We flew for so long that I forgot I didn't belong in the sky.

I passed birds and we seemed to share a camaraderie, creatures bound to the unforgiving air. We flew for so long that I couldn't pretend not to see Odysseus strangle one after another of these birds, wrenching from them whatever food was in their mouths. For so long that I had to ask if I could have some and when she said no, I had to strangle one myself.

It felt strange in the way I think maybe a hit and run would. With every motion, I thought, how can I possibly get away with this? But when I snatched the bird, his comrades did not attack in formation as I'd expected. When I snapped the neck, there was no reprimand. Even when I dropped the dead, feather-silky body to the earth, there was no frantic, revenge-bent scream from below. Here was the sky, truly a lawless frontier. As I ate that bird's bit of raw fish, I shivered with the truth that if my neck were to snap up here and fall into the sea, not a single soul would ever know about any of it. Crazy Acacia, they would all say, she's finally snapped, finally run off to Tokyo or New York or one of those places she always wanted to visit. Reckon she'll be renting a studio to paint with her own blood by now, just the sort of attention whorish modernism she so enjoyed.

Yes, I was hungry. My stomach echoed with emptiness and soon, stealing from the birds wasn't a choice but an impulse. But even more than I was hungry, I was cold, so cold. We flew over oceans -- well, who knew that an ocean could be so long and so relentlessly frigid? I shivered along through dense clouds, soaked with freezing dew in the mornings with the lazy evaporation of waters into the sky, into me.

Odysseus did not seem cold, and every time she came catapulting into my path again, she was dry and downright jolly. "The sky," she said to me. "What a place!" And though I'd been gearing up to complain about the cold and the hunger and the aches in my muscles and demand to know exactly where we were going and how long it would take, I'd feel all that discomfort and fear trickle out of my mind, blinded by the disarming light of her smile.

She didn't seem entirely unhappy to see me, most of the time. Sometimes she'd even be delighted, having forgotten I'd come with her at all. "Well, I say!" she exclaimed in one such instance. "It's you again!"

When she came to travel beside me, I stayed as close by her as she'd allow. I brushed accidentally against her with frequency, enjoying the shock of warmth between us as her skin touched mine.

I did not see the fairy or my pet, but sometimes I thought I saw them glimmering on the horizon ahead of me, waiting. It may have been the fatigue, my weakened mind inventing shapes.

To say I was not afraid would be a lie. I feared exhaustion of my own limbs, the way I found myself, sometimes, rocketing downwards, trapped in the dead weight of my sleeping self. I learned to clench my stomach in these instances and suspend myself, just long enough to gain back my confidence.

Being awake for days on end will do strange things to you, especially when you've no idea how many days it's been or how many more will follow. It became such a monstrously long time that I no longer talked to Odysseus when she dive-bombed in from whatever whiling adventures she'd been trifling in. I only drifted along with her, too tired to ask, "How much longer?" and have her answer, "To where?" and then have the whole thing of, well, how would I know where if you'd never told me at all?

But I did appreciate her small gestures, a bit of bread snatched from a seagull, a warm fur she'd nicked from . . . she didn't say, but I didn't care, I was so grateful to curl up my knees in that warm, shaggy thing. She pushed off from my shoulder sometimes when she left, saying, "Don't fall asleep!"and leaving a buzzing, living spot on my skin where she'd touched me.

For all the hunger cramps and pitfalls, there were beautiful things to be seen as well. We chased the sun across the sky each day, dim and pale as it was always in England (But who was to say what skies I'd flown over?) but spectacular for an hour each night as the horizon exploded into bleeding watercolors across a galactical canvas. There was that, and then there was the calming glint of clear waters below as the sun climbed back onto its shelf in the morning. There were forests, sometimes, with fog dozing above that looked like pictures from postcards. I saw frosted valleys of wildflowers, wild animals grazing at streams, checked blankets laid out in the park, all from so high above that I must have just been another pigeon to all of them, a very big, ugly pigeon.

I did feel a bit delirious after maybe a week. Well, it might have been a month, might have been a year, but I feel that a week is reasonable to say, a figure that won't prompt dispute. But then, after the fairies and the Neverland is the duration of the flight really the object of scrutiny?

But by that time, I hadn't the strength to doubt anything at all. Faith, trust, and pixie dust -- I had never trusted anything so hard in my life. I lolled about in the early morning chill, daring myself to imagine falling, but I could not. How could I ever, with all these strong hands pinning me to the sky?

That morning, Odysseus came spiraling out of the horizon line, a speck at first and then a blip and then an eclipse over the rising sun. She glistened, sparkling with water from head to toe, a broad smile cracking her sun-leatherned face. Who knew where she'd been, or if she'd ever tell me. But Hell if I cared at all by that point. In fact, I wasn't even surprised when she grabbed both of my hand squeezed them with her warm, dewy fingers. She was close enough to feel the humidity of wetness on her skin. She smelled of tossed wind and the sea, of showers in heavy rains and the dust of a war-torn sky. The moon had just barely crawled away as she clasped my hands, her eyes alight. She squeezed my hands and then said, "There it is."

I blinked. I felt tempted to curl up against her and just fall asleep, just force her to carry or drop me, but my sludgy, sleepless brain finally did process what she was saying to me and I felt a prick of mild relief in my heart. Things were too blurry for full out joy, for any kind of happiness. I did put my arm around her then, so consumed by the idea of rest that I could seem to support myself a second more. "Where?" I demanded. "Where?"

Odysseus, so cheered by her discovery that she didn't mind my arm around her shoulders, grinned and said, "Right there, straight into the morning."

I squinted out at the sky, watching two last waning stars twinkle in the dim grayness of the sky. But just past that, where the tip of Odysseus' finger pointed, there was a glow like a candle flame trapped in a clear river. I saw it, but only so fuzzily, so softly, that it might have been and might not have.

Only, the closer we got, the warmer I felt, the surer her heartbeat was against my shoulder, the stronger the sun shone over us. The more strongly I felt that this was not a new place, but rather, one retrieved from dreams long past. Not an alien body pressed to my chest, but one conjured again and again like morning glories, escaping and then enlivening as the sun shifted.