Fear of Flying - 1. Chapter 1

Four white ghosts fly out of the moon, their milky whiteness flowing like cream. Two black gulls follow them down, a curve like an arc of perfect sex as they swoop from a sky tinted from indigo to cerulean towards the hare.

I am the hare, just for a moment, alone and petrified, the weight of millions of years of being hunted. I cannot breathe, cannot think as I stare at the sky in abject horror.

Perspective shifts, the scene changes. The hare turns to look at the sky, and the birds wheeling so graceful in the inky sky, his eyes reflecting the moon so white. He cannot fly. The spiralling movement of the birds scares him, their grace and mastery over the air. The hare runs.

Watching the picture I feel strange. The whiteness of the rabbits whiskers in the black make my heart itch. The colours make my head spin, the dizziness of vertigo as I stand in my living room, a sensation that almost knocked me off my feet when I first saw this picture. I remember being cold and wet, badly dressed for the rocky English weather, and then there it was, pulling my sense of self away from my body and engulfing my mind until I wasn’t sure where I was standing. It only took a moment.

My chest feels hollow when I stare into the eyes of the rabbit, as though somehow he has stolen my heart, pulled away all my courage so that he can face his fear of moving in the sky. The birds are somehow malicious, they are hunting him. They are wrong. The rabbit is a god in disguise, or he is Kyome made flesh, the spirit of a man trapped in the body of prey.

Maybe the birds are protecting him, and they have all turned to see the feature they fear who is out of view of the picture. The big bad wolf come to hunt his pound of flesh.

I cannot help feel that sometimes the creature that they fear is me.