A small blue bird enters a cage so giant that it disregards the bars. It swerves between them. It appears on the rim. It bobs and sidesteps. It hooks a claw around the metal, then raises its beak to pull itself up a vertical, making a studied, trundling progress. It halts near the top to adjust itself, and blinks its eye at Sam. Sam blinks back.
‘Winter?’
She should have gone to the beach for cuttlebones. She should find seed. Winter’s hungry; he’s been gone so long. But now she’s found him.
There are no birds here, not for a long time. It can’t be Winter. Its beak is silver and it blinks with one eye. Black and faceted, the eye sits in the centre of its forehead. It looks like plastic, but it’s made of light. She can see right through it. It turns, and the eye widens. Some inner, whiter circle blinks, scanning her.
Sam’s heard of these, but she’s never seen one. They’re supposed to be restricted to the military. She must be in the migraine, looking forward at another time. How long have they been watching her? The distant, formless eye. She is too tired to think when. Her head throbs with an alien pulse. She lies still and allows the algorithm to complete its calculation.
Slowly, she feels the metal return against her back, the push of gravity. The fibre of her hair where it catches against the steel. The luxury of confusion evaporates like mist. There is rust; there is sky. She’s way up in the distance. An elbow knocks against a chip of paint, the skin of her wrist is exposed to chill. The world has all the detail it has after a migraine, and more. The exquisite, imperfect finish of now. Her stomach growls, and she can hear it. There’s no whirring, no hum to cover sound. She’s hungry.
Sam sits up. The bird teeters back, its feet touch nothing. Its wings are folded, but it doesn’t fall. It hovers in the air between two bars in a way a budgerigar could not. And then it seals its eye and flicks away.
She reaches for the seat of the gondola, finds and fixes her eyes on a clear line of shadow, not ready to look down. Distantly, she hears a car moving, a dog barking. She thinks that earlier, while she dreamed, if she dreamed, they were howling. The sound is far enough away to be a memory.
She watches the line crawl across the paintwork until she’s certain that time is moving, and doing so at a reasonable pace. The shadow is crisp on the metal, then fizzed at the edges, then it resolves. So there is a sun. The earth is turning. It takes her a space the width of her thumb to make sure she is back in her body. She is out of practice. All her organs feel displaced. Rising through time has given her the bends.
On her knees, Sam inhales quickly. She leans out over the rim of the gondola, looks down at the little model town below. How well it resembles itself: an echo town, a ghost. Nobody in sight. The barn stands with its door wide open. A clock like a driving lesson, its hands at ten and two, a station where no rails wait for no train. The field of weeds that was never going to be an avenue is still just a field. Beneath her, the white knot of the Big Thing lies curved and ludicrous, its arms open as though to catch her. Its one eye smashed a lifetime ago. And all of it familiar.
She’ll be waiting.
She stands. Her head throbs but does not crack open. The gondola rocks. Sam reaches for her phone in the pocket of her jeans, wanting to check the time, but it isn’t there. It isn’t on the seat, or the floor of the cage, or under the seat when she kneels down again to look for it, her legs stiff like she’s been running. She looks around the rim of the gondola, but it isn’t there either. At the edge she looks straight down, and feels herself falling.
The ground comes up tilting. The whole wheel vibrates like a harp. Sam isn’t sure if it’s her body or the world. Whatever it is, it moves her for a few seconds, then it stops abruptly; the pulse of blood begins again. The wheel makes a cringing sound as it aches, attempts a turning, manages to move an inch or less. She reaches for her bag, rummages for the last of the water. She’s had worse headaches than this, worse pain. She doesn’t know how long she’s been out. It’s daylight now, the sun high in the sky, late morning, but without her phone there is no way to tell which morning.
The bars under her hands are icy. She tries to remember why any of it is happening, why it is all still here. Going forward, going on ahead, to warn them. Only Ivy, for some reason, she was angry, but she can’t recall it now.
Fish-like, the mind still flickers. Some image of an image, a backwards propulsion. A stump spoke, she thinks, or algae did. It was depthless.
The smell of asphalt lingers in her nostrils. Asphalt and death. That’s another time. Water and. Another time. Salt and. Another. A doll fallen in the road.
Some of this has happened, she feels certain; some of this will happen next. The trick is remembering which. Her eyes are fizzing.
And then there is a sudden elation, like she has inhaled something. Some noxious gas is lifting her.
She’s alive.
Alive now, in her body. Her mind, cracked open like an egg, an eye. The past, even days ago, is made by other people. There’s something else at the edge of her thinking, the way this throbbing pain replaced the shaking of – what was that, anyway? Some kind of vibration in the air. And what’s left is not regret but the residue of empathy, the pain of separation that refuses to heal. A longing for something not yet gone.
There’s still time. There’s always time. Its infinite credit squandered on days, on waiting, but now. Now.
She hasn’t eaten.
Everything looks normal. No rain, no fog, no nothing. She lifts her bag, drinks the last of the water, splashes it on her face. It doesn’t clear her head. Her hands are shaking from the migraine, or this height, or the other rattle, whatever that was. She feels different, oddly fearless. As if some knot has come undone inside her, loosened its constriction. Loosened her skin. Perhaps this is dying.
She slings the bag over her shoulders and tightens the straps. Empty plastic weighs next to nothing. She pulls up her hood, steps onto the rim of the cage, and begins the task of lifting her own weight down. Her limbs ache from the climb, an ache like memory. She keeps her eyes on the bars she needs to hold, one or two at a time. She moves down backwards, feet first, head up. Eventually, she finds that she is making progress. She looks down.
In the distance, just beside the hills, like a question mark at the end of a sentence, there is a tiny wisp of cloud.