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It is allowed to invent new verbs? I want to create one for you: I sky you, so that my wings may stretch out enormously, to love you without boundaries.
- Frida Kahlo
When El sees beauty, it stops her in her tracks.
“Mike, look,” she so often whispers, tugging on his arm and pointing. Sometimes, she even takes his chin in her fingers and tilts his face towards the part of the picture that enchants her the most – a star that shines with particular brilliance, or a lone pink cloud in an orange sunset.
Mike loves when she does this. For a moment, he feels as though he is seeing the world exactly as she does. He wishes he could see it this way more often, that he had it in him to ruminate on flowers and trees and the colours in the sky.
In the kitchen, she stares at the windows, where the silhouettes of the trees sway through the curtains. Mike smiles to himself; he knows better than to try to coax El back to the table, where they have been working together in companionable silence for the last hour, knees pressed together. He drops his pencil atop his unfinished essay and reaches for El’s hand, still covered in glitter from her latest crafts project.
“Come on,” he says. “You’ll see it better from outside.”
El lurches from the table, pulling Mike with her. He almost trips over her discarded chair, but she clears his path with a wave of her free hand, tucking the chair neatly back beneath the table.
The door bursts open without being touched. Mike follows El over the threshold, down the stairs and into the front yard. His mother keeps the garden pristine, and El often coos over the neat blooms, often peels off her socks to sink her feet into the dark, lush grass. Now, she is distracted by the gilded sky, arching over the house.
“Wow,” she says, softly. She turns in a circle, her eyes luminous.
She watches the sky, and he watches her. Mike thinks he understands the longevity of her love for the sky, because the novelty of her beauty has never faded for him.
Turning to face him again, El’s reverence becomes somehow brighter.
“I have an idea,” she declares.
“Oh, really?”
“It’s a bit crazy.”
Mike laughs. “That doesn’t surprise me.”
El’s gaze widens. “But you’ll do it?”
“You haven’t even told me what it is yet!”
There’s nobody close enough to hear them - his father is fast asleep in the living room and his mother has taken Holly to the supermarket - but El crowds in close to him and lowers her voice to tell him her idea.
“We could sit on the roof and look at the sunset,” she says.
Mike raises his eyebrows. His instinct is to say no, because there’s nothing discreet about standing on top of a house, and El is supposed to be flying under the radar. But he’s also aware that his house is isolated, that his roof is tall, that they’re unlikely to be seen, and that El can’t live her life afraid.
What’s more, he’s very curious.
“How are you going to get us to the roof?” Mike asks.
He’s thinking about Steve Harrington crawling through his sister’s window, all those years ago. But El has a decidedly cooler plan in mind. A familiar one, recycled from that same crucial period, that week in 1983 that changed his life forever.
Mike finds that he likes flying much more when he isn’t falling to his death. It’s still startling, even when he knows it’s coming. He laughs in amazement as he is lifted from the earth, as El carries him through the air. He looks around, watching as the trees grow smaller and the roof gets closer. He feels the moment that solid ground returns to his feet, when he regains a sense of stability.
“Are you okay?” El calls from below, her voice concerned.
“I’m great!” Mike answers, still grinning. “I’m amazing.”
A moment later, El joins him on the roof, floating herself up with much less care and much more speed than she had handled him. Though he knows she doesn’t need his help to land, he still reaches out for her, and she still takes his hands, allowing him to pull her down to the roof.
Mike wipes the blood on her lip away with his sleeve.
“That was an awesome idea,” he says, his hand moving to her cheek.
“Thank you,” El says, smiling at him. “Everything is close here.”
She points above, where clouds hover nearby, threaded in golden light. Mike can see patches of orange sky behind the streaky sections. He can see the place on the horizon where the daylight clings, where the nighttime ushers in shades of grey.
“It’s beautiful,” he says. It’s the obvious thing to say, but nothing else feels right.
They find a place to sit and watch the sky unfurl. Twilight comes and unveils the stars, and El points out each one, fawning over how pretty they look, twinkling in the lucent abyss. The moon appears in a shadowy slither, cratered and blue, and it should look out of place amidst the lingering pink and orange, but it shines undaunted.
Eventually, El lifts an arm, her fingers stretching towards the heavens. She strains as she reaches, as if she means to touch the sunset, as if it is only just out of her grasp.
Mike looks at her in wonder. If anyone could touch the sky, it would certainly be El. But moments pass without contact and he knows her efforts are futile.
“I don’t think it’s possible to touch the sky,” he says, gently.
“I know. But it feels like you could,” she whispers.
Mike understands. The picture before them is so vivid it seems close. It looks soft enough to touch. In reality, it looms above them, miles away, and it is made of flame and air, things unsuited to their flesh.
“What do you think it would feel like?” El asks.
“The sky? Nothing,” Mike responds. “It would feel like air. The sun and the stars would feel like fire, and the clouds would feel like water.”
She glances at him and smiles in that charming, all-knowing way she has, and he realises that this isn’t the sort of answer she had in mind.
“I think it would be… silky,” she says, slowly. “Soft, like a blanket.”
Mike looks back at the sky and considers. “It almost looks like paint. Like maybe you could rearrange the colours. Swirl the clouds and the sun around.”
El nods her head in vigorous agreement. “Yeah. Exactly.”
She tucks herself into him, putting her head on his shoulder. Usually, this means she’s grown sleepy, but her gaze remains active as she stares at the scene before her. Mike sees lavender starlight flashing in her big brown eyes, and it looks so lovely that it makes something in his chest jolt.
He understands her world more every day.