Fleeting — Flash Fiction Version

A slight, almost imperceptible breeze moves listlessly through cattails and sagebrush, barely stirring the surface of dark blue-brown sludgy water. The sun beats down on the water and the cracked earth unforgivingly. The deafening roar of silence is only disrupted by the occasional cricket.

Just beyond a dirt, barren yard, through vertical steel bars, still, staring, glazed eyes, are windows to a dispirited, excavated, almost absent soul. A tethered human.

A fragile layer of numbness covers raging chaos. Eyes see nothing but a beige hum. Scenes of the past metamorphose in the inner recess of the mind. An innocent gesture of kindness, feet stepping quickly, one in front of another on the black concrete, a genuine smile. Then, a hoarse voice screaming, sound waves of accusations hurtle against the eardrum. Then, flashing lights and silver cuffs around the wrists. Her voice smothered under the burden of her brown skin and the unfortunate circumstance of her chromosomes.

Images whirl, mutating alternately courtesy of an infinite supply of what-if’s and never-again’s. A delayed, anguished scream suppressed into oppressive silence by blank, concrete walls. Purpose, chances of protest, any form of objection, vanquished by equally impermeable humans existing soullessly a few feet away.

A slight movement in the high peripheral snags her vision. A dark gracefully moving line to focused, deliberate flight, rapidly magnifying. Everchanging valley depth of undulating wings. A white, feathery helmet and fish hook beak, protruding. A bald eagle.

Pupils flinch. Those glazed eyes reluctantly lift, sluggishly following the movement. Menacing, piercing, all-knowing eyes come into focus. Inadvertent eye contact, almost a mistake, and spider silk strands erupt between them. And suddenly, she is transfixed, transported, transformed.

In another dimension, she feels. She is the eagle. Wind slices over her crown, sifts through her arriculars, shears through her coverts. Her wings pump joyously, powerfully, deliberately. Her cool feathers are warmed at the base by blood, thundering a frantic one hundred and twenty times a minute. Droomph. Droomph. Droomph.

She sees everything. Dry blades of grass in the barren yard and cracked earth. She has purpose, needs to find sustenance, will stop at nothing. Her razor vision sweeps the land, missing nothing. Freedom; fleeting, virtual freedom, almost feels forbidden. Yet still freedom.

The desolation has sucked the soul of the place, not even an appetizer in sight. She circles and spirals, searching. But the bald eagle jarringly soars out of sight, towards the bluer pastures of the nearby marsh.

The eyes fall, glazing over again. The heartbeat slows, returning to sustain an energyless human. The brief flame of freedom extinguished. And the bald eagle moves on, unknowingly leaving the place decorated with a depiction of itself. An indifferent embodiment of that vanished freedom.