Mary Jane 2040
Hung-over
She didn’t meditate, you understand, and she wasn’t a yogi or anything, but she’d been working on levitating for years now. She’d started after she’d snuck into Uncle Idris’s barn and seen a woodcut illustration of Simon Magus on a page from a dusty encyclopedia that was being used to line the chicken coop.
In the picture, Simon Magus was whirling through the air, all legs and arms and whistling wind, just above a crowd of gawking people. The caption, which she’d had a hard time making out until she scraped away a dried crust of feed, made her blood curdle: The mystic Simon Magus attempted to prove he was a god by flying, but as the Apostle Peter prayed Simon fell to the ground, where he broke his legs and was stoned to death by angry onlookers.
She couldn’t explain it, but after that she’d had to try lifting herself up against gravity and the will of the earth. It was partly the look on Simons’ face before he’d fallen, free and calm and sort of watchful, as if there were something up there he was looking for. And partly it was because, she supposed, she wanted to see what it felt like: to believe, even if you were wrong, that you were a god.
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