“You’ll be back soon, won’t you Daddy?”

It was a young girl of six, sitting on the porch steps as she watched her father load bags into the car.

“Before you even know it, sweetheart.” He threw his daughter a long, final look. Even in the dying hours of a grey clouded day, her flowing blonde hair was still dazzling. Even through a heart struck by ambivalence, the father still recognized his daughter as the most elegant of all precious gifts.

“Aren’t you going to wait for Mommy to come home first?” she squeaked ruefully from the porch, green eyes wide with uncertainty.

“Can’t do that, I’m afraid.” The trunk slammed shut. Car keys jangled in a cackling dance. “This business can’t wait. My plane flight is in two hours. Tell Mommy to be patient, and that I’m sorry.”

He flung open the driver’s door and shoved the key into the ignition. The mechanical beast roared to life. To the left, the child stared with undying intensity. It was if she was trying to drill a hole through the vehicle, hoping to render it useless and unable to transport her father away.

He sighed, and stepped out of the car. He didn’t remember himself walking, breathing, or even thinking. He just felt his own lips plant a long kiss on his daughter’s pale, smooth forehead, hands sweeping across her head of gold.   

“I will return,” he whispered. “I will come home.”

Then the engine gunned, spinning the man away. A familiar neighborhood fell behind. A familiar highway lane quickly drew up behind the dashboard. There were no other cars. It was like driving through a ghost town.

AIRPORT – 45 MILES. A tattered sign of faded blue loomed over the highway. The corresponding road exit lay dead ahead, less than fifty yards away.

But the father did not swerve off the highway. He continued onward for another seven minutes, following the endless black asphalt until he reached a smaller, almost concealed exit that steadily led over a set of gentle hills.

White sand fanned out before the man. He gunned the engine, racing alongside the edge of the deserted beach, and drove up the undulating headland. The vehicle jittered wildly from coarse rocks underneath, rubber wheels grating against the crude, pathless earth.

There was nothing even similar to a road now. But the man already had a map drawn in his head; every last direction plotted perfectly.

He braked to a halt just meters from the cliff. The Volkswagen overlooked an endless expanse of imperious, dark cobalt ocean. Deafening waves thundered forty feet below. Overhead, heavy clouds clogged up the sky; a grey, hackneyed blanket that hadn’t been washed for months.

It was thick, ominous, and could hide a battleship.

The man’s heart thudded ferociously. He violently hurled the car door open, but made no effort to exit. His hands shook as they dove into pockets, fingers wrenching out a small, soft stalk donning hundreds of smooth, silky hairs.

It was the feather – small and dark crimson – of a bird. The man clutched it tightly in a fist and leaned back in the leather seat, eyes scanning the sky.

On his palm, a circle of inflamed scarlet itched uncontrollably. His breathing picked up.

The sky remained utterly impenetrable; a smothering, depthless gloom.  

And then…with the winds abruptly picking up and a roaring silence clogging up the land, things began to unfold.

Like a pair of curtains drawing apart, the sky started to divide. In the shape of a diamond, a hole formed in the underbelly of the grey behemoth, right above the father. Fear’s familiar cold hand – gripping his spine in a deadlock – chilled him to the bone.

He had no idea what was going on. And yet…he could’ve almost predicted the entire procedure as it progressed.

The diamond grew to the size of a baseball stadium, and with it the eerie silence shattered by a steady, thunderous beating of swirling air. A sonorous whipping of wind that shook trees with each pulse. Yet a rhythm so calm it sounded almost natural…almost like breathing.

The father squinted from behind the steering wheel, seeing nothing but an entire universe of black beyond the hole in the sky. There was no moon; there were no stars. It was like a water well with vast walls of impervious grey haze, and he was looking up from the bottom.

The rushing wind now became a gale with every beat. The landscape was caught in a paroxysm; for one moment, everything remained still…and then the next, everything shook violently with the ruthless air.

And then it stepped out of the mist. Cast a shadow large enough to swallow the headland. Loomed over the earth like a god observing its pieces on the chessboard.

It was an enormous bird. The talons came into view first, each one the size of cars. Then emerged the wings, which hung strangely in dazed, limping levitation, spanning across the entire width of the father’s vision.

Then the eyes. Swirling grey pupils. Irises dense with nothingness; a totally unfathomable expanse of time, of power, and of prescience.

He became lost in those eyes. Eyes that contained the contents of eternity.  

Black coated his mind. Tranquilizing green slowly trickled in. Then an abrupt explosion of electric blue…

How beautiful. I can see everything.

The thick haze of the sky quickly formed a haze in his mind, and once immersed inside it, the father barely heard the shrill cacophony of squawks and shrieks that pierced the air. He never saw the hailstorm of similar, smaller birds emerge from the clouds. He never felt the hundreds – or was it thousands? – of tiny talons clasping his clothes, his skin, his hair. He never felt the ground leave him.

Sparkling, iridescent energies danced across his vision, his mind. He sensed approval, satisfaction. He sensed accomplishment…

But then, an image of his daughter floated into view; her small, beaming face perfect. An elegant angel of gold. The pure beauty of his only child…

The universe seemed to split open. Gone was the incontrovertible sensation of content. He felt an insane rage rip through him. He felt himself rip open.

Roaring wind burned his body. In his mind, the enigmatic grey iris blinked once. It was disappointed. It was defeated.

But it was not disheartened.

I will return. I will come home…

Then he hit the ocean below.