Out of Body | Sara Dobbie

In the beginning, it didn’t always work.

Microscopic pinpricks of light dotted the blackness behind your eyelids, blending into kaleidoscopic colours as your heart rate slowed. A vertiginous rush swept from the tips of your toes to the crown of your head, and you would rise. Not the you lying in your double bed beside a blissfully sleeping human, but that other you made up of figments and clouds and dreams, of the distant past and the far-off future.

But when that phosphorescent, vaporous you reached the impossible hole in the ceiling, an ice-cold fear gripped the remnants of your mind, and your elastic soul snapped back to crash into the unconscious you in the bed. You opened your eyes, paralyzed, disoriented, until finally you found the control to part your lips, lungs gasping, clutching for ragged breath.

Practice makes perfect, you told yourself. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Each time you ventured a little higher, a little farther, a little longer. You drifted and hovered, like a baby bird in the springtime. You looked down on the roof of your house, of all the houses on the street. The terror you once felt dissipated in the cool night air, and you knew the freedom of flight. Once you figured out how to do it, you couldn’t not.

You soared overtop of the coursing river, you cascaded over waterfalls and then shot up into the farthest reaches of the atmosphere to sing amongst the stars. You told yourself you must remember to return in case the link between this you and that other you became severed permanently.

You visited the seven wonders of the world, circling the planet faster than an airplane. You investigated the surface of the moon. You pushed onward past Mars and past Jupiter, past the glowing rings of Saturn. Your landings became softer, and you could slip back into yourself like water pouring into a glass.

You got so good you could do it anytime you wanted. No need to wait for the witching hour, you did it in the middle of the day, in line at the grocery store, or on a bench in the park. You watched your cousin’s wedding from the apex above the altar, nestled above the pipes of the organ. At your neighbour’s funeral you floated high over the casket, and eavesdropped on the ghosts congregated in the back corner whispering in each other’s ears.

When the secretary across the hall found you in your office she was frightened by your blank stare and the stiffness of your torso. You heard her calling your name as if from another dimension, and you flooded back to find her asking over and over, where did you go? You did not reply, because how could you tell her you were at the top of the traffic lights at the corner of Central and Maine, watching the crows line up on telephone wires to pass the afternoon?

You wonder if your spirit is stitched to your heel like Peter Pan’s shadow. If it is, the threads are loosening, and you could disappear into some Neverland to become a lost woman. Someday, when your bones are brittle and your muscles ache, your children and your children’s children will be grown, and you’ll have no more mother or father. No sister and no brother, no more friends and an absent, dead lover. And then, if you drifted too far for too long, if you never ever returned, no one would mind at all.

Sara Dobbie is a writer from Southern Ontario, Canada. Her recent work has appeared in Janus Literary, Drunk Monkeys, Second Chance Lit, The Lumiere Review, and elsewhere. Look for stories forthcoming from Flash Frog, Sledgehammer Lit, and Emerge Literary Journal. Follow her on Twitter at @sbdobbie, and on Instagram at @sbdobwrites.