3 A.M. Series—Wrangle Of Deliriums

3 A.M. Flight Upgrade

As I lay there staring into the heavens, watching the stars wink, past lovers recalling the glorious chaos we shared, nature shattered my repose.

A gaggle of geese was passing overhead, their honks slicing through the cool air, taunting me, daring me to rise, to seek the sky! My heart answered, and I leaped.

The leap was not merely of limb but of marrow, of memory, of every forgotten oath I'd whispered to childhood winds. My skin split like wet paper, bones telescoping, hollowing, feathering. Hands fused, wrists flattened, fingers lengthened into primaries. My collarbone bowed out into a keel; my lungs ballooned against the cage of my narrowing chest. My last human tear - salty, ridiculous - rolled off the tip of my lengthening beak and fell like a dark star toward the sleeping suburb.

Gravity lost interest. I rose.

Now, I soar north to the shimmering lakes of plenty. The world is a beautiful living canvas, changing by the minute. The cold air massages my restless imagination. Below, I see the scramble, and my goose heart aches with sorrow.

Cities glow like bacterial colonies in petri dishes, all frantic division and hunger. Highways are glowing capillaries jammed with clotting semis. Billboards flash the same tired slogans - CONSUME, OBEY, UPGRADE - painted in migraine neon. Above it all, the moon is a cracked communion wafer stuck to the velvet roof that isthe sky.

I bank west, riding the jet stream like an escalator of wind. The other geese speak in sonar glyphs:

- Cold front curling off the Rockies.

- Corn stubble still burning in Iowa.

- Storm lake ahead, metal tasting of bullets.

Their language fits inside my skull like puzzle pieces snapping home. I answer with a single, guttural note that means both "I remember" and "I forget." They tilt their wings in welcome, dark commas against the star-drunk dark.

Come! Release yourselves from the mundane magnet and join me in this realm that presses down on the world of rocks and dust.

I tilt my left wing, dropping altitude. Beneath me: a rooftop party, thirty-somethings clutching phones like rosaries, faces lit by screens instead of stars. One of them - woman in a red hoodie - looks up. Our eyes lock across species, across altitude. For one heartbeat I'm certain she sees me, the man I was, trapped in pinions and hollow bones. She lifts her hand - not quite a wave, not yet a salute.

I wheel away before longing can anchor me.

Up here, you can be anything. Imagine. It's not hard. I'm a goose now, soaring fiercely, riding the winds.

North again. The air thins, sharp enough to file regrets against. I taste lake water already - calcium, reeds, the ghosts of mayflies. My gizzard rumbles. I remember breakfast: gas-station burrito, plastic cheese, shame. Now I will dine on tender shoots and moonlit minnows.

The stars rearrange themselves into runes. One spells the name of my first love; another, the coordinates of the house I lost in the crash of '08. A third simply says GO.

I go.

Come - Fly with me.

We descend in a slow spiral, a heavy snowflake of intent. The lake below is a dark mirror, reflecting constellations upside-down. We land with the sound of applause made of canvas and bone. Water, cold as absolution, closes over my webbed feet.

Across the lake, a lone trumpeter swan raises its neck in a question. I answer with the story of my transformation, every honk a stanza, every beat of my wings a punctuation mark. The swan listens, then turns away - too regal to envy, too wise to pity.

I preen my feathers. Each one carries a single memory: a doobie shared on a fire escape, the smell of my mother's rosemary bread, the exact shade of her lipstick the night a lost lover told me goodbye. When the wind strips these feathers, those memories will scatter like seeds.

Some will root. Some will rot. Some will be eaten by muskrats.

Dawn is a rumor in the east. Somewhere, an alarm clock is murdering sleep. Somewhere, a commuter is rehearsing apologies for being late. Somewhere, a man is staring at the ceiling, wondering why his chest feels suddenly hollow, as if something necessary has flown out of him in the night.

I open my beak and sing - not the shrill cry of warning, but a note between laughter and lament. The lake answers with ripples. The sky answers with light.

And somewhere, maybe, a half-naked woman in a red hoodie stands on a rooftop, arms outstretched, nipples hardened by the cool air, feeling the ghost of wind beneath her shoulder blades, remembering the impossible promise a goose once carved across the stars.

© Noisy Wren, July 2025