2024 Short Fiction Award Winner: Kayla Chang

The Falling Year 

I fell from the roof of a building on the first day of the year and didn’t stop falling until the last. It’s not true what they say—that you fall so fast you can’t breathe, or that your heart stops before you hit the ground. It’s true that the weight pressing down on your ribcage and chest will make you feel those things possible, but that feeling alone is not enough to kill you—only enough to keep you from drawing full breath. 

But the worst part of falling is the constant sound of wind in your ears. At first I plugged my ears with my fingers and screamed to drown out the sound. It’s haunting, hearing your own screams as silence. I screamed until my eyes watered and my face filled with blood, but it wasn’t until I’d screamed my throat raw that I realized, really, there was no difference—that when you’re falling, the wind in your ears sounds exactly like screams. 

But this was all earlier on in the falling, when for days—maybe weeks, even—I waved my arms and kicked my legs in the air, trying to find something, anything, I could feel my weight against. It was pointless, but it didn’t matter that it was pointless, because fear turns action automatic. If you’re scared enough, fear turns your thoughts automatic, too. And if you’re scared enough for long enough, fear will turn your thoughts to delusion. 

It’d felt so real at the time—just a haze in the air at first, sheer enough to pass my hand through. But as the haze started to thicken, take on texture and shape, I could see the space all around me slowly fill in with trees. The trees were floating, unrooted, but they grew so high and full that they blocked out patches of sky. And when I looked down at my feet, I could see the air beneath starting to thicken, too. I kicked my legs harder, and when I felt that familiar impact of feet hitting ground, I cried, because I wasn’t kicking anymore. 

I was running. 

It’s a hard lesson to learn, harder even to accept as true—that illusion is maintained by hope, and hope maintained by fear. As I ran, I could smell the leaves of the trees. I could hear my breath heavy in my ears, doubled like an echo. But the more real it all felt, the less afraid I became. And the less afraid I became, the weaker my delusion grew. The ground vanished from beneath my feet, and in the space where the trees had been, I could see my circumstances clearly for the first time: the earth below was too far away to see, and there was nothing around me but sky. And truer than all that still was this: there was no stopping the falling. And this truth was too true to fear. 

What I wish I knew then, though, is that beyond the fear of falling, there’s only the falling. People say one second of falling can feel like an eternity, but really, it’s even longer than that. Space isn’t emptiness; it’s a trap. The ability to contain time in discrete units—of seconds, minutes, hours—is gone. Days turn to nights to days to nights, until the passage between them is lost to you entirely. If I slept—and I don’t know that I did—it was the same as being awake. During the falling, the only way to give shape to time was by way of entire seasons. But each season, with its particular inconsistencies and fickle moods—how could any of them be relied on to tell anyone of time? Still, each turn of season mocked me with its ability to pass into something new. When it rained, I’d look down past my feet and watch those first stray raindrops fall out of view, jealous of their descent. Sometimes the rain would come down so sudden and heavy that I’d imagine getting caught in the downpour and falling, too—down into the flooded streets below, swept through the gutters, spilled out on dirt. And before the falling could claim me again, I’d turn every molecule of my body into water and seep into the earth, wanting only to feel held by its depth. 

In this way, there were seasons—but then there was all the time lost in between. And the more time I lost in between, the more fixated I became on finding the smallest hints of variation in sameness. And because there was nothing but sameness all around, I did this by making my own body a stranger to myself: I stopped feeling hunger or thirst. I could see parts of my body changing—hair and nails growing longer, limbs stretching out thin—but couldn’t connect the parts to one another, or to any memory I had of myself. I counted the number of times I blinked until I lost count. I bit my lip then ran my tongue along it, tracing the shape of my teeth. I plucked the hairs from my scalp, one by one, and gathered them in my hand like a bouquet. 

All these physical sensations—I no longer understood what they were meant to feel like. But when I thought about life before the falling, I wondered what any of it had been meant to feel like. So much of it had seemed meant to prove me unwelcome—a layer of dust on my desk, a bitter aftertaste on my tongue, a shirt that didn’t sit quite right on my shoulders. Sometimes, I’d turn the faucet handle of a bathroom sink, and water would come out. Other times, I’d be walking past a tree, and the sleeve of my jacket would catch on a branch. And why this discrepancy existed—between the things that’d work and the things that wouldn’t—had been impossible to account for. Before the falling, I’d spent hours staring up at the sky from the ground, wishing I were there instead of here—as though the sky were a destination—because there was anywhere else. But now I was there, here. And here wasn’t anywhere. 

It didn’t matter if I’d never loved the world before, though, because I knew that it must be changing in all kinds of ways below—that people were dressing different, talking different, that entire lives were being reconfigured by the flux of birth and death, by the pull of new relationships and the pushing away of the old. And I knew that the shape of the city itself must be changing also, as structures rose and fell and freshly laid roads met for the first time. And it didn’t even matter that I was on the outside of it all, because your mind’s greatest power is to imagine what you don’t have. So I imagined the world I’d lost as a place to which I’d always belonged, and which had always belonged to me. In this world, I would never look up at the sky because I would always want to be here, there. If my jacket caught on a tree, it would never be a mistake. Every place would have what it needs, and every need would have a place. And wherever I was to land at the end of the falling, waiting there below me would be all the people I’d been meant to care for and be cared by—their distant heads turned up, hands rising to catch my fall. 

Delusion turns unreality real; fantasy turns reality unreal. So just as I’d thought I could put a stop to the falling, the delusions had faded away—and just as I thought I was learning to love the world, the falling slowed to a stop. The sudden silence of still air flooded my skull, and I covered my ears with my hands and screamed. As I screamed my body started floating upwards, as though the pull of gravity were being slowly reversed. Then I started falling with the rain. 

It felt different this time, the falling. This time, when I screamed, I could hear it against the wind. It’d been so long since I’d heard my own voice that it sounded almost like singing. I stretched my arms and legs out as wide as I could and sang alone against the wind, because I wasn’t falling anymore. 

I was flying. 

And I could finally see it then, in the space where nothing had been before: the entire shape of the world. I’d imagined it so many times—imagined looking down and watching all the changes I’d missed play back in one quick, unbroken time-lapse, their shifting contours so fluid I could dive into them like a wave. But as I watched the earth near, I knew nothing I’d imagined had prepared me for the end, because it was from that distance—and only from that distance—that I could’ve loved the world forever. So I closed my eyes and let my body go limp, praying that this new world would accept me as water. 

But no one rose to meet me but the ground.

Kayla Chang is a short story writer with an MFA from Chapman University. She was selected as a finalist for the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards in 2021. Most recently, her work has been featured in Beyond Words, The Margins, and VOIS. She lives in Southern California.

1 July 2025