penguin dust

17 November 2002

Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a brick house in an average neighborhood with a dog and a cat. She had a safe, steady job as an insurance adjustor, paid her bills diligently and on time every month, and had superb credit. She owned a sensible car with a high consumer safety rating, which she purchased after doing careful and thorough research on safety reports, cost ratios, and which dealership would guarantee her the best warranty for the least amount of money. Monday through Friday, she would drive her sensible car twenty miles to work and back, arriving by 7:58 AM every morning and leaving at 5:02 PM every afternoon, even on Fridays. She rarely called in sick and only took vacations during the off-season, so as to get a better plane fare.

She would go out on Friday nights with a small circle of friends, most of them from her job at the insurance company where she worked. She would have a glass or two of wine, but never more than that. After all, she wasn't about making a fool of herself in public. On Saturdays she would have dinner with her parents at their house. Afterward she would do the dishes, chat with her mother for an hour or so in the kitchen while her father stared at the television from his recliner in the living room, and be home by ten o' clock. She would put the dog out, climb into bed with her cat, and drowse through the evening news until she fell asleep.

Everything in her life was orderly, neat, tidy. Safe. At 28, she had achieved the perfect balance between work, home, and play. A time and place for everything, and everything in its place. She derived a tiny amount of pleasure from this fact, although she was quick to remind herself that this was a talent of hers, and therefore she should be careful not to be prideful about it.

One Monday she woke up to her alarm at 6:00 AM, as she always did, and realized she wasn't looking forward to going to work.

This in itself wasn't that unusual. Work is work, after all, and she knew every job would have its ups and downs. We can't always have things as we'd like them. Not every job can be personally fulfilling, she told herself, and isn't that why it's called "work", anyway? A job is a job; it's not supposed to be there for you to be self-actualized or whatever they're calling it these days. So let's get up out of bed and go to work. So lecturing herself, she rose, yawned and started her day.

The melancholy that woke her in the morning didn't fade as she wended throughout her day, though, which was unusual. She tried to cheer herself up by having an extra cup of ginseng-echinacea tea at lunch, scratching her shoulder absently as she sat at her desk sipping carefully from her ceramic mug. When she was finished, she went to the break room and rinsed her mug out, then returned to her desk and tried to settle into her work for the afternoon. She ended up staring at her computer monitor, her mind anywhere except where it should be. After an hour of fruitless, desultory pecking at her keyboard, she gave up and went outside to clear her head.

She wrapped her coat around her as she walked outside and shivered. It was October and the days were getting shorter and colder. At the moment, a breeze had picked up and was swirling around her feet. She turned her head at the skittering sound of leaves on the pavement, watching them twirl up with the breeze, then drift down once more. The air smelled sweet and earthy, like a pine tree shedding its needles. She closed her eyes and inhaled.

A cry above her head caused her to open her eyes and crane her neck up. To her astonishment and delight, the cry had come from the leader of a flock of Canadian geese winging their way overhead. The flock stretched out behind the lead goose in a straggly 'V' shape, wings beating the air with an easy grace. They were flying quite low, she thought, although what did she really know about the migratory patterns of the Canadian goose? As the 'V' neared it swooped lower and started canting around, changing the flock's direction gradually. Even with the day overcast as it was, she realized the flock was heading south. I guess they really do go south for the winter, she thought wistfully.

With one last explosion of noise, the leader called to his flock behind him. The 'V' shape tightened and the flock disappeared into the horizon. She followed them with her eyes as far as she could, straining until she couldn't see them any more in the haze rising from the city.

The girl thought about the flock of geese for the rest of the day. She thought about them as she went back upstairs; she thought about them in her afternoon staff meeting; she thought about them while driving her sensible car home to her brick house. She thought about them as she fixed herself the usual light, nutritious supper, and she thought about them as she put the dog out, climbed into bed with her cat, and turned on the evening news. That night she dreamed a six-foot-tall Canadian goose chased her across a meadow, honking urgently until suddenly she was running through thin air, the cliff ledge ten yards behind her. She fell, screaming, and awoke with a start just before hitting bottom.

In the days and weeks that followed, she found herself noticing the oddest things.

Driving to and from work, crawling through rush-hour traffic, she noticed the angry frustration of her fellow travelers rising like a miasma from a swamp. It made her so uncomfortable she would eventually have to roll her window down an inch, freezing as it was, and inhale as much fresh air as she could get mired in a sea of cars belching exhaust.

She noticed the subtleties of the wind shifting direction when she went outside for her breaks at work, which she did now with increasing frequency.

She noticed the patterns of the clouds whorling and morphing into new shapes depending on the time of day and how cold it was outside.

She strained her eyes looking into the sharp, crystal blue of the winter sky, scanning the horizon endlessly for her geese. It was winter and she wouldn't find them, but even knowing this, she looked anyway.

She was continually melancholy these days. Her mother clucked at her and told her, "It's that Seasonal Affective Disorder, dear. You just need to eat more oranges and sit under a flourescent lamp." Dutifully she did so, but the only effect was irritation caused by too much glare and a well-cultivated, hearty dislike of citrus.

And damn it all, her shoulderblades itched all the time now. She was tempted to buy stock in calamine lotion and Curel.

Her job, she realized about halfway through December, wasn't as interesting to her any more. In fact (she admitted to herself in the privacy of her head), it was getting... boring. She wondered why she had never seen this before. It's not as though she ever had a burning desire to do anything else, she just sort of fell into the insurance business when she got out of college. A temp job was open at the company, so she took it, got hired full-time, and eventually was able to get training to be an adjustor. Nothing wrong with that... it was just becoming so monotonous.

Again she told herself that a job is just a job. And a safe, secure job is far better than being unemployed and wandering about, isn't it?

The insurance office was now in the throes of the holiday season and all her colleagues were competing to see who could bring the best cookies, brownies, or fruitcake. At the office Christmas party (which followed the Chanukah afternoon reception the previous week and preceded the Solstice dawn breakfast the following week), she stood in the corner with her small cup of eggnog and watched the festivities. She listened half-heartedly to the mindless talk about whose nephew was in town and what so-and-so's daughter did last week and where such-and-such was going for the holidays. There was Peggy flirting with Steven the intern, which she did every Christmas party with every male intern she could get her hands on. Across from her nursing his third scotch was Pete, who would be drunk by 8:00 PM and have to be carried out by his buddies and crammed into a taxi. Floating through the crowd was her gray-haired supervisor, Drake, accompanied by a young blond thing who couldn't have been any older than 25. Every year since his divorce he'd shown up with a different trophy girlfriend, all of them young, thin, and vapid.

I don't know any of these people, not really, she thought suddenly. I know their habits, good and bad, but I don't know them. And they don't know me. All we know about each other is who cheats on their timecard, who leaves their dirty coffee mugs in the break room, who's going to pass out at the Christmas party. Every year it's the same thing: the same gossip, the same superficial chatter... it's even the same damn fruitcake! It never changes! Everyone here is the same! She felt a surge of irritation well in her, whitening the fingers holding her eggnog glass. Her shoulders were itching like mad, but she couldn't scratch them in front of all those people without looking like an idiot, so she set her glass down with a click and made a beeline for the door.

By the time she hit the crash bar on the door, she was running. She tumbled outside, gasping for air, and leaned over with her hands on her knees, gulping the crisp air gratefully. She straightened and swept her hair out of her face, startled to find she was sweating in her pastel suit. Her breathing slowed, but she was still too hot and her shoulders felt like she'd been rolling in poison ivy, they itched so badly. She tore off her jacket, silently cursing, rolling it up and tossing it on the stone bench. Undoing her blouse enough to get her arm under, she twisted around and clawed at her shoulder blade, trying desperately to reach it to relieve the horrid itching. She grunted in frustration, contorting her body, but she just couldn't... quite... reach. Augh! In one angry move, she tore her blouse off, popping buttons and struggling out of the sleeves. Frantically, she looked around for a stick, anything to reach far enough to stop the itching. Spotting the door she had just crashed through, she squinted into the shadows and realized the wall was made of brick. Sighing in relief, she put her back to the wall and rubbed her shoulder blades into the brick. She scratched them so hard she could feel the rough edges of the brick digging into her back, but the itching wouldn't stop!

Now she was crying with anger and pain, as the fire in her shoulders spread to her spine. She could feel the blood trickling down her skin, see it splash on the pavement, but she couldn't stop, she had to stop it somehow, so she writhed and twisted around, clawing at her back, slamming into the brick out of sheer frustration, trying anything to make the pain and the fire go away...

... and then, just as she thought she couldn't bear it one second longer, wings burst from her shoulders, towering and spiraling up into the night sky, still wet from where they exploded from her flesh. Wings that grew and grew, and while they grew, her hair became longer, flowing over her body, skimming over her skin and then becoming a part of it. Her hair rippled as the strands grew shorter, tighter, until she was covered with what looked like quills. But then the quills themselves burst into flower, if you can imagine such a thing, and the short sharp rachises softened into thousands of dark, sleek feathers. Her eyes dimmed, then grew brighter, and her nose was no longer a nose but a beak. Her body, normally short and plump, grew shorter and plumper and her now-webbed feet split her sensible low-heeled pumps until they lay in tatters on the ground with the rest of her clothes.

She sat still a moment, breathing heavily from the exertion of her transformation, but regaining her senses much faster than when she'd burst through the door a few minutes earlier. Slowly she lifted her head. There was a puddle a few feet away, skimming over into ice, so she waddled over and peered down at her reflection. Much to her astonishment, staring back at her was a sleek Canadian goose.

She looked up and saw for the first time the brilliance of the high, full moon, the air currents moving above and around her like an ocean. Experimentally, she flapped her wings, startled to find herself pulled off the ground in an aborted hop. She tried again, a little harder; this time she lurched forward three feet before plumping back down.

If she'd had a human mouth, she would have smiled.

Throwing her head back, she let out a long, joyful, undulating cry. With a rush of powerful wings, she threw herself into the sky, pumping higher, singing with exultation. She stretched her neck out, caught the nearest south-bound air current, and started the long, dangerous, exhilarating journey to join her flock.