Wonders of the Invisible World by Christopher Barzak Page A

my eyes and placing a gentle kiss on my forehead. I do distinctly remember that, somehow, after her kiss landed on me, my fever broke, or whatever it was that had kept me sleepless went away, and my lids grew heavy, and I then fell asleep fast.
Fell
being the key word. Fell into the place called sleep, where we rest. Where we find peace for a little while.
    A white haze surrounded that memory now as I put myself to bed and pulled my covers up to my chin like my mom did when I was little. If I could have kissed my own forehead to put myself at ease, like my mom could, I would have. Heavy eyelids were what I wanted. As quickly as possible, I wanted to feel myself being pulled down into the dark place of sleep, where I could find peace after a night of unexpected and worrisome revelations.
    Peace wasn’t what I found when I did finally fall into sleep, though. A strange dream came instead. It wasn’t one of mine, though, I could tell immediately. Maybe it belonged to someone in my family, or maybe to someone nearby. I had no idea. But wherever the dream came from, it swooped into my room on dark feathers, plucked me up like a baby, and carried me away to another world, where the peace of sleep did not exist.
    A world where the scream of an engine burst in my ears, so close, so loud, it rattled my teeth, scraping them top against bottom.

    I blinked as I came to, and turned my head to either side, looking around slowly. A row of soldiers sat against the wall opposite me, their faces blackened with some kind of paint; their round helmets covered in netting; their bodies slung with guns, grenades, parachutes; their eyes heavily lidded with worry. Then gunfire began to chatter against the belly of the plane we rode in—that was what it was, I realized as I continued to scan my surroundings—and the bullets rang out like pebbles thrown against a window.
    One of the soldiers lining the wall across from me vomited, wiped his mouth with his knuckles, then looked down at his own hand as if he couldn’t believe the hand had actually cleaned the spit from his lips without protest.
    “Out, out, out!” someone shouted, and the soldiers stood to form a line. “Out, out, out!” someone shouted again, and I looked out the open door of the plane, where the wind whipped through the entrance and ran its hands all over me.
    It was dark outside the hatch, black as black can be, but I could hear more airplanes ripping through the clouds around us, could see the flare of their engines, the shadows of their wings forming a bridge of darkness across the sky.
    A young man was sitting next to me, fingering the netting that surrounded his helmet like a web. “Out, out, out!” someone ordered again, and the young man stood, his eyes wide with fear, and went to the door as commanded.
    I stood with him, I don’t know why. I just stood, because there he was, a man in trouble, a man who stood despite being afraid, who looked out over the edge of the open door, where the sky, ruffled like the petals of a black flower, flowed by. To jump or not to jump? That was the question. And I went to him, this young man seized with a sense of duty that emanated like an aura. I took hold of his arm, and when he leaped, I leaped with him.
    Into the sky we flew, the wind whipping around us. I didn’t think about why I was doing any of this. It was a dream, so I flew into the sky with him, peering down at the dark fields of clover and woods, where gunfire chattered, breaking sparks of light into the night, and people ran through the landscape like frightened rodents.
    Then everything stopped for a moment. The air itself seemed to pull us higher into the sky, to pick us up like a kitten by the nape of its neck and return us to where we’d jumped from; then it dropped us again without any warning, and suddenly, throughout the sky, hundreds of white parachutes opened.
    We hung there, suspended in the air like white dandelion seeds blown away from their core. And down