In a very tall tree sits a girl. The tree is perhaps fifty feet high, and the girl rests with her back nestled against its trunk. If a person passed beneath the tree and looked up, it is unlikely they would see her. The color of her dress blends perfectly with the leaves around her. Her face is pale, as if the sun has not touched it in days.

The girl swipes a hand across her nose. A bee is buzzing somewhere. She has been in this tree for a long time, much longer than anyone would believe possible. Her arms and legs are stiff, and there are bruises on them; she can tell by the way they hurt. A tear slips from her right eye and she catches at a fragment of memory. Once, she sat in a tree with someone whose eyes were the exact shade of the sky. She wore a blue dress, one that brought out the color in her own eyes. A blue silk ribbon tied back her hair. When the boy told her she could fly, she laughed.

“Of course you can, silly,” he had said. “How do you think we got up here in the first place?”

She remembers the crack of the branch when she stood, the way the cool air spun up through her dress, rushed across her skin. It had felt so good. She wants to feel that way again, not like the broken thing she is now. She remembers the boy’s instructions. He’d recited them from the storybook, the one she’d been reading to him. The one their mother didn’t like.

“Don’t look down,” he’d said. “And don’t doubt. The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to be able to do it.”

A second voice had echoed him, tiny and excited, like the tinkling of golden bells.

Now she hears those bells again. She stands up on the branch, edges away from the trunk while keeping one hand on it. Bounces gently on her toes, like a diver at the edge of the board. Now that it’s come to the moment, she’s afraid. But if she stays much longer, she’ll never get down from the tree. She won’t be able to. She may even become a part of it.