Levitation

Gravity is a setting. I know that sounds like a joke. It’s the least funny thing I know.

Once a year the shaft opens and the setting slips, just in here, just for the length of a song, and the ones who’ve been saving up for it float. Old knees stop hurting. Somebody’s grandmother does a slow cartwheel she hasn’t managed in sixty years. The kid on the platform always stays down, holding the rope, because someone has to bring everybody back.

I’m the one who lets it slip. It isn’t allowed. I do it anyway, and I pull the setting back so gently that nobody ever lands hard.