight with a platter of steaming crab legs. She knew this restaurant was only a few blocks from her new apartment, so she made her way home from there while trying her best to remain unseen.

  The world from above was completely different from what she'd come to know living on the ground every day. It was almost unrecognizable to her. Buildings, trees, streets, and monuments all took a new shape and meaning when seen from above. It was as though by simply elevating above them Alice had somehow passed some veil between dimensions and was now seeing it all with supernatural eyes. She couldn't help but feel something in her had changed to see it like that.

  When she finally set foot on the same balcony she'd jumped from, there was barely enough of her left awake to walk. She crawled back into her apartment, ungracefully falling from the French doors to the floor, and huddled into a ball with her back against a sofa. She shivered audibly, still suffering from the cold she'd felt above.

  A new song was just beginning to play in her ear buds. It was "Drops of Jupiter" by Train. The perfect song for a girl who'd literally just come back from the sky with cloud droplets in her hair.

  She laughed. Great, rolling chuckles tumbled out of her and mingled with the tears on her cheeks. Music always communicated her thoughts better than she could. The gravity of what she'd done was settling in, and she knew she was forever changed.

  "All-about-me song!" she declared between breaths, and she was reminded again of the game she used to play with her father.

  She wasn't the same creature that had leapt from the balcony a lifetime ago. How could she be? She knew whatever future that awaited her, she would be flying in it. She would discover every limitation she had and use it for...what?

  She looked down at the phone in her hand, drops of cloud water still condensed on it's smooth screen. Her dad's playlist was on it, along with the songs she added herself along the way. It was a mix of her life and his shuffled into one, continuous harmony, a musical mirror that reminded her of everything she was and everything her father had been.

  "Why am I like this?" she asked no one. It was a question that wrapped around her heart and squeezed ever since that night ten years ago, the night she'd first flown. The night she'd walked unscathed from a demolished vehicle on a treacherous, winding road. The night she had failed, for all her extraordinary gifts, to save the life of the man she loved more than the sky itself. The question, cold and tight, gripped her very soul and refused to let go since she was nine years old. Figuring out what to do with herself was a debt she owed, and one she could not simply refuse to pay.

  The wind blew in from the open balcony doors, caressing her skin and chilling the cloud drops still clinging to her flushed cheeks. She looked out the open doors to the sky beyond.

  Someone like her just couldn't be an accident, she was sure of it. There had to be a reason for all of this. If she wasn't given her gifts to save her father, she would find out why she did have them. There had to be a reason, a purpose to her life. She was sure of it.

  To believe otherwise would be to accept the fact that she'd let her father's life slip through her fingers.

  Footsteps thumped along the bare wooden floors of the apartment. Alice looked up from where she sat huddled against the back of the couch. Her mother stood above her. While Alice had been out finding herself among the clouds, her mom had returned from her hunt for food to an empty apartment.

  "Alice, where have you..." her mother trailed off. She saw her daughter, wet and shivering, and the trail of wet footprints that led from the balcony. Her mom's hands covered her mouth, as though she were trying to keep everything she wanted to say from coming out at once.

  Alice sighed, knowing it was time to have a long talk with her mom.