Silver wings

Crossing the street to the house where Natalie lives, Ted finds an earring. It grazes against the bottom of his shoe and makes a muted clink as it rolls across the asphalt. It feels weak beneath him, and he stops in the middle of the road to pick it up. The earring is made of metal and shaped like a flower, a graying pearl inlaid at its center. The pin that would attach it to somebody’s ear is missing.

Holding it in his open hand, Ted looks to the sky and imagines it belonging to a valkyrie queen, empress of a throne in the clouds where women rule over men and every athlete is a gladiator. A product of the human world, the earring is sacred in the land of the valkyries, its loss like that of a king’s scepter. Returned to its matriarch, political turmoil and mindless bloodshed would be ended.

Ted looks down again and drops it into his pants pocket, letting it rest beside his wallet. Its shape creates a slight bulge underneath the fabric of his jeans.

For a moment, the earring feels electric. A weak energy seems to emanate from its depths, sending warm pulses through his body, teaching him new kinds of thoughts and emotions entirely separate from those ingrained within him. The tips of his fingers seem to become imbued with an unearthly magic, and his head begins to feel weightless. Each pulse pulls him closer to a thing far beyond him, which he can make out only as a blurred dark circle in a consciousness divergent from his own.

Then, in the same gradual manner as its onset, this sensation disappears from his being, and Ted is standing alone again in the empty street. Only then does the danger of cars register, and Ted hurries to the opposite sidewalk. Above him, the crackling hum of telephone wires orchestrates his daze.

Ted knocks four times before stopping to wait at Natalie’s doorstep. The concrete below him feels hard and unwelcoming, which makes standing difficult. If he were president, he would only ever have to wait on carpet, he decides. He would be allowed because he was in charge of a country. The carpet would be the kind found in houses that other people’s parents live in, the type that doesn’t have a bottom, but only soft tips.

Natalie opens the door barefoot. She wears her hair so that a neat row of bangs sections off the top of her forehead. Ted waves slowly, and Natalie stares back with her mouth agape. In their shared silence, a loud truck drives by behind them, and the entire neighborhood seems to be momentarily lost within its rumble.

“Hi Ted,” Natalie says. She shifts her weight onto one leg and juts the opposite hip outwards a little bit and sighs, as if trying to make the same point in as many ways as physically possible, all in one motion.

“I was wondering about what you told me on the phone yesterday.” Ted takes his cell phone out of his pocket, the one opposite the earring, and gestures openly with it, hoping that this motion will emphasize his innocence.

“You know what I said.” Natalie closes her mouth and blinks. “You know I can’t always be doing things for you.”

“Oh,” Ted says. For a moment, he pretends that he can accept what she’s saying. His general mood towards living becomes appropriate rather than alienating, and he feels a warmth that could be called happiness blossom in his chest. But like all false emotions, these insights manifest only as glimpses of things outside of himself, and evaporate as his true consciousness snaps back into its rightful place.

“Sorry.” Natalie bites her lower lip forcefully and looks deranged in a way Ted has never seen before. It makes him want to see her make the same face again, a hundred times more, but she stops, sucking her lips inwards and arching her eyebrows at Ted.

“Well, bye then,” Ted says. Natalie looks sideways and then upwards, breathing in, before slamming the door shut in a way that seems to push stray emotions out with it. Two cars drive by simultaneously across the road outside, each engine making a distinct sound, so that the two engines together make a sound that no single car could make.

Ted waves slowly again, to the closed door. He senses something solid that had existed between them shatter, which makes him cough.

The shortness of their conversation is what resonates with him more than anything else. He had played that moment through in his mind countless times until his imaginary self was able to say all the right words without effort. Instead, the way things had turned out had seemed to be an emotionless parody of what he knew to be the truth of it. The steps away from Natalie’s doorway feel heavy and tampered with.

Ted pauses on the sidewalk facing the road, his mind empty. Above him, an assembly of geese travels across the sky, all of their heads pointed in the same, clear direction. He watches them while gripping the earring tightly inside of his pocket, pushing on the pearl at its center with his thumb. Each of their wings moves in synchronicity with each other, and they make no noise. Their leader, flying at the tip of their V formation, is bigger than a bird should be.

The giant goose locks eyes with Ted across the open sky, and a breeze begins to undulate around him, which quickly turns into a small tornado. Ted contemplates escape, but the gust lifts him off of his feet before he is able to move anywhere else. The laughing sounds of the geese echo in the whirring air around him as his body is pulled into the sky overhead.

Returning the earring to the valkyrie queen enters his thoughts as he rises, and excitement overcomes him, making his weightless limbs tingle and shiver. Ted imagines himself in the valkyrie’s throne room, the dulled edge of a ceremonial sword resting on his shoulder, bestowing upon him an honor never before granted to a human being. He would then open up foreign relations between the valkyrie and human species, and human existence would gain a multitude of things that it hadn’t had before.

Soon clouds begins to envelop him, their cool touch on his skin fragile like condensation on an unattended glass of water. It makes him feel like a giant raindrop, and for a moment he thinks he may fall and splatter across the earth below, but instead, the tornado only slows him down, continuing to carry him upwards until he is among blue sky once again before gently letting him go.

His feet touch solidly on top of the cloud’s surface. To his disappointment, he finds no evidence of valkyrie queens or floating castles in the world now surrounding him. The entirety of his new environment is open air and the cloud beneath his feet, which feels now like loosely packed snow, temperate rather than cold.

If he were president, the country would be in a crisis. President Lost, First Lady Refuses To Comment, international newspaper headlines would read the next day. When he returned, he wouldn’t tell anybody where he had been, and his public approval ratings would plummet.

Below him, cars and people move through daily motions and routines. It looks like how cities look from airplane windows, the square shapes of neighborhoods discernible, but like if he yells loud enough, the people in those neighborhoods might hear him. His eyes begin to follow a middle-aged woman with greying red hair pinned up around her skull walking a small brown dog at a snail’s pace across the endless suburban expanse. He imagines a conversation with her.

“Excuse me,” Ted asks the woman. “I found this earring in the street. Is it yours?”

“Oh no, but I have a friend who lost an earring. I can take it to her if you would like.” The woman turns to face Ted with a smile that hides a rat’s nest of secrets.

“Maybe I’ll hold onto it instead,” Ted says.

A red sports car zooms past the two of them on the adjacent road, driving far above the speed limit, and they both turn to watch. The car breaks the sound barrier, making only an empty whoosh as it passes, and Ted can feel a light slap of air against his cheek. It makes him smile.

“Do you live around here? Ned and I just moved in next door.” The woman gestures towards the dog with the same hand that holds its leash.

“No but a friend of mine lives across the street.”

The woman blinks a few times and doesn’t say anything. Ned, the dog, starts to bark loudly, squaring its feet outwards the way dogs do when they want to look threatening. Ted looks around him and finds nothing but the dog, the woman, and himself, neatly trimmed lawns now taking up the spaces where houses once stood. The dog attacks without warning, jumping towards him off of its leash, higher than a dog should be able to jump, its bared fangs coming inches from his face.

Then Ted is on top of the cloud again, away from the woman and the dog and his imagination. He slowly lays down across its surface, finding its form accommodating. It’s soft in a way somewhere in between a blanket and a boulder, and after adjusting his body a few times to fit its curvature, Ted is able to relax enough that he can sleep.

In his dream, Ted is an old man, retired from presidency in a mansion on the beach, living off of the large sum of money that presidents inevitably end up with. He finds himself reading a newspaper in a red satin armchair, when he hears his doorbell ring. Waiting at his doorstep is the valkyrie queen, wings beating slowly so that she floats inches above the ground. Ted smiles and removes the earring from his pocket, depositing it into the valkyrie’s outstretched hand. Instead of being grateful though, the valkyrie queen rolls her eyes and quickly shoots off into the sky, away from Ted, without a single word of acknowledgement.

When he wakes up, the true images of the time he had spent with Natalie flood his brain like soda from a soda machine, until his mind is fizzing over capacity. It makes him shake. Carefully, he pulls himself across the cloud until his body is parallel with the its edge. Finding the earring still inside his pocket, he takes it out and dangles it above the empty sky, gripping it between only his thumb and forefinger.

He blinks before letting go, and the earring spirals downwards, making a tiny clink as it hits the earth.