author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Notes from the author:

The title is from a well-known Emily Dickinson poem; the thing with feathers is “Hope.” Hope is also what’s found at the bottom of the forbidden box of secret, damaging things that you knew you should not have opened. I don’t know that anyone puts it there. It just grows.

When Jan arrived at the office, her Otherlives were pinned to the wall. The hallway leading from behind the front desk out into the data wrangling station was papered in them. Paintings on printer paper, landscapes cut from magazines, photocopies of prog rock album covers, fantasies and dreams of both day and night—all of them featured, somewhere in them, a self-portrait of Jan herself but with some key difference. A Jan with fur or feathers or wings. Jan as she’d imagined herself Other.

This was how Jan took care of herself when the office grew too drab and gray, when the functions of her day threatened to rise up and drown her under a sea of porridge. She cut the photos and glued the pictures and drew what she saw in her dreams. But someone had found her Otherlives where she’d hidden them at the bottom of her filing cabinet. They’d dug them out and exposed them to one and all.

For just a few moments, Jan stared around her and thought her dreams had come true. She would walk down that hallway and emerge somewhere Other, flying free through Other skies. But at the end of the hall there was only her desk in the usual drab, gray office. The windows looked out over drab, gray city, block after block and building, building, building.

Jan’s coworkers, noticing she’d arrived, began to snicker.

She tried to work as though everything was normal. She said nothing about her Otherlives to anyone, and they said nothing to her. Management did not emerge from the central office to have a word about her indulging unorthodox pastimes; neither did management have a word with anyone else about creating a hostile workplace. No one said anything at all to indicate anyone was in the wrong. And Jan’s spirit diminished to the size of the space between her chair and her computer monitor, and she worked, and she wanted to die.

Next day, she did not come back to the office.

Jan awoke that morning with dreams still crowding her senses. In them, she had passed through her office window like a ghost passing through time. She flew over the city she’d known all her life, equipped with Otherworld wings. She knew it was time for her to leave, as a chick-turned-fledgling knows it’s time to leave the nest. But no matter how far she flew, she never found the city’s borders. The metroscape went on and on below her, drab and gray, block after block of building, building, building. The sun set and still she was flying. There would be no end to her flying.

Her dreams had left her with a sense of desperation so keen she could not sit still. She walked to her office out of sheer habit, but she did not go inside. She passed it by. She walked onward, past other office buildings, past shops and restaurants, and then through yet more business complexes and retail centers. She walked all day long, pausing only to tend to those necessities she could not ignore. She walked through the night, through unfamiliar districts, where she did not dare to pause at all.

She walked west, always west, following the path the sun took out of the city.

When morning came, Jan found herself among unfamiliar buildings, tall and bright in the light of dawn. It occurred to her that she might enter one of these, take the elevator to the very top floor, and spy from that high vantage point the next steps on her journey. Perhaps she would see an Otherlife from there.

In the lobby of the next building she came to, a cafe sold her strong coffee and a croissant sandwich. She brought these to one of the cafe’s tables. It was round and plastic and hollow, that table, and it stood on one leg like a mushroom. Her toes kept bumping into its hollow, plastic stalk. The longer she sat, the more she felt her exhaustion, the more likely she was to fall asleep sitting at the cafe. But she knew she mustn’t let that happen. The security officer behind the nearby desk would not approve.

She took the elevator as high as it would go. Upon exiting the elevator, she found herself walking down a hallway. It was too familiar, that hallway. It was lined with her Otherlives. Paintings, landscapes, prog rock album covers, the landscapes of her fantasies and dreams. Herself, imagined Other, flying free and alone through Other skies. The air was full of her co-workers’ half-suppressed snickering.

She walked the familiar route through the data wrangling station to her desk. A self-adhesive note from her team lead was affixed to her monitor: “See me when you get in.” Where had she been the day before? Why she hadn’t seen fit to call? Was it likely to happen again? She said, truthfully, that she did not know. Her team lead said they’d say no more about it; get to work.

At the window beside her desk, she looked out over the drab, gray city, block after block of building, building, building. She could see no end to the metroscape. Perhaps there was no end, except for that which waited patiently upon the bone of every living being. She placed a hand on the glass, which extended unbroken from wall to wall, and pushed, just slightly.

Then she returned to the hall her coworkers had papered with her stolen Otherlives. Carefully, so as not to tear the least corner, she took them all down from the wall. The snickers and stifled guffaws all quieted away; every eye in the office was riveted on her slow and cautious work. When the job was done, her Otherlives made a neat stack about an inch thick. Jan slid them into an envelope just barely big enough to hold them; she took this with her back down the elevator, back out onto the street.

She was so terribly tired. But she couldn’t rest yet. She had too far still to go. But she felt lighter now that she had her Otherlives with her. She mustn’t lose them. If she ever found the place where the city ended, she might need help remembering how to fly.

This has been the Friday Fictionette for December 4, 2015. It has been designated the Fictionette Freebie for December 2015, so anyone may now download the full-length fictionette (1052 words) from Patreon in PDF or MP3 format regardless of their Patron status.

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