Flight feels like being a leaf falling from a tree. It's being a pendulum hung from the ceiling of the sky, swinging in full hypnosis across the moon. It's like swimming in a velvety blue womb, the voices of the stars reaching in to comfort you when you cry.

It feels that way all while being cold and harsh and ripping at your skin. The freezing air bit and tore my skin, but the pain was a thrilling one. My eyes watered and leaked, but my heart soared, so full of hot, aching life that it could have burst out of me of its own will.

Odysseus floated by on her back, joyfully at ease in her sky. She laughed at the look on my face. "Good fun, isn't it?" she chuckled. "If you spin like this and close your eyes, you can't tell if you're falling or not." She tossed herself into a free-flowing twirl, her arms extended. Childish delight dawned on her face as her body twisted to a stop, rotating in the empty sky.

The thought of it made my stomach clench. I blinked, seeing only an endless darkness and suddenly the sky was not a cradle but the deck of a rocking ship. I retched, slapping two hands over my mouth.

She didn't notice, still so caught in the joy of confusion. She spun like a gently suspended ballerina in a music box. Her hair, pieces falling loose from its braid, floated close to me like tendrils of a sea creature. I grabbed onto one, desperate for a reference point.

"Odysseus?" I muttered. I squeezed my eyes shut, but that only made it worse. I curled my knees up to my chest and buried my face in between them. I felt like an astronaut in her first space simulation, except, no one would let me out. "I'm going to be sick."

"Oh, don't be such a softie about it," the girl teased. She gave her head a violent shake, freeing her hair from my fingers. "Open your eyes, you aren't even going the right way."

I realized with a sickening jolt that she was floating away from me, a cruel smile illuminating her face. She kicked her legs like a frog in a pond and shot even further into the night, so small and impossible that she might have already been miles away. I couldn't tell. Depth is tough in space.

"Help me!" I cried. "Come back!"

I hear her chuckle as if through a long tunnel as she tumbled farther away. "Don't panic," her taunting voice advised. "You'll only fall."

I heard her on the window sill: if you doubt you can, then you won't be able to. At the very insinuation that I could fall, my body plummeted like a rock.

I guess these are the thoughts of people in crashing planes, people thrown through windshields, people caught in riptides with water welling into their noses. I never even wrote a will, is what I thought, but then, who would I have left it all to? And who would want any of it, anyway? Wilbur, poor Wilbur, doomed back to that awful animal shelter. But after how many days? At what point would anyone look for me?

"Would you quit screaming? Goodness."

Only then did I fall silent and, in the silence, realize that the wind had stopped whipping past me like indifferent hands. I felt something warm against me, solid and so different from the sensation of flight. I wasn't, in fact, flying anymore. I was being carried.

Odysseus rose slowly away from the buildings of some city, (Manchester? London? Paris? What was distance, what was that formula . . . speed over time?) the muscles in her neck jumping as she heaved me along with her. I blinked away tears, relaxing my muscles as her strong arms tightened around me, carrying me like a baby. I leaned my head against her bony shoulder and breathed in. At first, it was just the cold freshness of wind, but then a hint of her musk, a scent like fresh sprigs of mint and a beachy fetor of salt and dirt.

I had a feeling that I wouldn't be this close to her again for a long time. I pressed closer and breathed her in.

"Lady?" Odysseus was saying. "I ain't gonna carry you all the way."

Panicking with the sudden possibility that she could drop me, I sank my fingernails into her back and cried out, "No!"

"No, what?"

Clearing my throat, I sighed hard at myself, but didn't retract my nails from her skin. "I just meant, please don't drop me."

It was a long time before she answered me. We leveled out in the sky, bobbing slowly forward like parts on a conveyor belt assembly line. I didn't dare to look down again. Rather, I clung to the girl and let the baffling headache of the night stars swallow me up.

"I won't," she said.

I don't know if I believed her. I clung on a bit longer, wondering to myself where the light had gone and where it'd taken Margie. I hadn't seen her for miles. "Odysseus?" I asked. The wind snatched my words away into the night sky like flyers torn from a notice board. "That little light that you had? The one that my dog caught? What is that?"

"What is it?" Odysseus scoffed. In her mirth, it seemed to escape her that I was in any need of assistance. Her arms unraveled from the cradle that had rocked me so safely a moment ago. I gave a strangled scream, but to my surprise, the air caught me up again as though I'd landed on a soft cushion. I laughed with relief, my body buzzing with the energy that suspended me.

I didn't catch up to Odysseus again for another few minutes, pumping my legs foolishly about me while she sailed on ahead, graceful as a dolphin cutting through water. When at last she slowed herself enough that I could push myself up next to her again, I grabbed onto her arm, determined not to lose her again. The thin skirt of my nightgown flapped around my legs like a cold, silk mouth. "Yes," I said, determined not to let the conversation escape me again. "What is it?"

"What's what?"

"Do you forget everything?" I asked. She jerked suddenly to the left, jerking me and my clenched fingers along with her. My stomach dropped. I turned onto my back so that I could only see the stars instead of all the distance I had to fall. We were rapidly approaching a shoreline, a voluminous vocabulary of water stretched out before us with dark, inky depths. I kept my eyes on the girl's knuckles, dyed white in the moonlight. I clasped her wrist and wondered if I could get away with holding her hand.

She turned onto her back as well, copying my twist. She pried my fingers away from her right wrist, but she let me weld them back onto her left one. Crossing her legs, Odysseus leaned back into the night, rocking in the gentle breeze. Her cheeks were rashy with cold and I could feel her pulse jumping in her wrist. "Well, not everything," she told the moon. "No one could forget everything. Were you asking something?" She jerked her head toward me and all of a sudden, I had her eyes on me.

"Y-yes." I couldn't keep it up. I looked away and gripped her tighter, afraid that she might wriggle free while I wasn't looking. "I asked what your little light is. You have a name for it, don't you? I heard you say it."

"I haven't a clue what you're talking about." That's what she said at first, sort of in a defiant way. But it didn't seem to stick with her that she'd said it, a moment later. "Hestia's my fairy," she told me, her head lolling absently to the side. "She's quite a creature, isn't she?"

A tenderness had crept into her voice that felt like a little lick of fire blossoming in my belly. I grinned to myself, wished she wouldn't stop talking. What a delightful little child, I thought to myself. Forgetful, maybe, a petty thief, perhaps, but delightful. Which is why it took my so long to register that she'd said fairy. "You have a fairy?" I gasped.

"Sure I do," said the girl. The warmth leaked out of her voice, replaced by a twinge of annoyance. "I dunno where she's gotten off to. I oughta keep a better eye on her." And just like that, she pushed away from me and darted off, leaving me to wheel uselessly, endlessly, through the night sky like a bit of space junk drifting through the atmosphere.