8. In full flight.

I know that they have decided that I am to fly.

I can tell from the way they glance at me furtively through their soft linen smiles. And I know that there will be dogfights, barbed and bloody, I see them through the open window.

The open window.

And I know how to fly, despite the confines of these sheets - white, webbed, tight as a hen’s foot. They wound them round me in the night to protect me from myself, from the flames.

Still, I lie, waiting, while the grey walls sweat softly, leaking the colours of the sky on a day smothered by cloud that should have been hot. The bricks are painted with shadows shifting slowly through the forest of chrome saplings and trailing creepers, and the whispers flutter like birds in the half-light.

The rubber mask thrusts its breath inside me and I swallow, gagging on my own excitement, I feel the cold, scratched metal beneath my gloved fingers and pitch forward into a screaming dive.

I know I am to fly.