Free Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories by Stuart Dybek Page A

below. If I were a girl, he thought, I’d look up her blowing dress. He gripped the ropes as gently as he might the braids of a girl. Still, his palms grew callused. He swung standing, kneeling, sitting; at night, he slept oscillating beneath the whorled Milky Way and dreamed of traversing luminous oceans that rose and fell in time to the gravity of the swing. Each morning he woke to find the swing had taken them farther than the day before.
    Perhaps he would have remained one with the swing, and be swinging still, if not for the day when he heard a name being called in the language that he’d learned as he ran through the forest. A name—his name?—was being called out over and over. He listened and couldn’t be sure. When he called back, frayed tendrils sprouted from the swing’s ropes and vined his wrists, arms, and chest, coiling at his throat and choking off his voice. He swung as if caught in the rigging of a ship, but he managed to pry open his father’s penknife and cut himself loose before a violent backswing shook the knife from his hand. On the upswing, he let go.
    *   *   *
     
    Think of dreams in which you fly. By which you fly.
    How does it happen?
    Sometimes, I fly unaided, as if flight were natural, although even in the dream I know it’s not. I’ll be running hurdles on a dark track like the one I’d train on alone at night in high school after the stadium gate was locked at ten p.m. I’d scale the cyclone fence to sneak in, and then lug the hurdles onto the track from where they’d been stacked along the sidelines. They weren’t modern aluminum hurdles, but old-style heavy wooden ones that bruised your knee when you clipped them, if you were lucky enough not to have your legs knocked out from under you. In those days of cinder tracks, athletes wore spikes gracile like ballet shoes. The spikes made you run on the balls of your feet, almost up on your toes; just tying them on made me feel lighter and faster, as if I were attaching winged heels. I’m wearing spikes in my dream, so maybe I don’t fly unaided after all. A friend once told me she had a dream in which she could fly after lacing on red ice skates, and that while she skated ecstatically over the rooftops, her mother kept shouting from below, “You be careful, young lady, you’re skating on thin air!”
    There are three strides between each hurdle if you run them right, but in my dream, all I need is a single stride before I’m skimming the next hurdle. And then I realize I don’t need to touch down at all. I can glide from hurdle to hurdle, and gliding becomes flight.
    It’s always night in my flying dreams. Sometimes, I fly unaided, or relatively so, but other times there are conveyances: a kite that pulls me up as it rises, a unicycle on which learning to balance becomes learning to levitate, an anti-gravity air taxi shaped vaguely like an inflatable life raft that hovers at my fifth-floor window while I climb aboard. A crew not unlike the Marx Brothers pilots it. Their names are Rosco, Bosco, and Moscow.
    A woman once told me of a dream in which her blue Toyota was able to fly. The Toyota was the first car she’d bought herself, after graduating from college, with money from her first real job.
    “Was it night when you could fly?” I asked, envisioning the taillights of her Toyota firing like rockets while her radio blared Prince’s “Little Red Corvette.”
    “You mean like a witch with her broom? No, I was driving down a two-lane past fields Technicolor with wheat, and green pastures where horses grazed. It was bright! I was wearing sunglasses, and had the windows down, and the car filled with the smell of fields and horses. A breeze that looked so gentle combing through the wheat whipped in, blowing my hair, and I noticed that on the other side of the barbed-wire fence the horses were racing my car. Their manes and tails streamed, and I realized I was seeing them from above. I could see the shadow of my Toyota