Apex Magazine: Issue 115, December 2018 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apex Publications

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0735WN4XM

Captain Midrise by Jim Marino

5,400 words

The thing that broke your heart was, he could still fly. Nothing else to call it. There he was in those silly clothes, going wherever he pleased and not falling, as if gravity were just some tired social pretense and he’d grown too old to bother. But it wasn’t the same.

“Kind of flying,” some people said, which turned everyone from the copy desk stone-faced with rage.

“He is either flying or not flying,” they’d tell you, grinding their teeth. “There is no kind of flying, or sort of flying, because That. Would Make. No Sense. He moves through the air, under his own power, with nothing supporting him. He is flying. Now. Where’s that rewrite?”

“Floating,” other people would say, and I tried that one on for a while myself.

“Nice try,” the copy editors said. “He moves against the wind.” Two days after they told me that, I looked out my office window and saw him moving uptown against a March gale, yellow cape kicking and thrashing behind him, with rain drumming the windows and Herald Square looking like a faded archival photo of itself. Just watching him made me want an extra pair of socks, but he didn’t seem bothered, and it was true. The headwind didn’t make him any slower.

“Okay then, gliding,” some people answered, mad now and hating to give up an argument. “He doesn’t fly. He glides.”

“Were you not listening about the wind? Also, gliders gradually lose altitude. I think we can all agree that isn’t happening.”

“I don’t know what you call it,” a few die-hards muttered on their way out, “but I know that it isn’t flying.”

“Oh,” the copy editors said, “like you could do better.”

So, flies, flying, and flew were still official Herald-Tribune usage. But it was obviously different. He didn’t have the speed, a tenth the speed, that he used to. Or for some reason, he wasn’t using it. It was hard to know. In the paper, we used euphemisms like deliberate and stately. Worse, he seemed stuck at one altitude, drifting along around the level of a sixth-story window. He never got any higher. Even stranger, once you thought about it, was that he never got any lower. You’d never see him at streetlight level. You’d never see him land. He could fly about six stories above the ground, and as far as anybody could tell, that was it. He would gradually drift sideways above the traffic, so that he started flying above one sidewalk, and seven or eight blocks later, he’d wind up over the other. People would see him zigzagging toward Brooklyn across the river or looping erratically over the park. After a while, you got used to it. There he was, you know? It didn’t seem so bad. You’d see him over the Sheep Meadows on a summer night, when you could barely make him out against the sky, over Riverside Drive on a clear autumn afternoon with the leaves riveting against the blue. And you wouldn’t think about how things used to be.

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