Work Text:
On my third week in town, the mayor taught me to double jump in the middle of the bazaar. I paid ten thousand gold for this privilege, money that would have been better used on animals or to fill my field several times over, but I suppose my curiosity got the better of me. I thought I was hallucinating the sprites too until I handed the one hanging out in my yard a stack of ten pebbles and watched it consume all of them, so anything is worth a go.
I can use a particularly large leaf to go gliding across Zephyr like the dandelions in my fields. The town mayor can double jump. Sure, what the hell.
"So what you want to do, my boy - knees apart - is jump once... and then at the height of your leap, you must... leap again!"
He clenches his fists in demonstration of his commitment to this bit, his teeth ground together with the determined ferocity of a cornered beast. I, wide-eyed and naive to the ways of the world, ask a question I thought was natural:
"Can you show me?"
It is worth noting that the mayor of Zephyr Town is not a small man. He is at least double my own height and as built as the mountainside, the crag of his muscle beyond anything I could hope to achieve in my lifetime. Were he an unkind man, he would be the sort kicking sand in my face and handing the woman of my dreams a pot of honey in front of me, the way they do in radio shows. I am telling you all of this so you understand my shock when I tell you I watched this man double jump like it was not a supra-natural feat. He didn't even run into it at all - just, bam, six foot vertical leap, the awning of his tent buckling and pinching to make room for his head. It did not rip. It did not tear. His top hat miraculously remained on through it all, even as gravity returned him to earth. No one passing so much as batted an eye.
"Now you!" He points to me with that same relentless determination that feels altogether threatening. I swallow, looking down at myself. I am all of five-foot-two and have never in my life been able to build muscle. Both of my legs could fit into one of Felix's.
"I don't think I can," I confess.
"Nonsense!" His hand inhabits the entire space between my shoulders. "Anyone can do it- why, I learned when I was your age!"
He gives me a solid pat that pushes me forward a half-step, his hands settling on his hips. I stare at him like one of the Suffolk lambs penned in at Ramon's down the way.
"Now jump, my boy," he urges, "JUMP!"
I jump. It is an ordinary man's jump, no matter how much of my blood may be pure adrenaline right now. I jump, and try to envision myself jumping again, but my feet find the earth before it happens.
"JUMP!" He bellows again. I have to go back to my stand in twenty minutes. I still have radishes I haven't sold yet. I'm really not sure if I'll be able to face customers as I am now, sweating with tears biting at my eyes as I try again and again to defeat my human limits at this man's command.
Jump. Jump. Jump. His hand settles at the edge of his counter in a way that would look casual if it were not for the earsplitting crack that emerges from the wood when he does. I clear three feet that time and he relishes in my victory with the ecstasy of a man coming to the mountaintop after decades of struggle.
"Yes...YES!" He shoves his counter to the side with the ease of opening a door. I have never been more afraid in my life. "NOW JUMP!"
I jump. On some base instinct, my hands raise in the air and summon the leaf. It is not a terribly breezy day, but it lifts me a few extra inches I want to pray passes muster. I land. Wild fury peers at me from behind thick square lenses.
"Do not cheat yourself in this," he says with a disappointment so gentle you could swaddle a child in it, and they would grow knowing they would never amount to anything. I feel the eyes of the bazaar on me, sharp in their judgement.That sad bastard can't even double jump, they say. But when I turn to them, to explain I am but an ordinary man who just happens to have hair the same hue as pink lemonade. They spare me nothing. Not their sympathy, not their ire.
"Do not look to them," the mayor continues in that soft, somber tone as he bends before me in the space his counter once inhabited. "This is something you must do by yourself, for yourself."
He continues, "I knew you were something special from the moment you arrived, but you have to believe it."
"How," I ask him, trembling as a newborn foal, a leaf on the cobblestone. "You had to teach me to farm. You had to teach my to raise animals. I-"
My voice cracks upon what I cannot bring myself to admit. I just came here for the free property.
His hands settle on my arms then, his palms equal to both of my forearms. It's such a tender gesture I wonder for not the first time in my life what it would be like to be loved.
"My young friend," he says, "it is because of that audacity that I believe. You have already surpassed so many of your own limits. What is this one but another?"
"It goes against the nature itself," I hiccup, his thumbs massaging my shoulders. "I can't."
"You can," he says. "You can and you will."
I want to fall to my knees and weep in the middle of the bazaar. I want to plead to this gentle and uncaring god that there are things in this world that belief cannot see you past. There are laws to this world that govern us, barriers so unlike the struggle of learning to grow radishes or tend chickens. I cannot jump and jump again while in mid-air.
Felix, perhaps sensing my thoughts, looks at me piteously. This man, who gave me my first tools, my first seeds, my first livestock... who mails me little gifts for the smallest achievements, whether putting flowers in a vase or fodder through the windmill. Mired in my doubts though I am, he has always believed in me. I do not think I can double jump, but I must believe that he believes I can.
And if not for him, then for myself. I must believe I can surpass my limits. I must believe there is more to me than this mortal coil, this prison of longing for the life I fear to give myself. It was I who crawled into the tub, having spent myself watering half my field, only to crawl back into the dirt after to finish the job. It was I who made the impossible honey cake from the eggs of my chicken and flour I grew and milled the wheat for myself. It was I who kept a stiff upper lip when the beautiful mystery I fell for at first sight gave me a fondue set as a means of letting me down gently. I sold it for a thousand and two hundred gold.
"Jump," the mayor says like a prayer. "Jump, and jump again."
I jump. I fill myself with everything I am and ever will be, bitter success and sweet failure, of the human experience in entirety as a hurdle rather than a limit.
I jump again.
My body, unaccustomed to this breach of the natural law, contorts against the pressure it places upon my thin little legs to push off against empty air. I curl them to my chest and cry for the harvest god in his heaven to witness me. For the goddess in her stream, pond, or lake to know me. For the beautiful women of this town and maybe Lloyd down the hill to stop asking me for favors and really look at me in the light of a new morning.
I land on my feet not a man, but a beacon. I pay Felix his ten thousand and return to my stand. We never speak of this moment again.