Untethered
By Megan Carlson
Morgan felt a tickle in her foot.
David was going on again. The failure of mass movements. The demise of the working class. The commercialization of causes. After so long together, the rhetoric was familiar. She set down her coffee and rested her head on her hand.
The tickle intensified. She reached down to scratch her foot.
David continued. Divisive tactics. Conspiracy theories. Big Data. Facebook.
She realized it wasn’t a tickle so much as a draft, like someone blowing on her feet. Then, a small current of air lifted her several inches above her chair. She thought at first her feet had fallen asleep, but a few swift kicks confirmed: she was floating.
David didn’t seem to notice as she rose steadily up and out through the kitchen window into their overgrown backyard. His voice, still expounding on tax reform, became soft in the distance as she ascended above the sporadic adobes and palm-lined sidewalks of the neighborhood. In the orange-pink glow of the setting sun, she drifted through gauzy strata that dampened her skin and muffled the city noise below. Soon, she could see the entire skyline and desert beyond. The sky darkened around her until she found herself out among the stars—the stars she hadn’t laid eyes on since moving to the city years ago—and into the galaxy. Finally, it was quiet. She rested her eyes.
She awoke late the next morning alone atop her cool cotton duvet. In the gap between dreaming and waking, she had forgotten all except the sensation of soaring through the night sky. As she recalled the wind on her skin, her right foot began to ache. She sat upright in bed and pulled it toward her. The breath caught in her throat.
A coat of short white feathers obscured the whole underside of her foot. The feathers had grown in so thick that they formed one contiguous blanket across her skin. She spread them apart with two fingers—the way she parted her labia when examining herself with a mirror—to inspect the roots. Each feather protruded from her leathery flesh with the violence of a mushroom penetrating an otherwise unblemished field. She pulled at one of the roots, then more firmly, until the whole feather emerged. A speck of blood appeared at the wound and on the tip. She flicked the fluff away, horrified, then collapsed back onto her pillow.
She awoke again near dusk. To her relief, the feathers had started retreating. By the next morning, they had disappeared completely, leaving only a few red bumps as evidence that anything had perturbed the dermis. The bumps faded by the weekend.
Time passed and Morgan forgot about the feathers and floating and quiet. David never asked what happened that day or where she had gone, but given that he rarely asked questions—about her family, her tastes, her hopes, her love—his silence was unnoteworthy. Morgan bought a kitchen mixer off Craigslist after reading in her horoscope app that hobbies could cultivate a sense of purpose; otherwise, life remained unchanged. Each morning, David left to work at a nearby coffee shop, while Morgan dragged her banged-up MacBook to the couch or biked to her startup’s coworking space along the beach. Each night, the pair ordered takeout and watched TV until bed. They had recently finished The Sopranos.
The tickling returned some months later at a block club meeting Morgan attended in the windowless back bar of a neighborhood dive. Rumor had it that the new gelato place would be distributing coupons, so she had arrived early. She craned her neck toward the bar’s small kitchen to gauge whether free samples were being prepared.
Pothole updates consumed the first twenty minutes of the meeting. After which, some questions about sustainable composting. Then, the club chairman, an aspiring comedian who had moved from Omaha, introduced the next agenda item: parking restrictions, specifically the lack of streetside parking in the neighborhood. He made a tangentially-related joke about traffic on the 405. No one laughed.
Two camps emerged. One side, led by a vegan juicery that had opened five months prior, urged the adoption of a one-hour parking limit to increase traffic to small businesses. On the other side, the residents, led by a petite white woman with a fire-engine-red pixie cut and nose ring, claimed that businesses like the vegan juicery were the markers of gentrification—of rising rents and forcible evictions—and that city government should do everything in its power to loosen the gentrifiers’ grip on the neighborhood. Vegan food, they claimed, threatened the working class character of the neighborhood. Plus, parking was already a nightmare.
Someone pointed out that Red-Head Pixie Cut was not working class, that they had seen her act in a television show on one of the smaller cable networks. Red-Head Pixie Cut reminded the block club that she was union. And to please put their cameras away. Things grew heated as the owner of the juicery, a man whose neon tank revealed both large biceps and a protruding belly, extolled the virtues of veganism for the health, well-being and future of the community. Did they know that the pesticide runoff from the Agricultural Industrial Complex was poisoning the water supply? That livestock farming was responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions? That the antibiotics used to quell infection among animals crammed together pre-slaughter contributed to the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in humans? That producing one pound of beef depleted 300 square feet of rainforest? Just Juice offered salvation from all that, one $7 organic beverage at a time.
Morgan felt the familiar prickle on her feet. A thrill traveled up her spine like the anticipation before a first kiss. Or like the first time, as a teenager, she had sped down the interstate, alive with the freedom of going nowhere and fast. The current lifted her body above the chair, and then out the door held open by an elderly gentleman. Morgan hoped the man would get her gelato coupons. None of her other neighbors had turned around.
Outside, she floated above the sidewalk tables and street lamps. She spotted her car illegally parked by the Chinese restaurant in the adjacent strip mall. Soon, the lot was out of sight, the impending ticket out of mind, and she flitted across the night sky. She decided to focus her energy this time to see if she could control her direction. To her delight, she swooped between crystalline clouds like a slalom skier. The wind rustled in her ear as she snaked above, then below, then above again, over and over, for hours.
As she moved through the clouds, her mind emptied. Dirt and clutter fell away like debris from a truck, and new spaces opened where before there had been only thick, swampy grayness. She could see clearly now. She inhaled a long slow breath of the cloud below into her belly. With added buoyancy, she bounced toward the moon, peeing a little on the way up, liberated.
She regained consciousness again on her toilet. She reached down instinctively for her foot. The feathers seemed thicker.
A rustling noise traveled down the hall from the kitchen.
“David?” she called.
She pulled up her panties and sat on the lid of the toilet seat. David walked in with a pretzel rod hanging from his mouth. His curls shagged in front of his eyes.
“Yeah?” he said. He bit off a chunk of the stick and held the rest in his hand like it was the clicker on Jeopardy.
“Look,” she said, holding up her feathered foot.
“Huh,” he said through masticated pretzel. “Called the doctor?”
“Not yet.”
“Hey, do you think you’re going to be much longer in here?”
“What?” she said. “Oh, no, I guess—”
“I just have a call in five and need to—”
“It’s fine.”
She called Dr. Jeske’s office. The first opening was in three weeks, but she could fill out the paperwork online to speed things along. In the “reason for appointment” section, she typed, “FLOATING,” paused, then backspaced over the text. She replaced it with, “FEET.”
The feathers had mostly receded by Monday. Later that day, in the cramped offices of their 20-person startup, Morgan’s supervisor, Tay, convened an “emergency huddle” for the team. Tay wore finely-tailored jeans with a silk blouse and blazer. The jeans signaled that she was a Cool Boss and one of You Guys, even though her salary eclipsed that of You Guys by a scale of three. She was not cool enough to dress in the wrinkled shorts and nostalgic gamer t-shirts of the industry’s male counterparts, but this was the next best thing for a person of her gender. At her side, in a non-threatening cardigan, stood Stephanie from HR. Stephanie spoke with a slight drawl, despite hailing from Hoboken. Her omnipresent smile unsettled Morgan.
“I know there are concerns that Mr. Birch has behaved in ways that have made some female employees uncomfortable,” Stephanie began.
Morgan swiveled almost imperceptibly in her ergonomic chair. She wondered if she had the right ingredients at home for a Bolognese. Perhaps she might discreetly text David to check.
“And I want you all to know we are working closely with our partners at Innotivity to investigate that claim,” Stephanie continued. She paused and folded her hands together. “However, I’ve also heard the word ‘sexist’ thrown around and I want to caution us against saying anything that might threaten our relationship with a major investor.”
“But he is a sexist,” a voice shouted from the back of the room. “He refuses to work with male staff. And he’s always... touching.”
Another voice spoke up.
“When we were in San Antonio, he invited me to a business meeting in his hotel room and—”
“Right now, we don’t know the facts,” Stephanie interrupted, smiling. “We’re just asking you to be patient.”
Morgan’s phone buzzed. She weaseled it out of her pocket and glanced at her lap.
can u believe this shit?
From Angelique, sitting across from her and throwing rapt attention toward the front of the room. The phone buzzed again.
doesn’t this piss u off?
But it didn’t. It couldn’t. Not anymore. Not after rapist Hollywood producers and felonious politicians and creepy uncles and abusive professors and all the times she was belittled by boyfriends or groped by strangers or followed home from the movies. She couldn’t care. The caring synapses in her brain had snapped, and one bad man wouldn’t undo that. Hearing his offenses spelled out just sounded like faraway noise.
Her foot began to itch.
“Let me interrupt,” Tay announced, shoving herself in front of Stephanie. “I’m confident that this is all a misunderstanding. But, sadly, as you’re aware, these are the times we’re living in. Call-out culture. Cancel culture. Me Too.”
The itching grew stronger. Morgan slipped off her heels in gratitude.
“This man is from a different generation,” Tay continued. “We all know that. Now, we can cry to our shrinks or we can man up and—”
Morgan was already on the ceiling, hands groping a dusty air vent. She looked down when Tay stopped speaking, and observed her supervisor staring slack-jawed back in her direction. The woman held a direct line of sight to the feathers, which flapped furiously. Morgan returned her attention to the vent.
After some tinkering, she loosened the grate and slipped like an eel through the building’s winding ventilation system until she was spat out through an air shaft on the roof. Workers from across the building had gathered outside, staring up with hands visored over their eyes. Stephanie stood in front of the crowd. Morgan wondered if there would be an office memo on Monday. Or maybe something on Slack. She exhaled as the onlookers became dots in the distance.
She travelled farther this time. A southerly wind propelled her down the coast, past the beach towns and deserts, for hours—perhaps days—across a seemingly endless ocean that reached its margin along an ice ledge penetrating the glassy sea. There, she drifted down like a feather caught in the breeze. Exhausted and wind-whipped by the salty air, she lay her head on the snow. She braced herself for the cold, but the friction from the feathers had warmed her feet, and the heat radiated across her entire body. It emanated, even now, from her skin, causing the ice to puddle beneath her. She fell asleep watching a family of penguins dive in and out of a watering hole for squid.
Later the following week, inside an eggshell-white room, she banged her dangling heels against the examination table. The first thing Dr. Jeske asked was if she were pregnant. No, she was not. Any chance she might be pregnant? Also no. She and David were careful; they decided long ago that bringing new life into the world was morally irresponsible. Maybe they would get a dog someday, but not until her work slowed down or he made some traction at the paper.
The doctor finally asked what brought her in. He scribbled notes inside a manila file folder while Morgan described her symptoms. A chunky desktop computer sat untouched in the corner, like a private art installation. Modern Medicine: Technology and the Body, Dell Inspiron, 2002. The nurse stood stiffly in the corner.
The incidents had become more frequent, Morgan reported. She had almost strangled herself on the phone cord escaping a conversation about her high school best friend’s latest boyfriend and whether he liked her and why he hadn’t introduced her to his family yet and how he probably thought she was fat.
Or like when her coworker cornered her in the bathroom to lecture on the healing benefits of essential oils for chronic inflammation, which we all suffered from because of our poisoned food supply. Had Morgan heard about the pesticides? And that, if interested, it made more sense economically to buy a whole starter kit and sell oils directly. Morgan would make back the money in no time. Plus, she could be her own boss!
The feathers had barely saved her that time.
“Let me check you out,” the doctor said, rolling his stool toward the table. Morgan shoved one foot straight out in the air. He poked and prodded. Morgan flushed. It was like bringing your car to the mechanic only to find the mysterious screeching had disappeared. The doctor dropped her foot and repeated the examination on the other.
It might be anxiety, Dr. Jeske offered. Had she been anxious?
No more than usual: work. The pressure to finish their product line before the investors poked around. The feeling that she could be fired any day because of the caprices of their 24-year-old CEO. The weight of student loan payments for a degree that had left her with few marketable skills. The knowledge that she would never pay off the debt. The shame of that failure. A high deductible (she would need to discuss a payment plan). Feeling trapped in a relationship due to economic instability. The fear of getting sick. The fear of being homeless. The fear of falling in the shower. The fear that it was too late to try something new, to do something meaningful with her life, to become a real person, not just a person on permanent pause.
And then, of course, there were politics. Gerrymandering. Police brutality. An education system fucked beyond repair by racial segregation and local tax structure. Health care reliant on GoFundMe campaigns. Greenhouse gases. Global warming. The melting ice caps. The disappearing rainforests. Did he know that producing one pound of beef depleted 300 square feet of rainforest? Extreme weather events. Environmental catastrophe. A government ill-equipped to handle any type of man-made or natural disaster. Plagues. Riots. Apocalypse.
The doctor nodded without looking up from his prescription pad. He ripped off the top sheet, on which he had scratched “ATIVAN” and handed it to her. He also referred her to a podiatrist to be safe. The nurse slipped her a business card with a disembodied clip-art foot.
“I see also that you’ve gained some weight,” the doctor said as Morgan hopped off the table and into a pink plastic chair.
“Ten pounds maybe,” she said, reaching toward her foot. She could feel them blooming through the cracks. Then, the usual tickle. The little flaps. “I haven’t been here in a while.”
The doctor peered over his glasses. “Well, that’s a problem too. You’re at the age where we want to watch for signs of hypertension, heart disease, you know. Plus, if you want to get pregnant any time soon, you’ll need to be careful. Especially with your family’s history of diabetes. How many times per week would you say you exercise?”
The nurse tried to pull her down by the leg, but it was too late. Morgan gave a little kick, and the woman released her grip. Nursing was hard work, Morgan reflected, as she passed through a vent that spat her out in Parking Lot 3. She spotted a man in a surgeon’s cap smoking by a dumpster. The man noticed her in the sky, flicked his cigarette ash to the ground, and turned back toward the metal door. He would probably understand about the feathers, she thought. He looked tired.
The brutalist buildings grew smaller until she could see the U-shape formulation of the hospital complex sprawled across the city block. She spotted her car, a red speck on the street side of Parking Lot 1. She would probably get another ticket. David would be on her case when she returned.
If she returned.
If.
She floated higher, through the sun-drenched sky and diaphanous clouds. The spokes that had tethered her to an invisible wheel, endlessly spinning, were breaking. She closed her eyes, felt the warmth on her face, and breathed in an infinite silence as she ascended toward the blazing hotness.
Megan Carlson is a writer and nonprofit communications professional living in Chicago. She is a fiction reader for X-R-A-Y Magazine, and her short stories have been featured in Bluestem, Hypertext Magazine, The Blue Nib and others. Find her on Twitter @MegsCarlson.