Wildflowers

It starts in small, indiscernible spurts. Little lapses of time where I have left my body and returned to it again, a flickering of a dream that’s forgotten the moment I wake. But I continue to practice, and soon I can leave and return more easily and for longer stretches, the memories of my experiences in the Second Space, as I have come to call it, growing less blurred around the edges.

The hands are always the starting point. I wiggle my fingers, moving them in rhythm the way a conductor swishes his wrists, until they come unstuck from my physical body. I feel them float above me without gravity, and then I move to my forearms and into the creases of my elbows, following the line of my shoulders and down through my back. The stomach is the hardest part to unstick (my theory is that it’s because of all the organs that must be left behind when one fully projects), so I usually skip it and move to my feet, up my legs and then my hips, until the stomach is the only thing left to separate. Sitting up is easy, but I have learned not to twist my spine and search behind me for my own body, still lying splayed out on my bed. The body does not like to be separate from the mind, and the disconnect is disorienting enough without the visual reminder.

There is always a moment, the Last Moment, where I can choose to resettle my astral form back into my body and abandon the project. It is the moment before I swing my astral feet over the side of the bed and fully untether myself, bound by only a single, invisible string to guide me back home. This Last Moment never gets less terrifying, but I broach it each and every time, because this is the way to get what I want.

I once saw a video of a stout that killed a rabbit ten times its size. “Stamina is not enough,” drawled the narrator in his lilting British accent. “It requires patience and a well-placed bite.”

He is easy to find, always walking the same corners of his small and filthy world, always filling up the space with too much of himself because no one has ever bothered to tell him that he can’t or shouldn’t, that what he is doesn’t deserve even an inch. I have been watching him for a long time, ever since I began this astral dance, so I know his habits. He is where he always is at this late hour: sleeping like the dead, wrapped in his high thread-count sheets and as still as a puddle frozen all the way through. I like to watch him like this. It only takes one well-placed stomp to shatter ice.

There’s a humming to this world, a vibration I wasn’t in tune with until I began to astral project. I have not skipped a day since I began, and I imagine that even after my initial goal in pursuing this practice is complete, I will not be able to stop. Once a bird learns to fly, it cannot hunt any other way.

Something shifts outside the window, a glint of silver caught in moonlight seeping in through half-closed curtains. I envy the way he can sleep so deeply without the full weight of the dark around him. Ever since the day his long arms wrapped too tightly around me, the dark is the only place where solace can reach me, and even then it is fleeting and sunken and the shadows move on the walls.

The glint outside the window is a knife, and the woman who wields it is a stranger to me. She searches along the sill with her fingers for a moment, intent on using the blade to unlock the window, but stops when she realizes it’s already open. The woman huffs, disbelieving. I mimic the sound unconsciously, watching as she opens the window inch by inch until it gapes wide enough for her to slip through. Men like him never think they can be touched.

She hasn’t bothered to wear a mask, perhaps hoping to get caught. Auburn hair curls around her shoulders in sleepy little ringlets. She draws closer to the bed, closer to him, and I know the look in her wild eyes. I am accosted with the same one each time I stare too long into the mirror.

The woman readjusts the knife in her hand, searching for the perfect way to plunge it into the sleeping man’s sternum.

Hello.

I let my voice filter out from me like a breeze, a soft thing. The woman startles, her body coiled to spring. She waits. Slowly, gradually, I move the air around me, rearranging protons and neutrons like flecks of wet paint. I know the exact moment she sees my form begin to shimmer and solidify before her, and I watch her face morph from shock to terror to disbelief as her eyes meet mine, as she sees the easy way I hold my hands out to her, a call for peace.

“Who are you?” she whispers, redirecting her knife to point at my jugular, even from across the room.

I know what he’s done to you. He did it to me, too.

The woman’s face crumples, the air pressed out of her limbs. She almost sags. I move to catch her, even knowing that I can’t from where I am inside the Second Space. The woman steadies herself without my help, her spine realigning to stand taller than she was before. “If you know, you shouldn’t try to stop me,” she says finally, voice sharper than the knife grasped tight in her hand. The man in the bed rolls over in his sleep, as if sensing a threat in the room. But those born with the world at their feet never truly learn to walk through it, and he sighs deeply and is still once again.

I shake my head, now standing only a few feet away from the woman. “I don’t want to stop you,” I say. “But I hear that revenge is best when shared.”

The woman tilts her head at me, one of those lazy ringlets brushing against her cheek. She grins, toothy and cavernous. “I’m Iris,” she says.

“Lily,” I answer. We almost wake the sleeping man with our soft snickers. “Seems he has a type,” I say once we’ve recovered ourselves.

Iris says “Irises look pretty, but they’re poisonous.”

“Calla lilies make you vomit,” I counter.

I take Iris’s hand and she takes mine, and together we guide the knife home.