dreaming of falling

For all of her life, Eleanor had been falling.

She was introduced to the sensation of flight on a gloomy August morning in her fourteenth year -- the sort of morning that's forever identified in memory by its peculiar shade of blue-gray -- and had ever since wakened from dreams to find herself weightless. The marvel of her descent bled across the line that separated her dream from her life, soaked it through, stained her waking moments with fear. It left her breathless, disjointed, clawing madly for a stillness in which she might be able to patiently decipher her life.

What Eleanor remembered of the first of many falls was visited upon her in choppy, splintered glimpses, gritty and faded like flashbacks on damaged film, scenes shot by a nervous hand, an unsure eye.

The memories always went something like this:

She would spy her younger self standing on the cliff, laughing over her shoulder at someone different every time: sometimes it was Jack or Stacy, who had been with her that day; other times it would be her fourth-grade teacher, or maybe her mother. Sometimes it was a strange man whose face she didn't know, skin so dark it was almost leathery, a thick, pepper-colored mustache stapled beneath his nose, eyes foreign and black.

She watched as the young Eleanor bent at the knees, arms slowly sweeping up and out. Always the angle of the camera changed before her arms reached their apex, and she would stare up from far below, her younger self silhouetted against the bleached sky exactly like a swan, for a moment as perfect as she would ever be. Always she recognized the moment that everything changed, when some tumbler in her awkward, ungraceful body shifted too far in one direction or the other, when her youth revolted against her ambition, and all poise fled.

Eleanor always saw the tumble coming before it began. She dreaded the ending of this dream, always unable to wake before it arrived. The final moments were played in agonizing slow motion, seen through a high-focus lens, every hair on her head crisp, the sudden sweat on her brow viciously bright.

Young Eleanor entered freefall, arms tearing at the sky. She remembered the flutter of the wind against her face, startlingly soft, like the wingtips of a seagull. She landed so hard, her narrow body slapping like a board on the breaking dishwater waves and disappearing, blood blossoming dark and inky around her shattered leg, and in smaller clouds around her skull. This was her last conscious moment, one in which she discovered herself overwhelmed by such magnificent pain that letting go was her only recourse. The water stopped her plummet, but in darkness Eleanor never stopped falling.

Sometimes the film was scored, usually something moody, something haunting, injected with solemn choral voices and the slow vibrato of a cello, sometimes broken by the distress of violins played like screaming birds. Lately the music would break as the fall played out, leaving Eleanor only with the horrible, empty silence that preceded the awful wet smack of her leg against submerged rocks, the barely-choked-out cry that lingered over the waves long after she had vanished beneath. Always that painful scream, always interrupted; a mouthful of seawater, the sharp, familiar taste of brine.

In all the years that followed -- for Eleanor's story did not end on that day -- this scream broke her heart each time she heard it, reminding her forever that she was an outsider witnessing an event she could never change.

Eleanor Witt had been falling, and dreaming of falling, for so long that the brush of clouds against her skin had become commonplace, leaving only vacancy where her sense of wonder should have been.