black history/futures: allying with air

it's feb! that means it's black history/futures month. my goal in 2024 is one flash fiction story per week. all stories from this month and past years here.

preface: today’s story is inspired by the episode of how to survive the end of the world with adaku utah.

i took the deepest breath i could and held it. i really wondered what would happen this time. last time, day 99, of working with air, my first inhale after holding my breath had rattled my whole building.

it was such a funny experience to have taken 50 days to notice any connection with air at all. and by funny i mean hard. she’s a fickle one, my teachers warned one. fickle and subtle. at first.

for the first 50 days of working with air via breathwork, i had noticed almost nothing. i couldn’t blow a candle out any faster, i couldn’t blow ripples into water, nothing new was possible. then just past day 50, i started to notice the flour on my counter move ever so slightly after my breath hold.

around day 60 i noticed my octavia e. butler posters start to flutter on my walls. day 70 a few books (very specific ones it seemed: somé, hooks, brown) fell off the shelf…

words / writing / post-processing
151w / 12min / 3min