Sora awoke in a cold sweat. She dreamed the knots she'd tied in the rope that held her and her tarp-hammock aloft had somehow become untied and that her hammock, with her in it, fell away to be taken in by the wailing and gnashing of teeth below. Once she knew she wasn't being eaten alive and that she was still high in her tree, she looked toward the ground and exhaled a breath she didn't know she'd been holding onto. There were no Zs there. She'd slept fitfully, no doubt because of the thousands of Zs which had flowed through the valley like unholy water through the River Styx. Then it hit her like a freight train. Where the hell was her hammock?
As if her eyes were opened just in that instant, she noticed the blue tarp hanging from a branch lower down on the trunk. She reached to where the tarp should have been and felt nothing. Her mind screamed at her and suddenly she was falling. She reached out with both arms and grabbed the nearest branch, hugging it for dear life, feeling the bark dig into her hands and forearms.
She held on for dear life as her mind frantically tried to make sense of what was happening. She kicked her foot out, trying to land it on a branch that was just out of reach of her legs. She loosened her grip on the branch, stretching her arms out a little more and hanging from her hands alone.
She kicked out again and her foot found purchase. She lurched forward as hard as she could, contracting every muscle in her body, and pulled herself forward just enough to be able to grab another branch, lower than the one she'd just been hanging from. She breathed deeply and looked to where she'd tied off her hammock. She was sure she'd tied them correctly, but she was so exhausted at the time that maybe she'd neglected to double check. Her memories of the previous evening were fuzzy for some reason. She wasn't certain if she'd done a double check of the knots or not. Either way the damn thing had fallen and somehow, somehow, she hadn't. It was strange, but she knew what she had seen and felt, and there hadn't been anything for her to lie on up there but open air.
Her mind reeled as she tried to figure out how it was possible. She counted her breaths, inhaling for a count of three, exhaling for three, in an attempt to bring her heart rate down. It helped, but she couldn't stop going over what had happened again and again in her mind. She had... floated? A lesson her father taught her when she was young, the Three Ps, came back to her then.
Was the event possible? That answer was the same as always. Anything was possible.
Was it probable? Sora shook her head at that one. How was she to know the odds of floating?
Was the event plausible? It definitely didn't seem so. Where did plausibility, reason, enter into this equation?
Alas, the Three Ps didn't help at all. Her father always said she should move forward based on the answers she arrived at when asking those questions, but she was confused to the point that asking the questions only made her mind reel further rather than bring clarity. All she knew was what her senses told her, and though it couldn't have happened - it had. What could this mean? She'd always been given shit - her entire life - for over thinking things. It was just who she was, though. A quirk
given her by God, she liked to believe. She saw it as a gift because though it sometimes made her overly cautious, it also always kept her safe. Thinking was her strength and she had no trouble flexing it. At least that's what she told herself.
So, she thought it through, forcing her way forward, grasping at the lucidity that lay just beyond the jumble of random thoughts and emotions. Illusion? Could it have been? She'd never heard of any illusion capable of tricking all of the senses, though that didn't mean it didn't exist. Was she in some kind of dream? She had experienced dreams that felt real before, but this was on an entirely different level. She supposed in the grand scheme of things she would never be able to know with one hundred percent certainty whether or not she was dreaming.
If it happened to be the case that she was, then eventually she'd wake... probably. So, if and until she awoke, she would assume that this was the real world - or at least the one in which she'd always existed. With that assumption in mind, could it have been a genuine occurrence? If she were to go
with that line of thought, what could it possibly mean? How could it even be feasible? The entire thing was inconceivable. People didn't just... float. When she was little, she'd believed the television magicians really were capable of what they'd claimed, that they were able to levitate and make things appear from nothing and saw people in half without hurting them. That was just up until the day she turned ten, when her parents had hired one of these so-called magicians to perform at her birthday party.
The man had been able to do absolutely nothing magical. He was adept at sleight of hand, though. She admitted that his skill was impressive, but ever since that day she had shunned any belief in that sort of thing. She had been crushed by the weight of that particular let down. Now though she felt a little of that old excitement building in her at the prospect of this thing actually happening.
She was a rational person by nature, and so couldn't shake the thought that there was some logical explanation behind it, but her heartbeat just a little bit faster even so.
She had to know for sure. A grin split her face as she climbed down the tree to the lowest branch. She stood, heart fluttering rapidly now, and looked down. The ground was at least fifteen feet below her. She inhaled deeply, steadying herself for the possible plunge, and stepped off the branch.
She didn't fall.
Her breath caught in her throat.
She was floating.
How...how?
Her mind was still for a while as she stared at the ground that wasn't getting any closer to her suspended body. She'd had dreams like this when she was young. Except in those dreams she was slowly falling from the top of a standalone red brick wall toward the ground. The top of the wall wasn't any more than a couple dozen feet above the ground, but the fall took all night long every time she had the dream. She always woke just before touching the ground. It had always been a curious thing for her but nothing she really worried about too much given that it wasn't really
affecting her waking life. The fact that she was floating in the air in her waking life would absolutely change things, though.
Eventually she looked up and thought that she'd like to move forward. She wondered how she might accomplish this task, and it happened. She was moving through open air. Seconds went by and she was soon past the tips of the branches of the tree she'd just stepped out of moments
before. She wasn't making any stepping motions with her legs or any movements at all, really, other than the firing of neurons in her brain and the breath that her lungs steadily pulled in and pushed out. She thought about going faster, and she did.
She sailed through the air faster than she would have thought possible, if she'd thought that non-machine assisted flight was even possible at all. Her long, dark hair flowed out behind her as she pushed her way through the oxygen and nitrogen and argon and carbon dioxide and methane and
water vapor and dust spores and bacteria that made up or rode on the invisible air around her. She breathed deeply and for the first time in her entire life she felt weightless and uninhibited. She thought briefly on how this feeling compared to the high obtained from opiates or amphetamines or just simply tetrahydrocannabinol, and came to the conclusion that if any of those substance made a person feel even remotely close to what she was feeling now then she would have no trouble understanding their attraction.
She wanted to climb higher into the sky and so her body moved that way, propelling her hundreds - thousands - of feet into the air. She screamed a joy filled scream, exhilaration tumbling through her body like a never-ending avalanche. Wherever she decided to go, that's where her body flew. She started to consider how this could have happened, how this absurd phenomenon could have possibly come about, but decided to let go of the questions for once and just enjoy it for what it was. Dream or not - real or fake - she'd fully live in these fleeting moments while they lasted.
Suddenly, though, those moments came to a very abrupt end. She felt her vitality drain from her body, and then she was falling. Her vision began to grow dark more rapidly than she could think about why it was happening and before she knew it her ability to control in which direction she flew was gone and all that was left was the downward plummet. She wanted to scream again, this time in pure terror, but she had nothing left in her. At least her last moments on Earth were amazing. They were more than amazing - they were more than she'd ever hoped to experience in her lifetime. She had done what no one else had ever accomplished and now she would pay for it with her life. The ground rushed up to meet her, to pull her into the purgatory that undoubtedly awaited
her on the other side of life. She felt nothing at all, and the last thing she saw was darkness.
There was a light. The light floated lazily on an equally lethargic breeze with not particular destination in mind. The purple thing was indolent by its very nature and it was that same nature from which the light got its name... Sloth. The light didn't much care for the name, but also didn't have the energy to think about it for too long. The breeze continued meandering through the valley in a place the flesh-bags used to call "Arizona," and so too did the light. It was a quiet, brooding thing, the light, and didn't like to be bothered. So when a shriek pierced the slothful morning it
irritated the light. The thing changed hues - from purple to violet - as was its wont when it was flustered. The light found the source of the scream and saw a flesh-bag, a female one no less, rocketing through the air as if she had some claim over the domain of the prince. The now violet light wasn't one to get angered often, but this certainly enraged him in a way unlike anything he
had ever felt. Well, except once, that is, but that humiliation was too much to think about right now. The human was in the realm of the light's master and that just couldn't be allowed. So, the light went against its nature and elected to exert some energy so that it could draw near enough to the
fragile feminine flesh-bag to do what it did best. The light shot through the sky toward her and once it was close enough the girl instantly lost her upward momentum and began to gain the same in the opposite direction. The light let out a derisive snort, which even it momentarily found
strange since it had no nose just then, as the girl fell to her very timely demise.
Another light floated high overhead directly in the path of the sun. It was invisible to the Sloth, as that pathetic creature had become bound to its own manufactured, sinful nature instead of that given it by its Creator. This light shone brightly, much like the sun itself. The human girl would have
been able to see this new light without issue had she been looking for it, but as it stood the girl didn't even know the light existed. That was okay, for now. All would be revealed in due time, certainly. The spectacular white light watched the entire thing play out before it. The girl had just discovered what had been sleeping in humans for eons and, while it was just the tip of the iceberg, especially in her case, she was enjoying it immensely. That made the light very happy. The usually
apathetic Sloth grew agitated and changed color - a sure sign of bad things to come from this wretched creature - and charged the girl. She fell, swiftly, toward the mountainous terrain below her. The Sloth had done just about all that it could do to an unwilling human: it had taken all of the energy within her body, which was already low due to the exertion of using her newfound abilities. The brilliant light expected the draining of the girl's energy naturally, as it always happened the first time a human used these powers, but it hadn't expected the Sloth to drain the girl of what little energy she had left. The white light had been with the girl, Sora, since her birth, and while it couldn't yet permanently defeat the disdainful Sloth and its cohorts, had fended them off on
more than one occasion. This would be no different. The light shot toward Sora more quickly than actual light particles could normally move in the physical universe. The light changed, then, assuming the shape of a massive oak leaf, on which Sora landed without incident, just moments
before she would have hit the dirt below. The light-now-leaf carried Sora gently back to where her meager possessions were and tipped so that she rolled softly onto the ground. By the time she woke the leaf was once more out of her sensory range.
Sora slowly found her way back toward the light of day that was consciousness. She'd never felt so exhausted before in her life. She momentarily questioned how she was alive as she sat up, resting her back against the trunk of a tree. She looked up and recognized her stuff above her.
Inexplicably, she was back where she'd begun. Had it all been a dream? She should be dead right now but apparently, mysteriously, she had survived. She'd been hurling toward the ground, certain of her own impending death. Bewilderment seemed to make a permanent home in her. That she sat there alive was uncanny at best, and at worst... well, she wasn't certain what it might beat worst.
The last thing she wanted to do was be ungrateful.
She'd often been unappreciative in her life and knew full well that no good had ever come from it. Somehow, though, gratitude had always compounded whatever good she actually was thankful for. It was little things like that, like gratitude, that people so often overlooked as being inconsequential. What these people neglected was the profound positive benefits of consistently and intentionally
staying grateful. They didn't see that gratitude makes people want to be around you, or that it improves physical and psychological health, or that it enhances empathy, or that it improves self-esteem, or that grateful people sleep better.
She remembered very well the long nights and common complaints of sleeplessness in college. People usually turned to various forms of caffeine to help them push through, but it would have been more beneficial for them if they'd
cultivated gratefulness within themselves and slept like babies. They would have been more rested! She laughed sadly at her sudden shift in thoughts, and at the fact that continued to think as if all those people were still alive out there.
Despite the sudden rise of sadness, she let herself feel that gratitude - inhaled it and exhaled praise. She thanked God, for somehow she knew that He'd had a hand in this. She stood and shook the dust from her clothing, looking north. Should she continue that way? She could go anywhere, now, though the prospect frightened her. Assuming she hadn't just woken from a dream... She thought
she'd like to float - and she did. She let out a raucous laugh. It was real! She lowered herself the few inches back down onto the ground and knew then she had to find others. If this had randomly happened to her then maybe there were other people out there, still unaffected by the zombie virus
or whatever it was, who were likewise experiencing miraculous things.
She thought most of the Zs would die out soon enough with there being so little humans left alive to feed on, if that even mattered, but the horde which had swept through the valley the day before appeared to be on a mission of some kind, as if they shared a common goal. It had made her second guess her conclusion that the world would be "Z free" eventually, and that frightened her
intensely. What if her assumptions were wrong? What if they didn't have to eat humans to survive? Were they really undead? Doomed to wander the Earth forever? The thought freaked her out.
Her plan had been to walk until she found a quiet, peaceful place to make a home until she died, partly because there was no way she could keep fighting the things for the rest of her life. Now, regardless of the fear, or if the Zs died out or flourished, or if she found anyone else, she knew she
could escape from anything. Of course, she couldn't get arrogant, and wouldn't, but she couldn't keep the broad smile from her face at the fact that now, should she be surrounded by Zs, she could fly away. Suddenly her joy doubled as she realized she'd never have to climb up another tree again!