An Iridescent Sky 2

      The opening moments of consciousness when there is no pain, no old wounds to prick at wellbeing. Michael felt his body light and fluid. His mind still.

The dream came back to mind, a slice of ordinary life. He stood at the kitchen door watching Marie concentrate on the screen of her well-used IPad. The golden light of afternoon made her cotton dress translucent, shapely legs, full hips, beautiful woman. How many times had he seen her like this? Blond streaked hair pulled over one shoulder, intelligent eyes absorbing some new idea into her venerable store of things aesthetic, spiritual, poetic.

He wanted to walk up behind her. Wrap his arms around her waist. Snuggle his nose into the side of her shapely neck, but he couldn’t move from the doorway. He felt troubled, frustrated. She needed the reassurance of his presence, or maybe she soon would.

A head taller than Marie, Jenny bounded into the kitchen pulling on her volleyball jersey. Marie quickly hugged their daughter and handed her a bag of snacks.

Yellow-green light washed away the recollection. The familiar fragrance of sweet earthy grass hung on the puffs of a gentle breeze as it washed over his face. The smell of spring in the meadowlands of the High Sierra it seemed. Michael felt he was lying in a soft bed of grass, his body warm and his face chilled as if in a sleeping bag, and waking to a day of adventure. But he hadn’t been backpacking. He had been flying. No. He had been crashing.

In one movement, Michael leapt to his feet, a sea of knee-high grass met his panicked gaze. Looking around, he found himself at the failing end of a great forest. Mind numbing shock washed over him. He fought vertigo and focused on his surroundings.

Islands of tress, the outliers of the main forest, dotted the meadow and extended down a shallow valley and into the grasslands. The edge of the forest proper, some two miles distant behind him, blanketed the foothills of greater mountain peaks beyond, great peaks in a haze of blue, snow covered from the mid-elevations to their sharp, craggy summits.

Michael quickly retreated into himself, desperately searching for normal. Normal was a history written in scar tissue and pain, but now his movements felt light, unencumbered.

“So weird! All of this! I don’t feel pain. I feel… I feel fully alive, like I could run forever. So…am I dead? I must be dead. I’m clearly someplace else.”

Michael considered this self-pronounced doom.

“Do the dead know they’re dead? I was crashing. I must have blacked out before impact. The glider controls were dead. And, before that… things were happening that can’t happen. The canopy bulb blew out. That can’t happen. I must have been hallucinating, right?

“So, what is this? Heaven? I thought a guy would be met by Jesus, or an angel, or at least a family member. No one! I’m alone.”

The land around him looked like natural ecology. Filtering through his shock, waves of birdsong mixed with sounds of insects buzzing. Grasses bent and whispered as gusts of periodic wind rushed up from the valley below.

“Is this some kind of psychic projection? I seem to hear birdsong, a whole cloud of them flying from the grasses over there. And this all looks and feels… well, natural.

Michael stood soaking in the surround waiting for the inevitable dissolve and the blackness of extinction. Large animal trails caught his attention. He realized the grasses all around him had been trampled. He bent down to examine the broken stalks and caught sight of his hand reaching out from a foreign looking shirt sleeve. A new level of shock washed through him.

“Ok. Keep it together now. I have a body, but I am wearing something I’ve never seen or felt before.  Body’s warm… comfortable, but my face and hands are cold. Would you be aware of cold if you were a spirit? But who the hell knows what it’s like to be dead? Maybe you think you should feel the way you do, so that’s how you feel. But how could I imagine whatever this is I’m wearing? I can’t even tell what color it is. Straw colored, I guess… maybe light-green-yellow…. Inside it’s just black, or maybe bluish-black.  Kind of depends on how the light hits it. And this thing on the ground… is a kind of cape thing, big sleeves, hooded... and embroidered… with what? Runes or whatever and impressive… like emerald and gold, non-repeating patterns. Could be writing. Looks almost like Arabic calligraphy, but it’s not. And these shoes! Kind of an elastic leather? Kind of like armadillo hide, but it’s not. Far softer, more supple… except when you push on it, and it goes glass hard. Oh my God! I have no imagination for this kind of thing.

“And if I’m dead, nothing material would come with me… like my clothes and jogging shoes… and they’re gone and the wreaked Nimbus! Duh! If it’s not here, then I am dead, or I’m alive as spirit, right? But with a body, or my mind’s image of a body, or.… Hell with it!”

Michael realized he had been lying on the cape like thing at his feet. He picked it up and stood where it had been lying. He systematically expanded the circle of his search, pleased his wilderness skills had not entirely left him. All around him, the grasses had been pressed down, fresh signs of others’ recent presence, but constructing a coherent story from the signs eluded him. Two very large animals had come from the direction of the forest. Their parallel tracks were unmistakable. And there were other tracks. Then his heart nearly stopped. There in the dirt between tufts of grass was a cat track, a very big cat track and very fresh.

“Damn thing could be anywhere. I’d never see it until it was too late, but it had been right next to me. If it was hungry, I’d already be dead. But, I am probably dead. Right?! How else does this make any sense? I just don’t feel dead!” Yeah! Feel dead! Right! An oxymoronic statement if there ever was one!”

Michael could not bring belief together with his actions. Many years of wilderness travel had given him a sense of wild places, and large predators meant true wilderness. He had to make some decisions. He could see where the meadow sloped up toward the forest and, some 200 yards away, a discolored patch of grass was also trampled down. He slipped his head into the hood of the cloak and his arms into the over-sized sleeves and went to investigate.

Running was easy and effortless, and the speed of it exhilarating. He was not even breathing hard when he arrived, as if all this were a dream and waking life imposed no limitations in the land of dreams.

The smell of burned grass hung in the air. Blackened straw-like grasses bled flakes of ash into swirling puffs of breeze. There had been some activity here, but there was little trace of it save some trample, matted grass outside the burned area. He found not even a fragment of his sailplane.

Michael gazed on the burned ground before him. His throat tightened, “Oh God! What have I done? My family! My Marie!”

His dream of home appeared unwanted in his mind. What had been comfort now stabbed with loss and guilt. He walked mindlessly among the grasslands. He let his body fall back into tall grasses. Pain shot up from his side where something hard was sticking up out of the ground. His head cleared a little. The bones of some small unfortunate animal made the grass bed uncomfortable. He slid over a couple feet and laid back down. Tall stalks of grass and an array of wild flowers framed a hazy sun. Streaks of cloud gathered in the upper reaches of the sky. At any moment, he felt he might just fall into the depths of that ever blue.

“I just want to fly home. I feel so light, so buoyant, so alive, like I could do it. I feel a bug crawling up my leg.”

He sat up. Small flies buzzed around his face disturbing his contemplation of his death and his guilt.

“God! Isn’t there any benefit to being dead?”

After ridding himself of a third carpenter ant, Michael settled back into the grass, continually brushing the occasional fly or gnat from his face. Time passed and the only thing that changed was the position of the sun and his increasing dissatisfaction with being dead. He felt antsy and needed to move. He stood up.

Peering up at the sun, he thought, “So, it’s about noon. Nothing is going to change here. I am wherever and in whatever state this is. I might as well do something before all this stops.”

Michael began formulating a plan. He remembered seeing what looked to be cultivated land beyond a river that, if memory served, bordered these grasslands on the far side. But there was a large cat somewhere out there. And if there was one, there could be others.

He realized with some frustration he planned under the illusion of still being alive. Looking around he felt a pull toward the forest. He knew some archetypes about spirits and mountains, and then the thought came that he could build a reasonable shelter from downed branches and, maybe he could find some berry bushes, or at least some grubs to eat if other game failed.  

He immediately assailed his logic, “But I’m dead. I don’t need shelter and I don’t need to eat. Idiot! Hunger and cold are illusions. God! Why is this so hard to just accept? Well maybe because every sensation of my body argues against my being dead. I have never felt more alive.”

In the end, the idea of trees and mountains seemed somehow a comfort. He loved forests, and he felt he could always backtrack and find the river later should consciousness persist, should this not be the last gasp of thought from a dying mind.