“The shirts you’d tailored make him unbeatable. The laundry had been repeating to put a note that they got worn out. He has pretended not to see and kept treasuring them as his precious wings.”
When I finished the last word with thanks, he came out of the fitting room. Next voyage with new shirts.
It must have been a hot summer back then, when I could fly. I was maybe seventeen. My room was on the ground floor, facing the back. Night after night I lay on the bed and imagined myself flying. That was a strain, I tell you. Usually I’d lie perfectly still for an hour before my body rose from the bed. Very slowly I rose, until I hovered a meter or so off the floor. Then with swimming strokes I propelled myself through the open window. Outside I flew higher and higher, over the garden fence, over the clothes-lines, over the roof tops and the apple-trees on the outskirts of town. The entire flight I felt the wind’s touch on my skin, and sometimes I heard voices, calling.