Flight (part one)

Flight

(noun) The act or an instance of escaping, as from confinement or difficulty.



He had wholly lost his natural self. He wanted to empty his mind of his day to day life, which meant absolutely nothing, a series of dull steps; bills, jobs, shirts, ties, meetings, neighbors, houses, the pretense of it all. If he carried on like this he was going to die. One turn of the wheel in his tiny Chevy Metro on the highway, off the overpass, into a semi-truck would work. Or the feeling he got as the Amtrak express train went by at the DC station, the rush of wind, the weight of the cars shaking the platform like nerves. The thoughts kept crossing his mind like static on a radio.

Wesley had wanted to become a dog for some time. It had taken months to let go of the fears that held him back from his own desires. The fear of what though? Here he was, an atheist, who listened to NPR and used to have a Mohawk, why should he feel anything even close to fear over the sexual? He’d spent countless hours looking at the boys online in their pup gear, begging, being petted, their butts in the air. The images he gazed at held him in a state of near hypnosis. He’d ordered his pup mask, paws, a tail, and a full rubber suit, waiting. A few more days, just a few more days. He wasn’t sure how this would feel, to be wholly encased in the second skin of some cybernetic seeming dog, but he grew hard thinking of it, and the feeling sustained him.

But now his days all went the same: the alarm clock rang, a shower or no shower, depending on how long he lie there not caring to wake, the hour drive to work, the eight hours at the desk, another hour for lunch, the hour drive home. It was dark by then. He seldom spent any time outdoors anymore, a few hours wedged in here and there on weekends, the trees, the grass, the sky and stars had all collapsed to a very small box, the four walls of his apartment, a memory from childhood, dust. Then, as a child, on those 300 acres in northern in Michigan, Wesley spent hours each day exploring the woods with his best friend, a dog. He had no brothers, no sisters, his parents often worked late. He did not care for school, did not run fast nor could he hit baseballs, or any other kind of ball, for that matter. He would rather sneak out into the woods, past the playground with a friend, and look for wild mushrooms, or ferns, and take off his shoes and walk up the stream-bed, feeling the gravel and the mud between his toes. He would stare out the windows of the classrooms with their flickering fluorescent pallor and smell of sour milk counting down the hours until he got off the bus and his big dog would run down the driveway to him, jump up on his shoulders, taller than he was, and shower him with kisses until he pushed him down, his tail wagging, his entire body a spasm of welcome and joy. Rex, a Collie-Malamute mix, was a mutt that had shone up on their porch one day, and his main companion. He saw more of the dog than most people.

Wesley would go inside, make a snack, then set out to the woods until his parents got home. They set out through the fields to the tree-line, past the garden, down the overgrown two-track, through the blackberry bushes to the big sand-hill. He’d lay there high up, looking up at the sky. In the spring, after the snow melted, he loved to trek through the marshes and stream-bed, coming home all muddy, smelling of musk and water. His dog always followed close beside him. Without friends in walking distance, or a brother, he was in the habit of talking to the dog, telling him his problems, sometimes crying, the dog looking back with sad eyes, head cocked. Sometimes, a pheasant would fly up in front of them and they would both jump in unison, as if tuned to the same set of vibrations. Once, they came upon a badger near dusk, lumbering along the path, which stopped and looked at them with its odd pointed head, and bared its teeth. The dog growled back, and they all stood frozen: the badger showed no sign of backing down. He grabbed the dog’s collar, and took off running in the opposite direction, seized with a strange fear. The image had stayed with him all his life, the small, fierce animal confronting them like some threshold he knew not to cross.

. . . . . . . .

Wesley sat in his car daydreaming, head cocked to one side to see why traffic had come to a total stop. He sat there in the heat, breathing in exhaust fumes amidst the rumbling engines, and closed his eyes: He was no longer near to the wild heart of nature, but in a place from which he needed to flee.