FICTION
Lift by
Luciana Lopez
Everyone had the same choice: one thing to levitate, to lift up into the air, on their own. Whether once or a thousand times, for a moment or for years. One object each person could choose.
The spendthrifts quickly found things to lift: sagging parts of the body, for many. Or hair, a permanent windy dishevelment. A bicycle. A chair. A table.
It became easier to tell people's dearest loves: musicians and their instruments, artists and their brushes, photographers and their floating cameras. Prized objects, mementos given sudden prominence in the home. Remembrances of people now dead.
Some tried to levitate themselves, or their children. It didn't work; whatever had given this gift had its limits. A dog, a cat, a cow, a bear; not a person.
A market sprang up: my object of levitation, your cash. Or your body. Or your something else valuable. It was status among the rich to have entire rooms where all the furniture hovered gently a foot above the lush carpets. For all the cars lined up in a garage never to touch the ground again. For a confused tribe of dogs to live in space their canine heads had never imagined.
The deathbeds were perhaps the most desperate: someone who had held on, waiting to get better from some long illness, or recover from something small, or hit by a bus and breaking into a million irreparable fragments. That person, with something still unlevitated inside them, reaching out, touching something, anything, just not to waste such gold before everything went dark. Someone's hairbrush; someone's pillow; someone's wristwatch. Whatever came to the sight of clouded eyes.
The charming cajoled levitation out of others, scams or cults that promised some eventual reward. A crowd gathered once on the coast, trying to levitate the ocean. The water was too great: Puddles drifted into the air, but always slid back down, as slippery when held by the mind as when held by the hands.
Then, slowly, the more cautious, who had hoarded this power. Not that they were so different, in the end; many of the same objects rose up in their homes as elsewhere, with no more stately flight than anywhere else.
But a few choices inspired the admiration of their neighbors. Horses, startled to find themselves apart from their beloved earth. Some carpets, too, their owners lying back on the knotted threads, the currents shaping and reshaping the floating textiles. Shoes, impractical for balance, but beautiful nonetheless.
Some chose to give their gift to others: levitate a rope, a chair, a harness, something that could be used to rescue, oh, miners, hikers, children. Anywhere a dangling line or platform could be dropped to bring someone up into the visible world again.
Nor did I know what to raise up, until the day I saw you, weeping, in our study. The uncontrollable sadness had come on you again, the depths I've never shared. You shook so hard I could not even hold you when I tried.
Nothing helps you when the darkness has you, I know. No pill, no person, no words. I sat beside you, on the floor. The tile felt cold to me; I do not think you felt it. You moaned sometimes, a sound that I, with the good fortune of my chemistry, could never make. I wanted only to comfort you.
And then I saw your face, streaked, desperate, drawn. I did the only thing that came to mind: I lifted, as gently as I could, your troubled brow, the contracted furrows above your eyes, smoothed out the skin with my mind's gift. Raised you up the only way I could.
Luciana Lopez is a reporter for the Oregonian in Portland, Oregon. She's written for a number of newspapers and magazines, as well, including the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, XLR8R and Urb. She is currently working on her first novel, To the Day.