I Spoke About Wings

I sat on a log, moss cushioning not enough to distract from hardened fungi and whorled knolls jutting into my skin. Persistent. Protruding. Not unlike the Thing taking shape beneath each of my shoulders. “Things“, plural, I should say. Now that I’ve begun correcting myself, I suppose I should admit that these Things were not really things at all. They’re me. Part of me, anyway.

The wings made their unwelcome appearance on the morning of my 19th birthday. I thought I’d gotten away without them, unscathed, since most nymphs in the Whispering Woods receive them in their 17th year. But I was one of the lucky ones. Or so I was told, when the Elders came to congratulate me. Awash on my doorstep in flickering light, beeswax candle I'd made myself hanging above us, their visit felt more like a threat than a celebration. With every word that fell from pale lips, the familiar scene around me began to rearrange itself. Sturdy walls began coating themselves in implication, and the air held its breath. Even as I stood in it, I began to realize that this was not my home. Not anymore. With my new appendages trailing behind me like a stray dog, I’d have to leave the Hollow, and go become one of Them.

No one really knew what the Fairies, those worthy ones of us who sprouted wings, did with the information they gleaned from the trees, just that it was something that invited hushed conversations and ominous glances. Some said the work they did kept us all alive, that some creature years ago had brokered peace with the spirits of the Woods, and now it was every generation's responsibility to keep up our end of the bargain. Some said the Elders don't like to let us know what happens to those who fail, whose sanity wasn't rooted deep enough before the whispers took hold of them. I’d never been the curious type. Nor the envious. I didn't want to walk with feet that hovered instead of crushed, no trace that I'd ever stood remaining at all. I fancied myself planted firmly on the ground. I didn't want to know what the Woods had to say: to reckon with that ancient knowledge, let it wrap around my ears and brand them in a taper. Leave that to someone else.

"Let me stay in my hushed hollow", I sat on my log and begged to no one. "Let me listen to the stories of the forest in their native tongue, and keep tangled translations with no end and no beginning away from me."

"Do not subject me to songs that will twist through my skull and choke my mind until there's no room left for anything else. Don't send me away to return hollowed, a vessel for tales the old spirits force upon us like flood. I will not prick myself on the thorns beneath your roses. I am content with the daisies, with the wildgrass and weeds you leave us as an aferthought."

No one answered my pleas. It was the one time the woods had nothing to say. I didn't appreciate their sense of humour.

I would’ve been content to stay cocooned in the hollow for the rest of my life, spending my evenings stargazing from toadstool tops and doing my very best to ignore the constant, dim sounds emanating from nowhere and everywhere. It was easier, when you had others. You could distract eachother, tinkling laughter and flashing teeth becoming your focus. I would lose that, when I returned. If I ever did. The Fairies were a Pariah. Respected, but distant. Feared.

My bloody shoulders sagged.