[Short Story]: "A lost young man with enormous wings"

The power of loneliness made manifest.

Photo by Luigi Boccardo on Unsplash

Let’s call him…K.

K awoke that morning with a chasm of a headache and a desire to try something new: something besides being the only one to kick up the stale air in his apartment, an air that did not so much as rustle the leaves of his plastic plants but would, after a few uninterrupted days, upset our fellow K enough to compel him to scream into his pillow. Afterwards, he’d come into the kitchen to wash his face, a task for which his own bathroom was perfectly suited, but he wished to justify the rest of his apartment.

A roach crawling up his leg stirred him from his perturbed slumber that morning, and a wave crashed through him and convinced him that enough was enough, that something had to change. He jumped to his feet and swatted at his legs. Something about the way he bent tickled the back of his nose, and when he sneezed his sheets hopped from the bed, and clothes were kicked up from the floor and thrown against the wall. He picked up a shirt and stared at it, then waved his arms around to test the air in the room, but came to no conclusion.

He decided, being the end of January, to hail a ride share and head downtown to see Gasparilla, the parade of pirates. He tried to convince himself, as he sat alone in the back of the car, that he had been looking forward to the parade all week; that he had, in fact, sat each day in his living room staring at his work laptop long enough for permission to close it, just for this moment. His approach towards downtown and his peering at the growing crowds uneased him, infected him with doubts. What a cruel name, he told himself, ride share. He touched the empty seat beside him, the downcast eyes following the hand to the cold leather. The he sensed, and immediately confirmed, the silent driver looking at him through the rearview mirror. K jerked his hand back and returned to his contemplative gaze towards the outside. But then, what he thought was embarrassment squeezing his face was in fact another sneeze: the jostled air, which cracked like thunder and left a lingering vibration in the car, panicked the driver into snaking in his lane. A discord of horns wailed past them. Once he steered them straight, his searching eyes grasped at any explanation. “What the hell was that?” But, in a shame that was born out of a vague sense of responsibility, K made no reply. The driver shook the stress out of his head and turned down the AC.

Groups of twos and threes and many more partitions sauntered along the sidewalks and overwhelmed the streets with a celebration that made the natural traffic laws irrelevant. The air was jubilant with laughs and jabbers from people dressed as pirates gathering to watch others dressed as pirates take a long walk down the street. That’s how K thought of it, anyway; he couldn’t help but think in such cynical terms. As he shut the car door and waved to the driver—who did not look at him—K thought of inviting an old friend, one who had long since moved away for other opportunities. But he immediately admonished himself for the suggestion, as he convinced himself that, in the first place, he’d receive no response until well past the end of the parade; and in the second, it’d be too distant a trip for his friend at such a late prompting.

He walked among these twos and threes and ‘many-more’s down the same sidewalks, and then, after some self-prodding, onto the same streets. He listened and enjoyed their banter, and would at times give himself over to weakly suppressed chortles; the eavesdropped, now cautious, would stare at him and he’d know it but would not look back. This is where the real fear and trembling surfaced: at least he could send his friend a message into the ether and hope for a response; these people were much beyond that to him.

A strong breeze cut through the street, interrupting the thought and flinging some posters and loose pirate gear into the air. He wondered briefly if those surprised looks, from those who had lost some precious memento in the making, were aimed at him.

He turned to the hiss of the city bus stopping and unloading passengers, and he stared at those smiling and conversant faces. He considered going back up the street to ride the next bus as a contorted attempt at delaying disappointment. Who would talk to someone swaying into the pole, hunched and hovering over the seat, scuffling in an awkward attempt to keep his balance against the jerking bus? As he pondered, the bus continued its crawl among the crowds, and his reverie was interrupted by a less than angelic reflection glaring back at him in the sheen. When was the last time they cleaned that thing? His hair was unkempt, and the buttons misaligned with the holes in his shirt; a poignant jolt of fear diffused through him as he tried to remember if he had put on deodorant.

He trudged down the Riverwalk with his hands in his pockets (arms firmly against his sides), impatient to check the parade off as an accomplishment for the day and head home. He pushed himself through the narrow corridor between the coming and going lanes of people drinking and shouting, and on occasion he’d bump into someone who especially erred from the traffic. They each would apologize and he’d raise a hand and nod with an attempt at a smile and carry on. A twinge of sadness passed through him from the thought that these might be the only interactions he would have all day—but at least it was interaction. Too many of these encounters in a row gave him an emptying feeling at the base of his stomach, right as he came to a row of portable restrooms and their corresponding columns of people uneasy from the heat.

A cold splash came upon him, observing the overpowering number of people, as he considered that his morning decision may have been a mistake. From a distance he watched someone come to another in line and say something gracious about having saved a spot, and this flooded K with a desperation that squeezed tears from his eyes and thrust onto him a desire to shake this gracious person and shout, “I could have saved a spot for you, too!” But, being too distanced, he did no such thing. He couldn’t, for at that moment a small tornado swirled around his waist, and blossomed into an expanding sphere of tumultuous gusts that left in its wake a disaster:

His face strained with the shock, the eyes round and unblinking, as he gawked at what were once columns of people waiting in line, now crashing down amid shrieks, the last cracks of a stormy wind subsiding, and the hollow thuds of portable restrooms falling like long loose bricks and emptying their smeared and soaked and screaming occupants onto the street or into the bay.

K stood dumbfounded among the lingering moans and the leaves that were the last to glide back to earth. Those who could bolted from the immediate area in a frenzy, with as many conjectures of what had happened as there were people to escape. K camouflaged himself with them, hyperventilating, running from the disaster, but when his senses returned and he understood that he was the disaster, his run slowed to a walk, to a pace, to standing still. The crowd swelled on the Riverwalk to such an extent that some were thrown overboard into the now thrashing river. Another crowd sick with turmoil stampeded towards him, and he was only saved by a hand that dragged him out of the way.

“Don’t just stand there, you’ll get trampled!” the voice at the end of the arm said. A strange concoction of annoyance and concern from this stranger punched our fellow K in the nose in how it dazed him, who now squatted among this ‘three’ that fretted together. The first of them tossed his head back and forth between the manic crowds and the rest of the group. The second was squatted on his hams, his back and both palms pressed against the tipped food truck that served as their shelter, and he shivered and shrieked with his eyes wet and distant. The last of the three, she said to our K, “Are you alright?” but even huddled together he knew himself to be apart from them; and, while her words could not cut through the chaos, the panic and concern in her face stung him. A cool guilt crawled up his spine, pinched his heart, and isolated him: his fallen face took in the frenzy and the terror around him that he knew now to be his own fault. The sick feeling swelled in him again, but he couldn’t warn his companions in time.

A fiercer sphere than the last erupted from him. From afar it looked like the mushroom cap of a nuclear explosion stretching out along the downtown, swallowing all matter that dared to defy its sinister prowess, a leveling wall of winds gusting strong enough to assert its solidity to all in its path.

The blast radius must have been at least half a mile wide. All signs of life were relinquished to the skies. The windows of every building nearby were shattered so completely as to give the impression that there were never any windows to begin with. The buildings closest to him teetered and grumbled and vomited heaps of dust that drizzled upon the streets like an apocalyptic snowfall. Some had cars lodged into their sides. On the other side of the river lay strewn jet skis and small boats; the river itself sloshed about in great waves that rhythmically smacked the trails along its edges. Distant screams and car horns colored the otherwise quieted air with a subtle, purple eeriness. K stood aghast long enough for foodstuffs and leaves and clothes to trickle back down. He did not allow his curiosity to follow the sporadic, deep thuds around him.

What to do—What to do—What to do? His mind spasmed with guilt and horror, running through a million ideas of how to stop the storm from returning, now that there was no denial possible. He ran around with desperate feet and grabbed the two largest signs he could find in the rubble and chaos. Both were large metal plates advertising food trucks that were now well on their way to the moon—one read “Try Gabriel’s Arepas!” and the other “Taste of Prague”—and to him they seemed wide enough to serve as makeshift wings. He then ran to the docks on the river and cut some rope from the capsized ships thrown on shore. The hard slap of his steps echoed in the emptiness around him. He then laid the signs down and tied a rope on each one as if the rope were a belt for the waist of the sign. He tightened them as hard as he could, then picked them up like dumb-bells to test them.

He thought of the people he could no longer save and ran up the Riverwalk until he stood in a street between a large parking garage and the library, both immense concrete buildings he hoped would withstand and abate the blast. Satisfied with his engineering and his launch locale, he stood at the ready, eyes closed, and with a slow, deep breath he waited.

And waited, and waited, and waited. But nothing came.

He tried to concentrate against the wet leaves grazing his face, the creak of precarious buildings, the Doppler effect of screams morphing into far-off plops against the water (these were the most difficult to ignore), and especially against the calm, quiet breeze that strolled along the river. Nothing seemed to work. He took to weeping hot tears and stamping his feet, and made his wings wobble in his flailing. He screamed, and the echo rode the whistling wind until a truth rang across the hollowed buildings:

I am alone.

He understood it now. The small ball grew into a hemisphere of grey gale that lifted him like an angel returning home, and a sweet relief swept through him from the knowledge that his contraption worked. The two buildings did indeed flatten the sides of the expanding winds and concentrated this force to launch him heavenward. The shrieking rush of the winds shielded him from the crumbling roars of the sacrificial concrete beneath him.

He wanted to feel peace, but it didn’t come easily. The drag on his face made for forced inhales and labored exhales, and wiped away the signs of weeping. In only a few cycles of drowning in and toiling out, the air thinned and cooled dramatically, but despite the cold, he felt his skin tremble and seethe from the sun, so close was he now to that purifying essence. He exerted no effort in keeping himself up, as from below he was shoved along by the gusty firmament and from above the atmosphere dug into him like planets huddled at his chest. His eyelids jittered and struggled to stay closed; they squeezed out the last desperate tears from his arid eyes with each hard blink. The mouth did much the same. The explosive hurricane beneath him nonetheless felt distant to his ears after such a prolonged scream in the thin air, and this aural distance convinced him that he had traversed into a realm beyond sound. The metal signs pressed hard into his elbows, numbing his hands, but in his growing acceptance, he could soon ignore this momentary pain.

No, the only sense that persisted was a spiritual proprioception: no more blank laptop, no more filthy apartment, no more nightmares, no more aimlessness. He had become dislodged enough to know more than all that now.

The rounded vortex approached those victims now hurtling their way back down: cars that crunched against that unimpeded wall; a trolley decorated with dangling passengers, all crunched like an accordion of steal and gore against the gale; bodies that had long ejected their spirits tumbling through the air as if falling down an invisible staircase; others who were still alive and flailing and screaming into something that absorbed all their terrors — all crumpling into the shrieking expanse with a muffled thud.

The storm slowed and loosened its push at K’s back. It dissipated into fragmentary wisps that tossed around the debris in its path. What was beyond the sky was dark and sprinkled with bright stars that watched the pilgrim with cautious twinkling. When he released his grip on the ropes, the wings he surrendered spun into each other with a metal clang and fluttered out like samaras blown out of a maple tree.

The momentum tumbled him forward, and, once upside-down, he saw a smattering of great gales like his, slowly expanding like grey boils across the face of the Earth.

The debris paused in unison for a moment before it crept back down to the earth. Still rotating, his arms circled in a gentle rhythm and his legs hobbled for footing that would never come. He stopped on his back, swimming in tranquility, gazing at the stars that now accepted him. An unknown serenity seeped through him, against his lungs lurching for every atom of air and his cold ears throbbing from the wailing winds.

K closed his eyes. He basked in the weightlessness that gave him a precious moment of clarity. He felt at peace. The rushing air that cradled him as he fell, growing hot with his speed, could no longer disturb him. His chest lifted with long, easy breaths. He savored it, for with this peace came the understanding that no other winds would come and save him.