Terminal Velocity

Sixty seconds.

Twelve seconds folded over five times.

She could make origami out of the time if she pulled her legs to her chest and cinched them with her arms but this wasn't about beating the clock. It was about perspective. It was about tasting the flavor of something irreversible.

How sweet it was.

Aisa closed her eyes. It had been tempting her since the moment she leapt from the door of the plane but higher up she had wanted to feel the cold burn her eyes. This was a higher altitude dive and she wanted to feel the cold turn to needles on her skin. Aisa wanted to cry into the atmosphere and know she'd come back down as rain.

She'd jumped early. Run right out of the plane door without her parachute. It was a purposeful thing, the unclipping her chute and leaving it behind, but running out early was a happy accident. She wanted to run painted blue nails through the cirrus clouds.

It turned out that they ran knives through her instead.

Ice crystals dragged their teeth across the bits of skin exposed to the air and elements. Little droplets of blood slipped upwards from her cheek, whipped away. Under the mask assisting her breathing, she smiled. Those too would be swallowed by the atmosphere and fall back down. Her blood would become rain. It would feed and nourish some sorry little sycamore searching for iron.

Now her eyes were closed and the world didn't feel light.

She felt heavy.

Unable to breathe. The wind pressed against her diaphragm, fought against the thin lining of muscles surrounding her bones. And she was tearing through the air. Ripping it to shreds.

Empathetic towards the air. She smiled again at the strangeness of it. She was a giant even like this. Millions of little things were dying at her touch. Bacteria on her skin. Creatures in the sky. Bugs would perish. Maybe a flower or two if she landed in a pretty field.

Lazy brown eyes slipped open again, blinking at the limitless horizons.

Living giants killed and dead ones nourished.

What would her blood do? What would the goo her organs liquified into nourish? Flowers? Grass? Weeds? Another handful of tears escaped her, floating up and then dripping down, chasing her heels.

Aisa hoped as she fell spread eagle through the sky that she would land somewhere remote. Somewhere no one had any chance of finding her. Then the little things would live, live, live the best little life they could and one million destinies would be shifted, changed, altered for the better.

At least, for the richer.

The world was so vivid like this. Large and small, cold and welcoming. It was one thousand juxtapositions all woven together until the contrast blended back into one.

Tired bones and sore muscles sagged into the invisible hands of the wind. It held her up, dropping her slowly until the air was breathable.

Aisa ripped the mask off, wrapping it beside a cut string fashioned into a bracelet on her wrist. It made an ungodly sound as it caught the wind. Something like a propellor and exiting gas. She laughed loudly, abs clenching around the joy but the sound couldn't escape over the wind. It couldn't even try.

She inhaled deeply.

Cold, crisp air filled her lungs and fizzed in her veins with absolute clarity.

The vision was oddly still and unchanging despite the roaring wind in her ears. She closed her eyes again, listening to the stories caught in the atmosphere.

Ten seconds would bring her lower, somewhere warmer.

And it did.

Aisa laughed again, louder this time. Enough to breach the static scream of the wind. What a lovely sound. A sound of bells ringing, ringing, ringing through the sky.

The ground rushed.

It was larger than the horizon. Thick and fat and everywhere all at once. Textured. Dim the way low altitudes always seemed to be.

Every nerve began to scream with pleasure. Scream with the joy of pure freedom. White fire raced through her flesh. The blood on her cheeks flew more quickly skyward and the pressure throbbing in her neck increased until she could smell blood.

Here came the end.

The slender body kept cutting through the open, a thrill of adrenaline making everything brighter than it should have been. The heart between her ribs thundered and sheer, violent ecstasy pounded through her blood. Aisa smiled. It was always this way.

They always enjoyed the dream.

The sixty seconds of immutable invincibility.

The knot of pleasure always grew, always burst like a supernova at the end of the line as though some hidden section of the brain knew the dream was reality and it could do nothing but hand over a blinding light as a trophy. As a distraction.

But the girl in the passenger seat would never know. She would never see the accident coming. Instead, she would be blissed out until the end, high on a cocktail of chemicals gushing from her mind. She was just a passenger and Aisa was driving her car.

It was nice, driving that car for the other girl, giving her this pleasure rolling in easy waves through her nerves and blood and brain.

This was her favorite pastime these days, body-hopping.

The body was going to die regardless of the chute. It should have died in the plane but Aisa stretched the limit of things. She slipped into the woman and ran her out the door.

She fell spread eagle through the atmosphere. It was almost lewd how easily the woman relinquished control.

And here came the supernova.

The end of sixty seconds.

Here came the burst of inner light still high above the ground, high above the gruesome nature of dying giants and bored fates.