A few months after she had the baby, my friend Shelly began to float. It was only half an inch at first. We were at the café we liked, the one with the saffron buns and antique bicycle on the wall. I hadn’t noticed the slab of air beneath her feet until we had gotten up to leave and she had trouble bending down to pick up her purse from the floor. 

“What is that?” I pointed at the nothing below her sneakers. 

She looked down. “Oh, that’s always happening.” 

The next time I saw her, it was a whole foot off the ground, enough for a corgi to pass. The baby was strapped to her chest like a bomb. Every time he farted, she would laugh and float a little higher. The soles of her pull-on sneakers were surprisingly muddy as if she had waded through fields to get here instead of taking the bus. She was like a large hummingbird moving up the ladder. 

Every time she laughed, her ginger lemon tea would spill onto the table and my croissant. Having given up alcohol, caffeine and techno, she wanted my help in justifying it. “Did you know decaf still has 3% caffeine?” 

I told her I did not know, and I made sympathetic sounds about her fifty-fifth day without sleep, though I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand any of it. 

The waiter yelled at her to come down when she started bobbing against the ceiling lights. He said they didn’t want a lawsuit, and to not leave smudges on the Murano chandelier, that thing was impossible to clean. We couldn’t go back to that place again. Not because we were embarrassed, but because Shelly said she wasn’t going to give her money to a business that didn’t support mothers. 

Back in college, Shelly had been the one who held my head in her lap when my first boyfriend broke up with me then immediately started dating our friend, Mae. Shelly took a firm stance against back-stabbing bitches so she kicked Mae out of ultimate frisbee. My ex: she intellectually eviscerated in “Intro to Heidegger” at least once a week. 

The baby was in her lap when I came over for tea once, and I watched her layer over him, elbows and fingers so tightly woven I couldn’t have peeled off a finger. She was inside a foamy world and I was squatting on sandpaper, only able to glimpse in when the bubbles parted. 

The roiboos tea went past room temperature and settled somewhere between history and neglect. I tried to tiptoe into the hall to get my shoes, but she caught me. 

Quickly, I lobbed a generic baby compliment at her. 

“Isn’t he?” She hovered cross-legged over the coffee table. “There are so many things that could go wrong and you spend so much time thinking of all the things that could go wrong, that when they don’t, it’s a goddamn miracle.” 

“Amen.” Felt like the thing to say even though neither of us had a droplet of religion. 

“The other day, I let someone cut in line. Didn’t say a word.” 

“Why?” 

“What is time anyways? All units of measure are constructs.” 

That worried me for a while, but then I saw how she could still be ruthless with her time: arranging family, hobbies and friends in a strict hierarchy only known to herself. For example, she refused to come to my place for brunch with our college friends because it required a subway to bus transfer. But then I heard she had spent that afternoon shopping for velvet stiletto boots, going across town from thrift store to department store, before she finally gave up and bought a pair of sheepskin slippers.  

Half a year passed before I saw her again. She asked me to meet her at the pool. When I got there, she had strapped herself to the inflatable flamingo the baby sat on, a hemp rope around the flamingo’s neck. She kept rising out of the water and I had to pull her back down and tighten the rope again. “Only had time to cut my right toenails!” she wiggled the left ones, long and curling, at me. 

Soon, we moved over to the indoor cafeteria so that she could rest a bit on the ceiling. I held the baby. His hair was a soft tornado that smelled like fields and warm milk. When he shoved his dimpled elbow into my ear, my ovaries gave a lurch. Shelly wanted to come down from the ceiling and it took us fifteen minutes to get her strapped in the plastic chair. The baby had crawled over to a robot vacuum, and he screamed with genuine terror when it turned on. I had to run over and pick him up while Shelly looked helplessly from her chair. 

“What are you going to do?” I strapped the baby to the stroller then Shelly to the handle. 

“What do you mean?” she yelled from above. 

“Have you seen someone about this?” 

“I’m fine!” She had swung herself over to the door by grabbing the neon lights, pulling the stroller along with her. 

For a while, she did try the pills the doctors gave her, but they made her so heavy, all she could do was slump on the rug. Then she convinced her husband to move to a basement apartment with low ceilings that made it easier for her to dive for things. The baby liked to blow bubbles and Shelly would flap and gobble them up like PAC-MAN. When she got tired of doing that, she would let him watch TV, but only the educational kind. 

I saw them less and less; I couldn’t be sure why. Maybe it was because I had started a new job, a dream one, really, that made Mondays feel lighter. It was uplifting work, and crushing sometimes, like when I came home after a 10-hour day and found a cracked toenail when I peeled off my heels. I hadn’t cut them in months. 

Meeting up with Shelly had too many logistical constraints: ceilings twelve feet or less, never outdoors, no chandeliers or exposed pipes, play area, stroller space, never after five or before noon. Maybe it was because she took so long to respond every time I texted her, I started filling in the gaps with resentment. 

It was the next summer that I ran into Shelly at the farmer’s market. She was alone and standing firmly in front of the peach stand. 

“Are you cured?” I asked her. 

“Dave and I are getting a divorce.” 

I expressed my sympathies, but I couldn’t understand it. Not really. 

“It was Dave’s idea. He thought it would make me come down.” 

“Seems to have worked.” I checked her feet for gaps. “Will you get back together now?” 

She shook her head. “Only works when it’s real.” 

She asked me what I had been up to these days – a blank question expecting a blank answer. 

I told her about my promotion, and she got so excited, she forgot all about buying peaches and insisted on getting me an espresso martini. By the time we sat down at the bar, we had run out of things to talk about. I wasn’t dating anyone and I hadn’t broken up with anyone. She muttered something about picking up the baby early. 

While we waited for the bill, I thought about how after she cut Mae off the team, they ended up losing every game that season. I thought about telling her she should float if she wanted to, but she was gone. 

Months later, I heard from friends that they had called off the divorce and Shelly was floating again. They had built a harness system that allowed her to move around more safely. 

When I got offered the chance to go to the London office, I said yes. There were flickers of hesitation, especially when I scrolled through apartment ads that promised luxuries like ‘has a window!’ But the images of pints at the pub with my new witty friends had been carved in. I chose not to have goodbye drinks, and only told a few people if it came up. I had a plan to email everyone from the plane, using the onboard Wifi the company was paying for anyways.  

The flight attendant refilled my red wine, and I had rolled an extra blanket to support my back. There was nothing left to adjust for comfort. I had to write the email. Before I clicked send, I looked out the oval window, and got the compressed feeling of sitting in a spaceship. 

There was a slanted sunset and cotton fog over the city. I thought I saw a tight, dark shape in the nebulous. A hummingbird testing how far it could go.