Day 78 Writing Short Stories

Dreamer

You know the sky is dark. You have known nothing but the dark sky full of smoke and ash. The ground, which once was said to be green and full of bloom, is now the same color as the sky. You have stopped looking for the bloom amongst the gray. Instead, you are looking for the bare skies—the spots where the blue should shine through.

They call you mad because you keep your eyes up. They think you are crazy with your theories, with your inventions, with your passion. But you know that without that passion you would go mad as mad as the others. You don’t want to be content trampling in the smoke and ashes.

You tighten the straps against the railings and look for the fire to lift you into the smoke clouds. You find your lighter. The one you dreamed of, the one which took you years to perfect. Now, everything is ready. So is the prod that harnesses the power of the cities that keep the greenhouses alive. One you made too. One that makes it all possible if your dreams are true.

You light the fire in the belly of the balloon that will lift you off the ground. The others have gathered to watch you. You give them a nod, and draw your goggles on. The world turns less gray and more brownish. You find warmth in that color, which is absent from the landscape.

As the fire burns hot, inflating the balloon, you dash around your basket, cutting off the straps, and you pray for all the saints and the spirits that once were tied to the flowers, the mountains, and the rivers to lift you.

The basket shakes, and then you are air-bound. The others turn smaller and smaller until they are hard to separate from the ground and its muted colors.

You lift your gaze to the sky and its thick clouds. You pull the strings to push and guide you with the winds where you want to go. You know the spot—the one that the top of the mountain spears.

The winds shake you, pushing smoke into your mouth. You draw a cloth around your face to keep the worst away. The balloon keeps pushing against the currents, steady and slow like you thought it would.

The mountain soon rises in front of you, and you push the fire into the belly of the balloon, forcing it to rise. The clouds make things invisible, and you listen to the sounds the world makes. An eerie, muffled silence governs everything, but you listen past that to the mountain and its rumblings. There it is: quiet, but present. You guide the balloon with the sound and your intuition, knowing the mountain and the clouds from your drawings.

The balloon lifts higher and higher, and your breaths are getting shallower, and your hands swell red with white spots. You know it’s time to reach for the prod. You lift it to the sky, to the thick bundle of dark gray, and fire the prod, releasing all its power.

It sparkles blue, yellow, and orange, but the gray persists. You make the prod sing its rattle again—again and again, until the cloud lets you through and you see the peak of the mountain against the blue of the sky. It is like a halo, casting light against the snowy peaks, and you cry.

—

Mind is a funny thing. It sometimes does what it wants to do without asking questions. Today, what I got was a comic fantasy about a voyage and return, written from a second-person perspective. What I wrote was a fantasy of a voyage and dreaming in a second-person perspective. So half and half. I’m happy about the story and the character, of you, dreaming away.

Thank you for reading! Have a day full of dreams ❤