Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

And then he was falling, plummeting through bright opalescence, dropping through crystallized vapors, his heart lurching in the prisonhouse of his chest as though deciding it was going to try to save itself, fuck Itty, it was getting the hell out of here, and his bladder figuring what was going on and joining his heart and intestines in their respective attempts at evacuation. Meanwhile Itty began climbing an invisible ladder, scrabbling for altitude, kicking against emptiness with his shiny black wing-tips (despite his bunched pants acting alternately like a cotton version of the chain binding together a convict’s legs and a bantam parachute trembling in the stupendously noisy wind), his runted arms pistons, his lungs clusters of grapes huffing the thin air with the rapidity of a hummingbird’s wings, and, at the instant he thought maybe, just maybe , he could make some real progress here through the sheer force of his imagination, he blacked out and twined into a dream in which he was driving down a narrow road in northern Scotland (where he’d never been, nor particularly wanted to be) in a rented rubiate Fiat on a cold rainy day at the very second eight sheep clattered out of oyster-white fog, dirty squat rectangular bodies, stubby black legs, rumps raised in defiance against him, and halted there, expectant, behind them a ditch, an incline, a row of evergreens, then moors sliding into ashen light; and, when in unison the black masks lowered warily to sniff the cracked asphalt, Itty slowly reached for his camera in the seat beside him though at the same instant one of the sheep raised its head and the others followed, their chests kicking forward, and Itty understood what he would later find in his photograph even though he decided to take it anyway: a still landscape through his windshield, trees, fog, horizon the hue of unclean bones, and a spare road winding nowhere.

He peered between his legs, around the ruffling carcass of his chubby white penis and quivering billows of his black trousers, and blinked. Upside down, he was squinting directly into the sun which was in the process of bullying the rest of the sky into paying attention to it. Everything was bathed in arctic blue light suffused with a scintillating golden fog. Itty’s hammerhead fingers were numb, his ears (predictably much too small for his head) fragile as the flimsy layer of ice that epidermizes a pond after only one day of snow in late November and aswarm with his own panicked breathing. He had a strong hunch that the gelatinous liquid filming his eyes had frozen solid, and he was just beginning to contemplate the ramifications of this potentially compelling fact when he discovered himself instead examining a poor pale imitation of a vast canvas by Mondrian, geometric shapes plotted beneath him all the way to the horizon, bleached green rectangles, whitish squares, beige rhomboids, and it occurred to him he was in a slow tumble through the afternoon. Across some of the configurations networked turquoise and brown dendrites. Tiny tin barn roofs glittered at the edges of others. He could just make out the one-street assembly of erasers and thimbles that was (if he’d been in a position to consult a map) Iron Lightning, as well as the pinpricks of sunlight waterbugging on the rural road straight as a Prairie State county line that sliced across the landscape beneath his feet. It was difficult for him to comprehend how depressingly fast all this was coming into focus, how quickly the atmospheric shades of blue were darkening from cornflower toward ultramarine, how swiftly the planet was swooping up to shake his pygmied hand, but it was as simple as the tint of his black hair corkscrewing from his forehead how unlucky he would have been had he not at that moment happened to glance up from his ever-accelerating freefall to behold, perhaps some three hundred feet east of him, the tanned body of the flight attendant who, less than a minute ago, had been rapping on his lavatory door and asking, in a sense, if she might share his travail.

Itty didn’t know that her name was Sharon Weingarten, nor that she was the sister of Matilda Weingarten, the woman who with the help of Wally Klott had set in motion this Rube Goldberg contraption of terrible luck, nor that she had grown up not nine miles north of Itty’s hometown of Beaverville, Illinois, in Aroma Park, her one childhood wish having been to attain escape velocity from that dull rat’s hole of a dung heap, as she mixed-metaphorically conceptualized it, nor even that this very morning she had performed various intricate perversities (that, if brought to court in the state of South Dakota, would prove punishable by jail terms of not longer than, respectively, six months, three years, and half a decade, with the possibility of early parole in each case) with a young bisexual computer analyst with this cute way of fingering his ear lobe when he talked who she’d picked up in a Chicago bar the night before and who was at this instant on his lunch break in a broom closet of the Lakeshore Drive office building where he worked boffing an even younger computer analyst (not bisexual in the least) whom he’d been hitting on for months, a little tackily if not just short of pretty disgustingly harassingly, unknowingly gifting him with various transmissible (though not, as the battery of tests would later confirm, deadly) sexual diseases he’d contracted just hours before at the O’Hare Airport Hilton from none other than Sharon Weingarten herself, who was, even as she fell, oblivious of them, thanks last week to that jerk of a first officer with the pouty lower lip who flew the O’Hare-Dulles route and made you feel more base than a python’s belly if you ever refused him even a cherry LifeSaver. No. All Itty knew was that her hair, now unbunned, bloomed above her head in a tongue of blond flame as she plunged, that her uniform was gone (as was for that matter Itty’s soiled shirt, thin black tie, cufflinks, and, now that he gave it some thought, his left wing-tip shoe), having been ripped off by the supreme vigor of her meteoric descent, so that she currently wore nothing but those endearingly frayed Fruit-of-the-Loom panties which complemented what with great statistical probability was a matching Fruit-of-the-Loom bra, though of course Itty couldn’t discern the brand name — all of which made her look horribly unprotected, bone-crackingly cold, like someone you should put your arms around immediately and nuzzle and warm.

Which, his heart once more netted like a rare African butterfly and drawn down his esophagus, Itty did, or tried to do, by effecting a sort of tenacious sidestroke in her general direction, closing the space between them by perhaps three-quarters of a yard before a muscular gust of wind punched him back another ninety feet and caused him to doublecheck his relationship to the earth which was presently above his anvilic head, only to have this dawn on him: that he could already make out individual patches of purple sage amoebaing across dead spans of dirt, and shadowy movement behind windshields of swiftly enlarging pickups stirring cotton balls of dust into the atmosphere as they glided along the rural road now above him, now below, not a propitious sign by anyone’s standards, while Itty briefly righted himself again and located Sharon and this time serendipitously caught her eye, or at least sincerely believed he did (the azulene vacancy separating them being expansive), for what might have been if he were exceptionally generous something like seven seconds, but which seven seconds were somehow plenty long enough, given his situation, given the way just about everything had been heretofore going, because in that millennium he realized something that changed his life.

He realized that Sharon’s face wasn’t shockingly terrified by the negative theology whirling around it, wasn’t tugged into one of those classical tragic masks by the unutterable surreality of this particular interval in her life, as Itty might have guessed, no, but was fabulously calm, fabulously composed, her gaze steady, her eyes (quite possibly parrot green, and, if they weren’t in fact parrot green, should have been) unsurprised by where she happened to find herself right now and why, as if like a dolphin skimming the shockwaves of a ship’s bow she had already adapted her body and mind to this new environment and made some kind of important decision about her place in its ecosystem, which realization had an instantly soothing effect on Itty, who kicked into his sidestroke again and swam toward her and (suddenly) the idea of love, only again to be clipped by a scud of wind. He paused, caught his breath (as best he could), and thrust out once more, imagining himself a salmon nosing upstream, but it didn’t do much good, the wind being not unlike a logging truck hustling a Pinto off a highway, and yet, somehow, he kept his gaze connected to hers for five seconds, six, maybe even seven, and, in the end, just as the notion invaded Itty’s brain that maybe he was misreading this picture, that maybe she wasn’t so much unsurprised as ultimately surprised, maybe not so much serene as, well, stunned , Sharon wowed him for the last time. Although it remained hard to tell for sure from this hefty distance, Itty was ninety-nine-and-nine-tenths percent convinced that she smiled at him, smiled , that her lips parted, that her teeth caught the sun in a genuinely humane salute, just a millisecond before she stretched her arms over her head as though about to yawn, palm greeting palm, bent at the waist, touched her toes, and gracefully somersaulted into a streamlined swan-dive toward that point of land roughly triangulated by the towns of Iron Lightning, Thunder Butte, and Faith, South Dakota, leaving an astonished if transiently content Itty rotating like a splayed starfish increasingly far above her.