Off to Seek a Wizard... -7- Just a Crazy Ghost? by Erin Halfelven

 
Waking up is a surprising thing to do when you're convinced that you're dead.

I could hardly believe the sun shining in my face. I had fallen out of a plane, hadn't I? I should be dead, not stretched out on some grassy knoll somewhere. I lay there quietly watching fluffy clouds in a blue morning sky, trying to work out just what had happened.

I'd come back from the lavatory wearing flops that the flight attendant had given me. What was her name? I couldn't remember and just at that moment it seemed like the most important thing in the world. After a bit I gave up trying to remember it because the only thing I could think of was that it started with an S but my name starts with an S and so all I came up with was Stephanie and that wasn't right.

Back on the plane, I'd gotten to my seat, after almost rubbing my seat on George's face. How humiliating. Maybe I had ejected myself from the plane in sheer embarrassed funk. I tried harder to remember. I'd sat down and been reaching for the seat belt when there was a noise right above me. Before I could look up, something grabbed me and next thing I knew I was floating in mid air with no plane in sight. Floating? Falling? Flying?

I could hear birdsong. Birds could fly so why, oh why, couldn't I? It was one, possible (?), explanation but I had never known I could fly before. Was it something I could only do when scared to death? Lots of luck recreating the necessary conditions for that experiment.

I tried to relive the terror of falling through the storm cloud, of nearly freezing to death on a rare day in June, but I couldn't. My mind kept veering away into inanities. Like I could swear I heard the snuffling and snorting of my Aunt Daisy's pet pug dog, Lowheezie off in the distance.

I wanted to ignore it but all that happened is that I began wondering if I had maybe broken every bone in my body in my landing. I didn't hurt anywhere but that could be shock or a broken neck or -- I imagined all kinds of things. The fact that I could feel my toes wiggle, feel grass blades tickling my sides and a mild but insistent pressure in my bladder meant nothing of course.

I could be imagining all those things, I could be imagining I was alive. Nothing was too improbable, maybe I was a ghost who would have to haunt the airways and jetstreams until my soul would be at rest. Maybe I was crazy. Maybe I was a crazy ghost.

Was that wheezing getting closer and louder?

I knew I shouldn't move in case of a broken spine but when the sound of the imagined pug dog seemed louder and closer and much, much bigger than even a bulldog or a mastiff, I lifted and turned my head to take a look.

And found myself nearly nose to nose with a mass of fur and halitosis that could only be a bear.

"Sarah," I thought. "The flight attendant's name was Sarah."

Then I screamed.