INTRO

Some things don’t run. They rise.

Flight is not always graceful. Sometimes it’s jagged, breathless, stitched from instinct and ash. These flash fiction stories of escape and survival explore what happens when staying becomes unbearable—when the body remembers it has wings, even if the mind has forgotten.

Here are tales of girls who vanished into forests, mothers who left without looking back, and lives that came unstitched midair. Some flights are chosen. Others are conjured. Not all of them land.