dream between the mountains and the sea

the avalanche at the peak was relatively small, and many of us thought that that was all there would be. many of us were wrong, because a few moments later everyone started running downhill when someone spied the first trickles of rock lower down on the cone. we felt the ground shake beneath us and knew that the sliding and tumbling would not stop until it reached all the way into the valley. one raggedy old man ran much faster than everyone else, supernaturally fast.

i don't know what everyone did when they got to that last ledge, where the slope rose into a rocky lip and then dropped off into nothing for the last few hundred feet of mountain. i don't know what the old man did. some of them climbed, and they must have survived because we met later at the bottom in a crowd of weeping people looking for their friends.

when i reached the cliff, i turned into a large brown bird with broad wingtips, feathers fanned wide. there was no hollywood morphing, no squishing or stretching or feathers poking thorugh human skin; i just was a bird. two of the others turned into small red birds. hanging on the air was easy a yard above the slope, but fear squeezed my heart when i flew out over the edge and found myself hanging hundreds of feet from the earth. still, i was a bird, and birds are made to fly. the fear settled.

i remember standing on the mountain as a man, watching the bird-me struggle with that moment.
i remember my feathers, my tiny heart, my hollow bones.
i remember the rising air past the edge of the cliff, teasing me further from the earth.
i never found out about the old man. something tells me he turned out just fine. it couldn't have been his first avalanche.