At Night I Fly

By Scott Hughes

I don’t know how or why. Don’t really care. I do it, and that’s what matters. It’s no dream. I’m no monster or angel. I have no wings. With the moon I rise and take flight. Soaring over darkened houses and lawns, I climb higher each night. Just below clouds, then through them and over. Up and up until ice crystallizes on my lashes. Tonight I go further, break the atmosphere’s grip, and find the vacuum of space doesn’t kill me. Here now I fly without breathing, circling the Earth like a satellite, a shooting star that will never decay.

     
Scott Hughes’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, One Sentence Poems, Entropy, Deep Magic, Carbon Culture Review, Redivider, Redheaded Stepchild, PopMatters, Strange Horizons, Chantwood Magazine, Odd Tales of Wonder, The Haunted Traveler, Exquisite Corpse, Pure Slush, Word Riot, and Compaso: Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology.