Flight

The first thing she said when I found her was, “I burned them.”

 

I knew what she meant. For months I’d been asking for my wings back—not wanting to use them, necessarily, but to know that I could, if I wanted to. That I could come and go as I pleased. Sometimes Salyn would say that she’d forgotten where they were, but she knew, alright, just as she’d known she’d wanted me that first time she saw me, swimming in a woodland pool close to where she lived, washing the sweat off me after a long flight.

 

Salyn had been walking, as she often did before work, her lithe little body patrolling the footpath. From there she’d seen me through the trees, a white flower against the green, and had cut through the grass to watch me squeeze chill water from my hair in the lake.

 

My wings had been set aside under a stone while I bathed, pale as frost upon the bank; how Salyn had known what taking them from me would do I never learned. She’d seen it in a book, I imagine, and through the evidence of her own eyes had come to the conclusion that I was indeed what she had read about. That I could be made her woman without her ever having to court me, as others had done.

 

I didn’t hear Salyn come up behind me, that’s how small she was. There was nothing of her to make a sound, not even when she took up my wings and put them under her arm, folded shut.

 

It was her touching my wings that had me turn and look at her, water dripping down the white hair along my back like the seam of a dress. I sensed it as though it had been my own skin she’d laid a hand on—that’s how sensitive they were, my wings. How much part of me.

 

I thought to shout at her, to come up out of that pool and twist her arm until she gave them back—but I saw how lovely she was, a soft, pretty figure with dark hair clipped to her shoulders, blue eyes so wide at the sight of me that I couldn’t help but think her guileless, an innocent come across a creature of the wood.

 

I saw her, and I loved her without knowing her name or the colour of her heart. I went naked from the pool into her arms.

 

“Who are you?” I asked her, and though Salyn let me know her name she never did tell me who she really was.

 

I had to learn it myself, over time, a slow poison ingested, taking its bitter effect. That’s how a friend of mine would describe her, savagely pulling Salyn’s character apart before me in the hope that, at last, I’d comprehend what she was made of.

 

But I wouldn’t accept it, made excuses that I’d never be thanked for. Explained away what I’d later laugh about with the kind of scorn you’d hold for an enemy. 

 

I suppose I did hate myself, at least in what I was willing to ignore or otherwise put up with for the sake of love. For I did love Salyn from the very second she picked up my wings—that was part of the magic, I think, or curse, I’d call it. 

It wasn’t only that I lost my flight, was made to walk on legs, deprived of the ability natural to all my kind. Once Salyn had my wings she had a hold on me far stronger than what I felt for her, or my promise to stay.

 

It was what had made me think we were in love even though she’d hurt me, though she had trapped my wings under her arm as I climbed into the clothes I’d left on the bank and walked with her all the way to her house. I thought it was a flirtation, her stealing them from me in that way, a sort of joke before she gave them back again. 

 

But Salyn put them somewhere in that little house in the wood that I could never get at, though in the months to come I’d go hunting through attic to basement looking for them.

 

Whenever Salyn went out I’d go feral in my search, tearing carpets up to look for trap doors she might have stuffed my wings under, ripping handfuls of wires and insulation from the walls, tipping clothes and odd bits out of drawers and even going through the Christmas presents that Salyn had wrapped and poorly hid from me, taping them all back up again.

 

Never could I find them, and she couldn’t have taken them with her; they would have been no use to her if she had. Human women can’t fly on a swan maiden’s wings, and they were too large and delicate for Salyn to have carried them around with her, had she the notion to try.

 

I’d ask her where she’d put them—lightly, in the beginning, forever brushed off with some vague remark, then when I began to plead in earnest she’d bark at me to leave it be. She made me feel like an annoyance for wanting my own possessions, for asking questions she didn’t want to answer.

 

If I tried to raise my voice at her it would only break. That, or Salyn would meet me with a worse anger, of a cold, restrained kind that made me feel I’d lost my reason. 

 

It was the way she’d look at me, the eyes that had once seemed so full of sweetness gone to a blue and broken glass, cutting me up the longer she looked at me. She didn’t have to raise her hand or throw things, only close up against me, her small body become angles it didn’t have. I’d want her soft again, so I’d relent, if only briefly.

 

But I wouldn’t let the subject go—my wings were vastly who I was, that set me apart from mortal women. That gave me the ability to fly, which had been my truest happiness, covering the world only off the strength of my own limbs. All the places I’d been, and could go, all the people I hoped to encounter, the mountains and forests and myriad landscapes I could see from a vantage point beyond the dreams of human folk and their machines. 

 

The longer I was apart from my wings the less I remembered who I was. Strangled by the house and the earthy wood I was suddenly shy, unsettled to live among people who thought me one of them, knowing that I was not. Afraid of meeting the friends I’d made in case they were sorry for me, shrinking and drab, my white hair become a filthy blonde by then from having lost so much of my power. 

 

So I couldn’t help but pester Salyn for my wings to be returned to me. I asked and asked until a sort of paranoia got at her, convinced that I only wanted them for the purpose of leaving her behind, which had never occurred to me in the beginning, nor would for the longest time.

 

Things began to change places around the house; I believe this was to throw me off the scent, or else to hide my wings in new places should I, by luck, come across them accidentally. I knew, then, that Salyn and I were in a tense and quiet battle against each other, little though I cared to fight.

 

I wanted the sweetness we’d had, our warm kisses in the wood, holding hands as we crossed streams together in our walking boots. The bars and cafés we’d go to, our heads conspiratorially close as we commented on the passers-by that looked at us, two beautiful women sheltered from the rain.

 

I missed the way she’d touch the soft down on my ears and the back of my neck and blow air upon me till I wriggled. The smell of her sleeping body next to mine.

 

I don’t know how long that sweetness lasted for Salyn. If she reminisced about those times as I did. I think it had all begun as a game for her, like catching an animal, wondering how many liberties she could take of my naivety and for how long. Forever, she’d likely hoped, but then she realised she’d made a mistake, that I’d started working at the trap she had me in.

 

Progressively the affection Salyn had for me withdrew to the point I’d beg for it, and whatever grudging effort she made would be rendered unpleasant by the work it had taken to receive it. We bickered all the time, little things blown up into rows.

 

I realised quickly that I didn’t like this woman: she had scarcely anything pleasant to say even of her own friends and relations, simmering in a constant negativity whose ice only abated when in the presence of those she didn’t wish to offend. Salyn could still charm, when she wanted to, but she never did with me anymore.

 

I didn’t like her, but I still loved her, loved her even on the night I went out to our back garden to find her, sat hunched under a blanket in front of the fire pit, watching flames crackle and snarl in its keep like a rankled beast. 

 

“There you are,” I said. “I’ve been looking all over the house for you. What are you doing out here? It’s freezing.”

 

It had been a blustering April, which at its tail end was only just beginning to lift. The nights were still as cool as winter had been, and Salyn shivered as she leant in to the flame for warmth. 

 

She looked as close to dishevelled as I’d ever seen her, and even then she was very beautiful, her unblemished face and hands like those of some sheltered princess, her eyes that ran with paint in the heat given off by the fire still like heavy jewels inlaid there.

 

I went to put an arm round her, but something in her lack of expression, the way she did not even look up at my approach, prevented me.

 

“I burned them,” said Salyn abruptly. “Your wings. They’re gone.”

 

I only looked at her, my ears unable to digest the words.

 

“I got tired of you asking,” said Salyn. “Asking, asking, always asking. You won’t let it go. And I’ll know what you’ll do. That friend of yours—”

 

Here, dislike, a crack in the ice. 

 

“I’m tired of it. Of all of it. So they’re gone, now. You don’t have to ask anymore.”

 

There was no sign of my wings in the fire, no stray feathers, no smell of them singeing. But she’d been out there all night, presumably,  had the time for them to go to cinders without a trace.

 

Still—

 

“I don’t think that’s true,” I told her shakily. “You wouldn’t do that. You know how important they are to me. They’re not just things. They’re like arms or legs. You can’t just get rid of them.”

 

“I have done,” said Salyn. “I burned them. So you can forget about it, now, Fina. You can let it go.”

 

Something in the stillness of her, sitting there, the way her eyes bore into the pit as though the wings still burned there made me believe her.

 

The pain of it was like a kick in the belly, and I sat down on one of the garden chairs on the opposite end of the fire, hit by the spinning, nauseous horror of acknowledging the act for what it was.

 

Comprehending, at last, how Salyn had abused me. That she’d decided by doing this she had won.

 

Then there was grief. It gutted me. Emptied me out like some terminal illness I’d tried unsuccessfully to ignore.

 

I stayed with Salyn for some months after that, but as a kind of ghost, trapped in routine. I ate at her table, was fucked by her in our bed, and went out with her to drink wine outside bars in the nearby town, all with a desperate false happiness, trying to forgive her, trying to love her. Finding myself unable.

 

I’d lost respect for her the night she’d burned my wings, though I should have done away with it years before. Once that was gone I saw that if we went on any longer as we were I’d lose all hope for myself. Give up, go on haunting my own existence the way other people did that had been hurt in other ways.

 

All I could think of then was how I could get away from Salyn, go back to what I was. Back home, to where I’d been raised, with my own folk.

 

I began to consider a way to have wings again now my own had gone to the fire. A way I’d known since I was young, that was spoken of like the eating of maiden flesh or the marriage of siblings, a horror you’d light a candle against to keep its dark from you.

 

Still, this thing was possible. It had been done. You heard of it, now and then, in my country. You’d see a girl not so proud of her wings as the others, notice the stitch marks of them sewn on at the base and you’d know she’d done it, and you’d wonder with a plunging horror who she had loved enough to lay her wings down by.

 

You’d think she was mad, and that you’d never do such a thing yourself. Never be in the position where you’d have to. But there I was with my bare back to the woman who’d done it, in her bed, and without my wings I’d only go back to Salyn if I left her.

 

I had no name in her world. No papers. Few friends to put me up that would ever understand what she’d done. If I ran away as I was I’d give up and creep home to Salyn, and I’d die like a flightless bird, slow and trusting.

 

Once, I might have accepted this, but the burning of what was mine had changed me. I’d run lengths of the house and the humid garden just for the feel of flight. I wanted it with what was more than want, more than hunger. Desperation more like a madness—

 

Yes. Madness. That’s what it was.

 

Out of my mind, I went like a wolf under full moon to the local park one night with a saw and a sack. I know how I must have looked, all in black: the robber I was. No one was about to see me, not even the brutal youths that watched with dark, crazed eyes from the playground swings most evenings I’d walked that way.

 

There was a river that cut across a field of grass like a scissor blade bent back. Swans nested along the length of it. I saw them, ivory hooks in the darkness, and I couldn’t decide whether to take a male swan—kinder to the eggs that needed their mother—or a female, less aggressive and likely easier to kill.

 

There was no doubt in my heart that I could do it; I’d known from the moment I’d come upon Salyn  by the fire pit that I was capable. I felt it all through me, a coldness that was really adrenaline cutting all feeling off, a temporary amputation.

 

Which swan I killed in the end I will not tell. Either choice was equal in its harm, and any reader of this account will have already, doubtless, have determined me a monster from my first having conceived of the idea, to begin with.

 

Let me be a monster, then. Better that than the half-thing I was, not really a woman, not quite an animal. Less than my halves.

 

But what I did was indeed the work of a beast, one more terrible than those that crawled the land I came from. I took a bird from the lip of the river, caught it up in my sack and sat upon it with all my weight, pushing down until the bones of its lovely body began to crack and the long wavering head that bit at me in the dark convulsed, blood in the black, noble beak. Blood in its feathers’ white.

 

I put a gloved hand upon the handle of the swan’s long throat and snapped it in my fist, and I cried out as I did it, a call like those I’d made in the bed of the creature that had maimed me.

 

There was no pleasure in it, only the dull awareness of a task carried out and now complete.

 

Taking the bloodied body of the swan in its sack I went into the woods to dispose of it. I sawed the wings from the fragile shoulders before I did so, washing them in a nearby stream until the white feathers came up clean again. 

 

The mangled torso I buried. I said no words. I shed no tears. 

 

While the dark still held I went to the one friend I had left that I trusted to go to with any secret or favour that needed to be done. I didn’t expect her to come to her door when she saw me knocking, watching from a high window of her house as though I’d crept there from my grave.

 

I’d not been to see her in some months, afraid to rankle the warden that kept me.

 

“She only wants to sleep with you,” Salyn had said with derision. “Don’t bother with her. It’s not like she really cares.”

 

But she did care, my Ania. She came down in her slippers, her hair all a mess, to greet me, filthy with soil and gripping my stinking sack as though it was all I had, which it was.

 

“God,” said Ania. “What’s that?”

 

She didn’t ask where I’d been, or where Salyn was, whom she’d never liked. She took me into her kitchen and listened to me; I doubt she believed any of it, not then, but she listened all the same while I ate leftovers she’d liberated from the fridge for me, seeing that I was starving. The work, the running away; that had done it. That, and the prospect of the long flight to come.

 

When I’d done talking Ania opened the sack and put a hand to her mouth, appalled. 

 

“So, what,” she said. “You put them on and you can turn into a swan again, just like that? How do you even get them on?”

 

“My last ones were part of me,” I said, licking my fingers of chicken grease, a minor cannibalism. “We’ll have to sew these on till they take. After that it’ll be just like before. Have you got a needle and thread?”

 

Ania had it, shoved in a drawer full of defunct electrical cables and odd buttons and scattered hair pins. She wouldn’t let me do the sewing myself.

 

“How are you meant to reach?” she said. “I’ll have to do it, and I’ve not sewn anything since I was at school. And if it doesn’t work—”

 

“Oh, I’ll die from infection, then, won’t I?”

 

Ania told me to shut my mouth and had me lie on my belly across her bed, my filthy dress pulled down to my waist. She mopped the sweat from my back and muttered something, a curse. A prayer. A threat to see me dead. 

 

Then she took the wings, one after another, and set about sewing them in either side of my spine. She’d given me a leather glove to bite on for the pain; I’d chewed right through it by the end, my tears running like wax, fever heat peeling off me.

 

I heard the crunch of the needle through wing and flesh, the whisper of thread. Felt Ania’s long, skinny body trembling against mine as she forced herself to work. I looked back and saw an amber string of vomit swing from her chin like the rope of a bell.

 

When it was done Ania fell on the floor in a heap, asleep at once.

 

I lay shuddering, not yet wanting to touch my back or look at myself. Not daring to move my new wings in fear that I had been wrong. That it was a lie, this method of renewal, something that couldn’t be done after all.

 

Out of exhaustion alone I, too, slept. It was some hours before I woke, stretching my arms and, with them, my third pair of limbs.

 

“Oh,” said Ania with a sort of dull wonder. “They work.”

 

I went home the following morning, the home I had not seen since Salyn took my wings. Ania packed me some things to take with me—“you’ll have to come over sometime to give them back to me, now won’t you?”—and stood on the doorstep watching as I opened my stolen limbs out from my back and beat the air with them, once, twice.

 

The base where the stitches were stung me, but I ground my back teeth together and bore it. There would be discomfort like this in running away; I had known this. They were necessary.

 

I don’t think Ania thought I’d be able to go so far as fly, let alone transform from one shape to another. She watched me, silent, turning the necklace she wore round and round her knuckles until the chain bunched across the flesh.

 

She thought I’d change my mind, stay with her for a bit then go back to Salyn, as I’d done before.  

 

But when the first foot left the ground she gasped, a theatrical woosh of air that would have made me laugh were I not afraid I’d lose my focus. I kicked up off the earth, a smooth ascent into the grace I’d lost. And I left Salyn behind, felt her fall from me, the devil on my back. I felt the air through the feathers of the dead swan as though they were my own.

 

Then I was no longer a woman in the air but a white bird, the change so quick I only knew it from the shape of my shadow on the earth below, vast and strange, though to me not strange at all. 

 

In time, after I was home, the stitches Ania had put in my back dropped like fruit from the healed wounds, and the wings fit me as well as the old ones had done, but for the scars. Sometimes I’d reach across my shoulder to feel the ridge of skin, and then, as time wore on, I almost forgot that they were there.

 

There were other women I took to me, after Salyn, some that touched the marks I bore and wondered about them, some who held my wings in their hands and marvelled that they held such power. I never told any—no matter how trusted they were—where I had cut them from, but sometimes, on long nights, I’d go out to the woods, to that unmarked graveside, and I’d kiss the earth where the murdered swan was buried like a lover, grateful for its death.