A Brushstroke

The bird did not beat its wings often now through the black night air and the girl clung to the feathers on its back to fight the dark that lulled her to sleep. There was a line she watched for, the line of land, the curve of a beach or rocks. But when the wings did beat, it was a rush and a heave that lifted her from below like the tossing of hay. She gripped again with feathers between her fingers and thought that they were not like grass but warm.

You are the last, her father said when he saved her tears in his palms. You are strong, Green Eyes. Much stronger than your old man. And he jumped off the roof to face the Antmen swarming through the fields, a flow of foreign oil, spreading like a spill over open land.

Feathers came away in her hands when the bird screamed and she grabbed the tendons that held its wings to bone and she felt the feathers peel off the bird like chaff, how they hit her in the face and arms, a hailstorm of bird-hair. And she knew then that she was found, that the bird would die, a snail in salt, from the volcanic ash they threw into the air. A torch ignited on her right, another opposite. And when she pushed off into the black night, the bird was also falling, a body inflamed and bleeding from the ash rushing over skin.

She fell and the night was not so cold. Not cold enough to kill her, nor would the ocean water take her life away. Her pursuers did not know her well: Green Eyes, a father’s daughter, a girl with a beating heart and strong arms. They did not hear her father speak with awful, earnest eyes. And she cried to think that life was not a field of weedy alfalfa, viewed from a bedroom window and ruffled under wind.

The torchlights appeared beside her, falling faster, and she watched as they streaked like shooting stars toward the black water below. She did not wait to see the lights strike surface like matches, and blanket the deep-water waves with impossible flame. Instead she swam herself upright in the air with pointed feet and crossed arms. Perhaps the flames would be too early or too late.

Too late. She fell through the inferno into water and when her lungs burned for air, the fire was gone. But she saw land as she fell, illuminated by the sea alight, waiting underneath the star she had followed. And Green Eyes, a father’s daughter, a girl with a beating heart and strong arms swam in that direction.