The Firebird's Answer

 I nod. But when I step forward, toward the thread, and when I feel the rising mountain wind on my cheeks, this all seems utterly impossible again. 

Everyone goes to see the firebird at least once, or so I’m told. For most people it happens when they’re children.  or maybe they get lost and need to find the way home, maybe they go to ask the remedy for a parent or friend’s sickness. I had no questions when I was that age. I kept my head low and my thoughts lower. I thought, when I became a teenager, that I wouldn’t ever have a question so burning it required the firebird to answer. 

But in recent years I’ve felt the want, the deep, aching want, to fly. And I haven’t been able to talk myself out of it. And so I’ve come up to walk the thread after all. 

Like a bicycle. I shut my eyes; the trick, I think hard, is to just keep moving. Thousands have done this before me, who needed the firebird’s help; it must not be as impossible as it seems from solid ground. So long as I don’t realize how far I have to fall I’ll be fine. “Are you ready?” my guide prompts.

The sun has faded to a strip of gold on the horizon. The orange thread glows faintly in the navy night. I put out my foot. Just leaning out far enough to do so sends my head spinning with vertigo. The world below is so small I could be looking at it through a funhouse mirror; the cliff is so sheer it seems concave. I draw back and take a deep gulp of mountain air, working to steady my nerves. Look out. Not down, never down, or I won’t make it a single step.  

I try again. I fix my eyes straight ahead. But there’s nothing to see straight ahead; wherever the firebird sits, it’s too far away to glimpse from here. The clouds obscure the light of its flaming wings. 

The Firebird's Answer

Still. Better ahead than below. I put out my foot, jaw clenched so hard it hurts, and take my first step onto the thread. 

For a split second I’m certain it’s going to break. It dips more than it should, more than I like, and it makes a creaking sound like the boards of a ship caught in a windstorm. It holds, but only barely; tiny strands of it seem already to be snapping under me. I list dangerously to the right and almost overcompensate by toppling to the left. I throw out my arms for balance and come close to tumbling backward. Out. I make my other foot move. Stay in motion. Just like a bicycle. I’m not looking down, but I can still see the drop in my mind’s eye. I can still feel, as though it’s a real sensation, the air rushing past me as I plummet to the unforgiving rocks below.