It started the day Valentina tripped and did not fall.
She was coming down the steps from the verandah into the garden, carrying a gateau with more candles on it than she cared to think about, and her toe caught on a cracked tile. She pitched forward, desperately trying to avoid dropping the cake (and ruining everything, as the voice in her head quickly cried), and succeeded in keeping it on the plate. Only when she was sure the cake was saved did she notice that she hadn't yet hit the ground. Knees that should have been scuffed and bleeding were fine, and the party dress that should have been dusty from the path was not.
She looked down, and when she saw that she was hovering eighteen inches above the garden path she got a fright, and this time she did fall. She arrived at the table cake-less, her knees scuffed and bleeding, her party dress dusty from the path. Her friends laughed the cake disaster away, and mistook her preoccupation for much of the rest of the evening as being about the falling cake, when the truth was it was about what had happened just before the falling cake.
An hour into the evening she decided it must have been a mistake of some kind, that she had imagined it, or dreamt it, or that during the fall she had had a burst of mental acceleration that had made it seem as if time had stood still, she shook free of the preoccupation, and resolved to enjoy the party. She did, and at the end of the night her friends left her with hugs and kisses and promises that they would go out and this time actually eat some cake. Valentina laughed, said her goodbyes, and when the house was empty she went to bed.
In the middle of the night she accidentally walked out the window.
When she did not fall to the flower-bed below she realised she was dreaming, and hovered for a moment before moving herself, without being sure how, out over the railing and into the road. Fifteen feet above the road, to be exact. She flew down the road at that height, skimming under the leaves on the long avenues, dodging electrical cables and phone wires, straying in and out of the pools of light cast downwards by the intermittent streetlamps. She took a turn onto another road, and when that went well she flew all the way to the city centre, until the bright lights there spooked her and, fearing she would be seen, she glided home. She drifted through her window and touched lightly down on the carpet. She sat on the bed, smiling wide, and waited to wake up.
But she didn't wake up. And, after a while, she realised that the reason she hadn't woken up was because she wasn't asleep.
This puzzled her, because she knew that people could not fly, and yet she had flown, while awake. (Or so she was coming to believe.) She stopped smiling and asked herself, with her most serious face, if she had really flown, fully awake, around town.
And the answer was yes, she was sure that she had, and the smile returned as, filled with joy, she took a step towards the window, and the step turned into a walk, and the walk turned into a run, and with a single jump she bounded onto the window-ledge and leapt into the night sky.
This time she did not restrict herself. She flew straight up, pirouetting as she went, tumbling and rolling, dancing in the heavens. When she looked down she could see the whole town laid out before her, and she realised she was cold, but the cold did not dampen her joy. It drove her to move again, and she rose higher, chasing the clouds, driving through them, feeling them soak her like invisible rain - and then she was through them, above them, watching the moonlight on the mallowscape below her, and still she rose, high even above the clouds now, the cold bitter but her heart unstoppable, and she found herself marvelling at a slowly dispersing airliner condensation trail, that seemed to glow phosphorescent...
The 747 when it went by below her was faster than she would have thought possible, and even as the shockwave from its passing sent her tumbling the thought finally went through her head.
"Valentina," it said. "Of course you cannot fly".
And she realised that the voice was right. Who was she to think she could fly? She was human, after all.
She stopped flying.
At that altitude, or any altitude, the act of stopping flying is exactly the same as the act of starting falling, so that's what she did.
She plummeted.
Down through the moonlight and into the soft caress of the clouds, but they did not hold her and she fell through them, breaking the surface below, with the lights of the city separating and growing brighter at a rate that was really rather alarming.
Her stomach rolled and she clawed at the air, but because humans cannot fly she could gain no purchase, and as she fell the last few hundred feet, attracted at terminal velocity to the planet on which she had stayed firmly rooted for as many years as there had been candles on her cake, she resigned herself to dying, and steeled herself for the end...
And at this point the realisation came to her. "But I flew."
She opened her eyes. A streetlight above her buzzed idly in the humidity of the early summer's night. She breathed in, and allowed her hand to fall behind her.
Her finger-tip touched the hard concrete of the street, eighteen inches below her. She wobbled, but did not fall, and carefully she willed herself to pivot, until her feet touched the road. With a stumble she righted herself, and in a moment she was standing in the street, right outside her house, in soaking-wet pyjamas.
She looked up. Far above, the lights of a passing plane blinked.
Valentina closed her eyes.
She watched the kaleidoscope of blood coursing through her eyelids as her brain tried to make sense of the data her rods and cones were sending her.
Then a grin spread across her face.
She flew back in the window, changed her pyjamas and went to sleep, eighteen inches above her bed.
