Category: Issue 16

These were the wings his body refused to grow. He felt them at his shoulder blades when he reached for them, hands back, his arms folded to an acute angle. He knew they had been there once. This was something he knew on a genetic level. His body was making him a liar.

It was early morning. There was blue light all around him and a persistent haze in his mind. He got back in bed, waiting to hear something, anything. He closed his eyes.

Usually he woke before his mother and lay in bed waiting for her to rise. He held an acute fear that she might’ve died in her sleep. A feeling of loneliness that crept over him this way. He did not know where he had gotten this inclination, toward seeing her death, but it was something he thought of all the time.

He heard her footsteps coming down the hall and waited for her to round the corner and reach the kitchen. He had scared her once. She had jumped into a wall and scowled at him. She had slivers of her dark hair bisecting her eyes then. The two of them had a still moment.

Now his mother was standing at the counter, waiting for the kettle to boil. It didn’t whistle like the old one did, the one that sat on the stovetop. He liked the whistle of the old one. She was hunched over it, watching.

He told his mother that he had had wings there.

She turned and looked at him, towering. She was a tall, slim woman. She towered over most people. This was something he had seen in crowds, her face high above everyone else, the way she stood singularly.

She said, “Where?” very slowly.

He turned and lifted his shirt and reached back for his shoulder blades. Then he looked back at her. She was pouring water from the kettle into a cup. The teabag rose up to the lip.

“You’re not looking,” he said.

She turned back to him and told him she saw them. Her face changed completely. She smiled grimly. Then she said to go get ready, and he went back to the semi-dark room and dressed.

When he came out ten minutes later, she was dressed too. She wore a t-shirt and jeans and hightop sneakers. She looked even taller then, for some reason. She had to kneel slightly to put her hand on his back and push him out the door toward the car.

On the schoolyard, he told another boy. The boy looked at him askance. Look, he said, trying to show the boy, pulling his shirt up. There was a heavy fog resting on the wetness of the blacktop. Girls played hopscotch. The boy laughed and climbed the slide. He waited for him to come down so he could show him again, but the bell rang.

He knew he had had those wings. He felt the memory of them there, the way they had sprouted from him. He saw them in breaks in the clouds. He felt their scars in the shower, the ridges of his shoulder blades. He mourned their loss.

In class, he drew himself with them. He shaded each feather, gave them dimension and scope. They burst from his back, unfolding huge and broad. They took up fore- and background. The drawing was crude.

He stretched with his arms pulled back at his sides, like he might if he had the wings. Every bit of floating detritus in his periphery was a feather falling.

He wasn’t paying attention. Ms. Andrews was talking but he could not hear her. He caught maybe every other word. He looked at the clock, watching the ceaseless motion of the red hand. It did not tick.

He was studying her face in the half-dream state. She was a heavy woman, her eyes a kind of blue-grey that seemed to change with the light. She had streaks of white through her black hair. A sort of distance to them.

Then she called on him and he stuttered, trying to find answers in the whiteboard. Some indication of what she had been saying this whole time. She wrote in looping cursive, beautiful in its antiquity. Strangely otherworldly.

She stopped his stuttering with a hand and told him to pay attention. For a while he did. He had his hands neatly folded over the wings drawings. He looked through his fingers at them at first. Then he was unlacing his hands, moving them to the sides of the desk. Something in the way the drawing looked, the image of himself with the wings, made him feel full. Something about them made him feel shaded in, as if he had acquired depth.

Ms. Andrews was at his desk. She took the image and examined it, measuring its composition. Wordlessly, she folded the piece of paper in half and walked back to the whiteboard, where she resumed the lesson.

Slowly, he gleaned that she was covering the planetary system. She said that when she was a girl, Pluto was considered an integral part of the solar system, but now it was not. Pluto was ubiquitous for the solar system, a kind of dawdling little brother at the back of the pack. Her face was mournful when she said this, as if something had been taken from her with force. Then she said Pluto was unceremoniously removed, redefined. Now it was some kind of trans-Neptunian object, but resolutely not a part of our solar system.

He recognized this feeling. The way she mourned the loss of something that others might regard as inconsequential or abstract. When the bell rang, he stayed after class. He approached her desk. He asked her if she had really cared for Pluto. She had a strange and quizzical on her face.

Then she said, “About as much as you can care for something that’s three billion miles from you.”

He looked at her and nodded. Then he went out.

At lunch, he sat by himself. He did not want to eat, but he drank the pouch of chocolate milk. He tore a hole in the plastic with his teeth and held it like he had seen his mother hold a bag of frosting when baking. That delicate way about it, like it was made of glass and it might slip from his hands if he wasn’t careful.

Emma Daniels sat in front of him. She was a slight girl with flaxen blonde hair.

She said, “Stephen Gallagher said you said you had wings.” She looked confrontational.

He drained the pouch of chocolate milk and looked at the dusting of freckles between her enormous blue eyes. Then he set the pouch down and said, “Stephen Gallagher is a liar,” which she seemed to regard as true for a moment.

“He said you pulled your shirt up and tried to show him your back,” she said.

He shook his head no. She stared at him with a look somewhere between scrutiny and sympathy. But she said nothing for a long time.

He was taking small bites of the mac and cheese on his tray. He was not chewing. He was beginning to speed up. He was nearly breathless. His cheeks swelled against the increasing mass. He held eye contact with her until she grimaced and left. He watched her leave. The way her legs moved under the hem of her dress. When she was gone, he stood and went to a trashcan and emptied his mouth.

The rest of the day passed slowly. It was a Friday, and the nervous and impatient energy was palpable in Ms. Andrews’ class. She stopped several times to quiet everyone. She begged them nearly. When the bell rang, she looked relieved.

He wanted to ask her more about Pluto. He wanted to know what role it had had in her life. How she saw herself in relation to it. But he didn’t stay to ask. He walked out into the hall and out to the street where he waited for his mother to show.

On the sidewalk, Stephen Gallagher walked by and sneered at him. Emma followed, a hangdog expression on her face now. He sat on the steps of the school, watching the street. He couldn’t tell how long he had been there, how much of the afternoon he had wasted. It wasn’t until Ms. Andrews came out that he had realized he had been there for too long. The sky was darkening down.

She asked him if he was okay, and he said he was. Her face expressed doubt.

His mother pulled up a moment later, gleaming with sweat, running from the car and apologizing. Ms. Andrews gave her a strange look that felt both conciliatory and reprobative. Then she wished them both a good weekend as his mother knelt slightly to guide him toward the car.

When they got in, his mother said they had to make a stop. She was breathing hard, and her clothes were damp at the neck and armpits. He had seen her like this before. Maybe a year ago. It had felt exactly the same. Before that, there were months of her coming home late in the evening, gleaming with sweat. She’d walk directly to the shower, right past him, past his father.

He thought about his father as they drove uptown against the skittering rhythms of cross-town traffic. Anytime they came to a stop behind the hazy glow of brake lights, his mother swore under her breath. He had his book bag between his feet  and reached down to get a book. She stopped him.

“You’ll get sick,” she said.

Her face was urgently framed against the smudged window, a kind of pale palimpsest. His hands still rested on the zippered mouth of the bag, unmoving. She was beating her thumb on the upper curve of the wheel. Then she turned on the radio.

“Here,” she said.

It was an aria. A da capo aria. He felt the surge of the “B” section, the climbing voice running almost sidelong up the scale. This was something he understood, this great arc, like the apex of a flight. He closed his eyes. It would lift him, it would physically lift him out of the car, through the roof and into the sky now blackened and spotted with fractured lights. The voice crawled up to the highest note and held. It was jangling bright. He felt like he was starting to lift, but when he opened his eyes, his mother was parking.

“Stay here,” she said, “Don’t move.

He saw her heading toward one of those skyscrapers that dominated the skyline. The glower of lights breaking against the sky in the night, liquid, omniform. She disappeared behind the door.

Now he took the textbook out. He turned to the section on ornithology. It was a shallow text, not even beginning to cover the breadth of the subject, but he had read it several times. One section in particular. A skeletal comparison between aviary life and human life. This was an image he studied for hours, the similarities. The skeletons were nearly identical, nearly interchangeable. It was simply the skin, the organs that made humanity flightless. That doomed him to the hard soil. The way the outer layers adhered to his skeleton. Something so insignificant as to be almost cosmetic.

Sometimes, at night, he lay on his stomach on his bed, with his arms out at his side. He wanted to feel the weightlessness of gliding. That feeling at the top of the Ferris wheel where he was neither rising nor falling, but instead hung for what always felt like a moment too long at the apex, or tipping point. He’d close his eyes, trying to remove himself from his body that betrayed him. To feel for just one moment time stopping. But his mother always walked in and interrupted him.

Like she did now. There was a slight shuffle as she got in the car, enough to make him open his eyes again. When he did, he saw her looking down at the textbook. Then she looked at him.

“Birds are known carriers of diseases,” she said.

Then they drove off. They were heading downtown again, down toward the village, where they’d cross the bridge and be out of the city. The skyscrapers were receding in the rearview. He saw rooms lit against the sky, forms smearing against the night of the sidewalk.

“I’m sorry I was late,” his mother said. She was looking at the road still. He was watching the people passing on the street.

“It’s okay,” he said.

She put a hand on his knee and shook. An awkward form of motherly affection, as if she were trying to wake him from some melancholic dream.

“Your day was good?” she said, now glancing at him. “You learned things?”

“How do you feel about Pluto?” he said.

She said, “The planet?”

“The trans-Neptunian object.”

She thought about it. Her face was drawn up on the right side, a sort of smirking without emotion. A gesture she made when she was giving something deep, concentrated thought. “It’s a planet. Definitely. No question. Some things you just know.”

“And you know this?”

She tilted her head. “Yeah, I think so. This seems like something I know.”

“Isn’t that anti-scientific?”

She shook her head no. Then she said, “No, no,” but didn’t elaborate. He saw her face only in the sepia light of the streetlights they passed under. He didn’t press her.

They were rising over the bridge. That funny feeling he got when he heard the whipping of the wheel’s rubber against it. That feeling of precariousness that felt like he was always rising or falling. She held the wheel at ten and two and was slightly hunched over, her long body kind of wavering. Over the water, there were fleeting glimpses of light moving fast across the rippling skin. What bodies lay beneath? If he jumped, how long would he remain in flight before he hit the water?

On their street, they got out and walked up the three flights of stairs to the apartment. They went in and his mother went off toward the bathroom and he heard the shower running. Her voice came lilting through. A lovely, husky voice, a kind of intonation that gave words heavier meaning than they’d otherwise have. This was one of her talents.

She came out a little later with a towel wrapped around her head, dark strands spilling out. She wore a robe tied tight. She went toward the kitchen, passing behind him.

He sat on the couch and was back in the book, looking at the skeleton again.

When the doorbell rang, his mother looked at him. He rose and walked to the door and opened it. His father was framed there. He was slight, with thick glasses that made his eyes large.

“You ready?” his father said.

The boy nodded and went to his room, gathering his things. He put the book in the bag first. Then all his clothes. He heard them talking.

“Funny thing happened today,” said his dad.

There was a nonverbal sound from his mother.

“A man in a suit came to my apartment. I said I wasn’t interested. His foot was wedged in the door and there was an envelope. Guess what was inside.”

“Scott, please,” she said.

“Can you guess?”

“I don’t have time for this. I have to get ready.”

“I’m not mad, is the thing. There’s no harboring resentment. You understand. Ready for what?”

He came out into the hall. His mother towered over his father. She looked down the hallway at him. She looked tired.

She said, “I’ll see you next week, huh?” Then she rubbed his shoulder.

He nodded and followed his father down the stairs. His father was slumped, his shoulders an inverted convexity. He wore an oxford shirt that was at least one size too big. He was almost the same height as him. Still his father held a hand on his shoulder as if he were guiding a substantially smaller person than him.

They shuffled out to the sidewalk, into the dark night, then down to the subway platform. He only ever rode the train with his father. He liked the smell down there. That cellarly, vaguely industrial smell. The smell of damp exhaust concentrated.

They stepped into the car, and a man was yelling. He was exposed. The boy stepped closer to his father, and his father held an arm back, lightly grasping him. His father was sweating through his oxford shirt. Sometimes his father was prone to sweating like this, and he could make out the shape of his father’s undershirt. He couldn’t see his father’s face.

The man was pacing half the length of the car and the boy’s father was backing him away slowly. The man’s eyes roamed wildly. His hair was frozen into a shock. He spoke at a rapid clip. He was muttering things the boy couldn’t quite make out. The only phrase he understood was “that’s what they do,” which punctuated every other sentence with a stab.

They had four more stops. They were backed up to one end of the car.  The boy held his breath. His father said nothing.

A couple stops later, the man went out onto the platform. He looked back just as the train started to pull away. He touched the glass as the train pulled away, saying “no, no, no” before he reached the end of the platform.

When the boy looked up, his father was breathing hard. He didn’t say anything, and there was no indication of panic or worry in his face, but his oxford shirt was moving with his breath. He squeezed the boy’s hand as they walked out onto the platform and down to the car.

His father lived outside of the city now. Had been living there for the past few months. It felt like nowhere. The streets were wide and sprawling and quiet. There were trees arranged into canopies, a long stripe of sun coming through the shade. In the dark, it was almost impossible to see anything at all.

They drove through these streets pulling wide. He looked at the dim faces of houses. The light cutting through the blinds, the birds in the branches of the trees. All these dim eyes, the owls hooting and twisting their necks. He imagined their skeletons, spread out next to his own.

When they came to the front of the duplex, his father walked around the front of the car and opened his door. They went up the walk and across the patio to the leftmost door. Inside, it was sparse, a yellowed white, smoke-stained along the walls. There was a fold-out couch that he slept on.

His father went to the kitchen and put a frozen pizza in the oven. The whole apartment smelled of gas. He sat on the fold-out and turned on the TV. His father came back in to the living room and opened a window. Then he sat on the couch.

“Look, I don’t know what you heard,” he said.

The boy turned from the TV to his father.

“But you don’t need to worry,” his father said, “There’s nothing to worry about yet.”

The boy said nothing. He was flipping through the channels, across skittering gray static.

“Because whatever happens,” his father said.

The boy put his hand on his father’s knee and gave him a shake. There was a still moment between them. Then his father rose and went back into the kitchen. His choked breath was audible from the living room. It lasted several minutes. The boy wondered if he should go in there, but, after a few moments, it faded.

When he came back, they ate in front of the TV, which was something they never used to do. The pizza was still half-frozen. The chewed silently and watch a documentary about animals of the Amazon, which the boy had eventually settled on. His father fell asleep on the couch. He had a kind of rattling snore. And slacked, his face had a youthful quality that it did not possess when animated.

The boy went to the kitchen. The stove’s clock read 11:17. The time flickered. He took the book from his backpack and splayed it open on the table. He could not focus on the text. He read and reread passages over and over again.

It was quiet. The only sound he heard was the hooting of an owl. And when he looked up, it was on the windowsill. Its head twisted and twitched. Its beak parted and shut, these little half-gestures.

The owl and the boy looked at each other for a long time. The boy did not move. He felt he shouldn’t. He hardly breathed. After a minute, the owl walked onto the kitchen table. It stood before the boy, twitching.

Then, behind the owl, his father’s face came from the dark. Then the broom over his head. Then the impact.