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Marisela had bird bones.

She had a dream about rising above what trees there were, rising still, and breaking through a thin rind in the clouds. She woke up weeping.

Her father ran out of the house and pointed to the roof. “Maricela, you’ll fall.”

“It’s the light above the clouds that woke me up,” Maricela called down in her pajamas.

“My god, you’re floating up. Stop it,” her father shouted, running for a ladder. When he finally made it to the roof, he looked up and saw the last of Maricela disappear into that height impossible for his eyes to penetrate.

Maricela had a dream about light and this light had made her weep. In the dream, she felt the earth beneath as a memory and the light above the clouds had been like warm lemonade made tasteless by icemelt. Awake, she felt the warm updrafts of the air against her thin arms. All she had to do was make swimming motions or turn the palm of one hand and she’d change direction, go down or ascend swiftly, which she did. She looked down, but height at night is different than height during day and in dream height had nothing nothing at all. Awake, the burning city reminded her of a bed of smoldering coals. In dreams and awake we all fear falling, but Maricela, awake, embraced the higher air.

The clouds were a brief buffeting of fog, small whispers in the form of droplets. She closed her eyes and for a moment feared any accumulation of moisture that might bring her down. Just a few days before her father had called her to him from the fence and Maricela had drifted over the ground like a shadow.

“How did you do that?” He knew but pretended otherwise.

Her mother, Maricela had heard her whisper. “I swear that girl can fly.” Maricela would smile.

“She’ll be my death,” her father had said. “Remember last year the drive back from Phoenix?”

“Aw, yes,” her mother had exclaimed.

“I couldn’t believe it. You said, ‘Maricela, god, we left Maricela at the hotel.'”

“And there she was on the roof of the car?” her mother had said.

“Yes,” her father had said, “had she been there all along or flying above us for those few hundred miles? Oh, I have such dreams for her.”

Maricela remembered other drives on the straight roads watching out the window at the big white moon above the scalloped and luminous clouds. How if she placed her head against the window in the right way she could pretend to be above them. The moon changed or altered its position, and this inverted sky and inverted travel followed her as she broke suddenly into the pure air and she felt the soft heat of high altitude moonlight on her forehead and on the skin protruding above the collar of her pajama top. The soft rolling surfaces spread beneath her feet to the edge of the sky and in their depressions and everchanging cavities the bright light left great quiet shadows, like mid-morning sun on land interrupted by hills.

Oh, how the dream had been so unreal as this, so senseless. Maricela turned her palms down and cruised over a rise, the moon glaring at her with its details against a black patch so bright as to blot out the stars.

Maricela wanted to stay. But she could feel a creeping fatigue, a gently coming weakness in the center of her back and deep behind the knee caps and deep in her wrists. And now, for all this space, she couldn’t wait to descend and inform her mother and father what dull and stupid things were dreams.