PIPPIN
Carol Lindsay Marielle lay floating in the water below the sheer cliff wall, hundreds of swallows darting in and out of their mud nests, up, down, left, right, with lightning flicks of their wings. Frenetically, she thought, an apt use for her ‘word of the week’, assigned to her just yesterday by her mother. She would be sure to describe this moment to her parents at dinner tonight, dropping the word casually, impressing them with her ability to quickly fold such a word into her vocabulary. From flat on her back, the sky was a blue dome hung with brilliant white cumulous clouds, their underbellies flat as a ruler, as if a wire had been drawn clean and straight across their base so they might scoot above the earth with no friction. The white was of such intensity she had to squint to stare at the clouds, so she closed her eyes and waited for one to pass over her, the shadow turning the inside of her eyelids from blood orange to almost purple, then back again as the cloud moved on. She slowly drifted, pondering the rooted nature of humans, ever tied to the earth by their feet. What might it be like to enter the three-dimensional freedom of the atmosphere, released from the ground to look down on the world from the air? She knew people flew in airplanes and hot air balloons, she had seen it in National Geographic magazines, and had read that one could even see the curvature of the earth from high altitude. But to defy gravity and fly on one’s own power, like the swallows, to maneuver through and with the air, not just breathe it or feel it on one’s skin when the wind blows. She swam to the cliff and climbed to a ledge six feet above the water, causing an uproar among the swallows as they flew in alarm from their nests. She stood on the threshold of the rock shelf, curling her toes over the rim, focusing her vision on the far shore to calm her breath. Drawing her arms out wide, she launched herself as high and far as she could, eyes wide open, seeking the moment when she might escape the pull of gravity and hover in the atmosphere, even if just for a second. The afternoon wore on and Marielle climbed higher and higher up the cliff face, finding small footholds and rock projections from which to leap into the water, her stomach tumbling with every plunge. Each time she found a reference point on the 69
