The Girl Who Was Not A Bird This one time there was a girl who was convinced beyond all reason that she could fly. She was shy and bold at the same time. No one knew where she came from. She mostly kept to herself, but she was always nearby, perched on roofs and fire escapes. If you caught a glimpse of her bouncing around in the air, you would probably squint and rub your eyes and think you got confused. The first person to talk to her was Grackle McCart. Grackle had a bicycle hot dog cart with the longest menu in town. Everybody loved him because he had every kind of hot dog, 100 of them in fact (seriously every kind, like tofu, turkey, tongue, and even toffee and tamarind). Grack himself? He was just super chill, smart, silly, and charming. He was dorky in a cool way, and cool in a dorky way. He'd always be peddling his hot dog cart around the market, smiling, and then if he caught your eye he'd go, "Hungry? Good thing I got here in time," and then wink at you. Shopkeepers and cashiers flagged him down all day for hot dogs: He'd sell them to the pet store and the popsicle store and the broken electronics store and the scissors store and the mis-printed T-shirt shop. Afterward, the loud, crazy punk rockers and art weirdos from the notoriously trash strewn $5 hotel would try to talk him out of cheap hot dogs all night. Running a hot dog cart meant he was parked on the same corners for hours. Grack spent oodles of time watching the busy market streets, scanning for hungry hot dog buyers. So he noticed small details all the time. Then came the day. Grack was refilling the ghost pepper chipotle mayo when he looked up and saw -- he was pretty sure? -- a girl jumping back and forth over the three-story brick buildings. It was surely an unjumpable distance. Two lanes of traffic and rows of parked cars, and in between, a bunch of shuffling pedestrians too busy shopping or lugging giant boxes to notice. The next day, it was a slow afternoon, and Grack was cleaning his grill and throwing stale hot dog buns to the pigeons. Out of nowhere a feral-eyed girl jumped down off the fire escape behind him, grabbed a bun out of the air, and landed atop a mailbox, all without touching the ground. Grack's mind was blown. But as the youngest son of the biggest hot dog family in town, he had seen all kinds of crazy things, so he played it cool. "What kind of bird are you?" he asked the girl. She looked thoughtful while chewing her mouthful of hot dog bun, then said bashfully, "I'm not a bird, I'm just a regular flying girl." She stuffed the rest of the hot dog bun in her cheeks and scrambled up the fire escape. When she got to the top she kept climbing up into the air and disappeared. Grackle McCart was in awe and kind of smitten. ~~~ Ever after , the flying girl would roost on the phone poles and window ledges and fire escapes by Grackle's hot dog cart. When no one was buying hot dogs Grack would look up and search all the roofs and windows for the girl who seemed convinced that she could fly. Sometimes she'd tumble by bouncing on the roof from one side of the street to the other. Other times he'd see her almost hidden next to an air conditioner or nestled in the awning of a shop. One day Grack honked his two AHWOOGAH horns and rang his three bike bells until she looked his way. Then he made his cool-guy-eyebrows move and grinned. "Hey, I got too many hot dogs again this afternoon, help me eat a few?" He said the first thing he could think of to get this weird wild girl to hang out with a regular nerdy hot dog guy like him. To his delight she chirped "Okay!" and launched-fell off the nearest roof, bounced off a store awning, floated over a parked car, and landed in a gleeful crouch on top of the closest trash can. She was all a jumble of motion that seemed like the routine of a clumsy, careless trapeze artist except she didn't have any ropes. Without discussion the girl and Grack decided they should probably hang out every day. The girl would drop out of the sky and stick around for lunch, brunch, snacks, and dinner. At first, they never talked about themselves. The girl would tell him about stuff she'd seen from up high, like a giant hats and guitars party in the courtyard of the burrito place, or the glow-in-the-dark frisbee she'd found atop the ice cream shop. Grack would gossip about how he'd made hot dogs for a bunch of hip-hop stars and some big-deal sports guys, plus he knew a place with free video games as long as you kept buying milkshakes. He invited her to check out the video game milkshake place maybe? But she said she wasn't really great with the indoors, and Grack didn't argue cause he didn't want to leave his hot dog bike alone long anyways. And then someone would come along for a hot dog and the girl would tumble sideways up the nearest building like a tumbleweed that made a ninety-degree wrong turn. Weirdly Specific Market The Weirdly Specific Market always had people coming and going, buying weirdly specific stuff at the market's weirdly specific stores. Shoppers came to buy enough T-shirts to fill a whole truck or a new set of number buttons for their elevator. Or they went to the strange dark underground club for eating cheese and looking at pictures. One store only sold bolts and screws, and one store only sold empty takeout containers. There was a specialty shoe-boot place that converted boots in to shoes and vice versa. One store was entirely rooms of milk crates filled with stereo cables in an old abandoned department store. The point was, everybody needs some kind of weirdly specific thing at some point. When they did, they came to the Market. The Market also had dozens of butchers, cheesemakers and bakers. There was a grocer that sold rare fancy purple and blue apples, and one where you could get a bag of 1,000 carrots for twenty bucks. There were dozens of ice cream and hot snack carts, and Grack? Well, he was the most popular one, thanks to his Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu. Since Grack had been running a hot dog cart since before he could read, he had the experience to cleverly figure out that most people would stop and hang out, waiting to see what happens, if, say, they saw some bananas hijinks like a shoeless girl endangering herself by climbing up and jumping off of roofs and streetlamps and phone poles. Then, once she didn't actually smash herself into the ground but instead kept on fluttering about like a featherless bird, most people would eventually look down and see the Infamous 100 Hot Dog Menu, which was carefully designed so at least one dog appealed to someone's particular vice, craving, or guilty pleasure. With the girl who wasn't a bird around, people walked past Grack's cart at half speed and then got even slower. His business doubled and kept increasing. Before long, regulars at the market had started saying stuff like: "Hey, let's get hot dogs from that crazy bike-cart with like 100 different kinds of dog. There's a girl who's always there and she was probably born and raised in a travelling circus, then abandoned here a few summers ago and adopted by pigeons. She hangs out on top of the traffic light and will jump off of it and catch French fries in mid air. One time a guy bet her a corn dog she couldn't hop, skip and jump herself on top of the market water tower, so she took his hat and bounced crazily and carelessly twenty meters up a tower and almost plummeted into the cement sidewalk a bunch of times. But then she stuck the hat on top like the water tower was wearing it. It's still up there!" All the nearby punk rockers from the five-dollars-a-night hotel started called the girl Eggs after her one and only T-shirt that she always wore, all faded and torn up. It read "EGGS" and it was from a TV commercial recommending two servings of eggs daily. She loved that shirt so much that if you tried to tell her chickens couldn't fly, she'd just climb up the closest wall away from you. Can a Girl Fly? All day and every day Eggs would fly around town aimlessly fluttering. She'd appear not long after the sun came up and disappear just after it went down. (Flying at night, she once mentioned, causes ten times as many crashes as during the day.) She would get all over town most days. She claimed to really like the roofs of the food carts at the mall cause people would let her finish their fries all the time, and she could fly to the drive-in next door and see movies but without the sound. Afterward, she would go back to the food cart roofs and listen to people who'd just been at the drive-in talk about the movie and she would learn what it'd been about that way. Two of the hotel punks told Grack they had seen Eggs at the amusement park a week ago. She had been riding the roller coaster but the opposite way of everyone else. She'd flutter all over the tallest parts of the roller coaster, and then when the coaster train cars with people on them came by she'd jump-fall off the track and flip and land on the next ride. For this she got in mega trouble with amusement park security, who chased her around for an hour with a giant butterfly net. The guards said they'd put her in a giant birdcage if she came to the park again, but the joke was on them cause by then she'd already been on all the rides. Once, Grack couldn't help but kind-of-sort-of ask her: "How do you do it? How can anybody move around in the air like that?" Eggs had made a grave serious face, like she was gently breaking bad news. She said she couldn't remember a time she didn't fly. In her earliest memories, she wanted to be everywhere. See everything. And always keep going up and up and up and up. She said, "Flying is my favorite thing in the world. When you fly, you never want for anything, but you get to see everything. A bird's-eye-view of stuff everyone thought no one could see. The city becomes a big unfolded map of itself, and you see how the world fits together. You can see how everything works. When you get in trouble, nothing bad happens because you can get away fast and you're almost impossible to catch." She explained that most people can't fly because of a common misunderstanding of how flying works. Most people imagine flying is done by falling sideways instead of down. It is precisely right but also totally mixed up and wrong. "Yes, that is what flying is," Eggs said, "but it is not how it works! People mistakenly think they're supposed to fall and then just forget to hit the ground. But then they focus on trying not to fall, instead of on doing flying stuff." Grack laughed and said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about." He actually had no idea what she was talking about, but it wasn't reeeeeeally a lie. He was always pretty sure he was on the verge of being able to understand her. At the very least, he really liked her and thought being friends with her was the coolest. Grack was Eggs's best friend pretty much and no one else spent much time hanging out with her, so that must mean he understood her, right? And logically, that must mean he understood what the girl had just told him. Grack decided that basically Eggs had superpowers. Like a superhero but more realistic and hard-won. In Grack's mind, a superhero who was also basically a regular girl was more possible than a flying girl. Undeniable was the fact that she did possess a superhuman climbing ability. She could scurry up to any roof in seconds. She would flutter up a featureless brick wall with an ease powered only by her own belief that she was flying. The other half of her conviction that she could fly was cause she had jumped off more than a hundred buildings and not died once. Her record flight was a leap off a fourteen-story building, even though she was utterly un-aerodynamic looking. She was just a little bit taller than a short person, with a bit of a tummy from Grackle giving her unlimited hot dogs. Grackle said the dogs were just in exchange for Eggs flying around the neighbourhood for him flyer-ing for his hot dog cart. But really, he felt so proud and special that this new, strange, amazing girl liked him. And he wouldn't let her eat his trash, even if she dove off a building to grab it out of the air. Eggs could balance teetering on chimneys and phone wires with a dumb luck more powerful than any practiced skill, flinging flyers at passersby below with okay-ish accuracy. And when she ran out, she'd climb as high as she could and stretch upward, testing the air, flapping human arms that were neither strong nor skinny, threatening to launch herself into the sky, if she ever found the wind she was waiting for. Excerpted from The Girl Who Was Convinced Beyond All Reason She Could Fly by Sybil Lamb All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
