Freeing Will

A pez volador, angling hard toward the surface — a predator below, or nothing, or nothing yet. Breaking through into a medium it has never trained for, pectoral fins snapping open, body flat on the updraft off the face of a wave. Two hundred meters of gliding before the water reclaims it. The creature has no record of having done this. The leap precedes the knowledge that leaping is possible.

The surface breaks open first. Courage is the name given afterward to what the body already did.

How do I choose? By noticing the surface already broken, the fins already open, the water already below.

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