Birds of a Feather

Martha Glieb pressed a button to finalize the sale, and the clerk slid the transparent plastic box across the marble counter towards her. Martha beheld the shining glory of her very own TranZip. Like a faceless wristwatch, it gleamed with the chrome promise of a new life, one worthy of the decade of dedicated toil it had taken to achieve. She imagined it was the same light that had shone off a Cadillac fender in her grandfather’s day.

The thought of the car reminded her of her dad, who always loved automobiles and drove them long past when they were legal, always letting her ride shotgun with her hand or her face out the window. It was on one of these road trips that she had seen TranZippers for the first time, and when she’d first discovered Guru Sandi.

When she was eight years old, her father had driven for hours along the coastal highway in British Columbia, the smell of the ocean mingling with wisps of cloud, the two of them in an old station wagon with wood paneling that still ran on gasoline and had probably been shooting benzopyrene into the air. She smiled to think of that now, how foolish things had been. They finally parked and got out of the car and walked through a lush green park until she saw the first view that literally took her breath away, the splendor of the Lions Gate Bridge.

And then she’d heard it: that telltale popping sound that soon she would know firsthand, like a cork coaxed out of a bottle of expensive champagne. They were slow at first, a few individual pops that made her turn her head, which is when she saw Guru Sandi, swathed in white linen, running gracefully across the grass. Then the popping sounds came faster and in clustered bursts, until she and her father were in the middle of what felt like a flock of birds, all with gleaming silver bands around their wrists. They shimmered and spilled around her, shifting directions in an instant, holding hands and laughing. They looked incredibly happy.

“Where are you going?” she’d called out in her small voice to a willowy man with an afro.

“Wherever we want to,” he said. “Come on!”

But when Martha looked at her father expectantly he slowly shook his head, and before she knew it the popping noises started again, and they had all zipped away to somewhere else. That’s when she decided she would one day join them.

The lady behind the counter grinned down at Martha with a serene radiance. “Congratulations,” she said. “May you zip far and free.” It was a line from the commercial, but something about the way she said it sounded genuine.

Martha had worked hard to be able to afford this. How many times had she said no to a date, or an evening out with her friends, because the money she could spare she was saving for this one thing? You had to sacrifice to get what you wanted, that was a truth she had learned early and well. She would sit alone and stare out her condo window at the new hovering Gardiner Expressway or the LightSpeed Train station, thinking about the places she would zip to when finally she could afford the device. Her eyes often glazed over, and sometimes she fell asleep curled up in her chair, imagining the distant corners of the globe.

When she got home, Martha placed the TranZip on her wrist and felt a small thrill pulse through her. She familiarized herself with how to set the latitude and longitude coordinates, and where the zipping button sat on the band. Now all she had to do was wait. She had subscribed to Guru Sandi’s channels on every social media platform, and any moment now she would get a notification about where the flock would be heading next. Then she could set her TransZip and join them and begin her new life.

After two and a half anxious hours, it came. They were heading to a location close to Drumheller, no doubt to gaze at giant dinosaur bones before heading off to some tropical locale. Martha took a deep breath. This was it.

She entered the proper numbers and pushed the button. The noise it made was like something heavy and metallic whistling through air, except muffled, because she was moving inside of the sound. Martha closed her eyes. She focused on her breathing.

And then she stopped. She was standing on solid rocky ground beneath an unfamiliar sky. And she was alone.

She had arrived too late. All she saw before her was barren rock. There were indications that the TranZippers had been here—more litter than she would have expected from enlightened travellers, really—a wrapper from an energy bar, some clumps of rice and chickpeas, and even a crushed plastic water bottle. That surprised Martha most of all. How could anyone who followed Guru Sandi have brought a water bottle and then dropped it?

What was a destination after all the travellers had left? Nothing but an empty space. Martha stood there, breathing it in. Bereft. Feeling like nothing so much as that little girl she’d been in Vancouver all those years ago.

Pop. Marsha heard the sound behind her but almost didn’t dare to turn and look.

“Hey,” a voice said. A male voice. “Am I too late?”

Marsha turned around and saw a broad man with a beard and sparkling eyes. She shrugged. She gestured weakly with her hands. “I guess we’ll wait for the next notification?”

“Forget them,” he said. “We can go our own way.” He offered her his hand with a shy grin. As she reached for it, she heard a few more pops behind her.

Martha held out her arms. “Come along, little birds,” she sang out to the new arrivals. “There are so many more places for us to go!”

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