Wingfolk

Luke sneezed out the bitter tasting mud, mixing his face with the expulsion in the process.

Face down in soft worm food, he carefully brought his arms beneath him. As he pushed himself up, he saw what triggered the sneeze, sticking up in the mud where his nose used to be.

A single remnant of a feather, magnified by a lens of clear mucous, stood defiantly against the mud.

More feathers whirled around him as what was left of the wings disintegrated in the wind. He crouched and ran his fingers against his tunic, trying to wipe some of the mud off them before wiping the stuff caked to his face.

He didn’t mind getting dirty, but he hated anything on his face. He had just started sprouting facial hair and he hated that even more, attacking it with a pair of tweezers every night before he went to bed. He found himself wondering if mud would serve as a facial depilatory, or, worse, if it would enhance the hair growth.

He shook his head violently, causing some of the mud to splatter against the breeze as he straightened his body to a standing position. He was a little sore in some areas, but no broken bones.

Scanning the skies, he spun his gaze in a slow spiral, starting at the zenith and ending on the Western horizon. It was the way he had been taught, as it was much easier to attack from directly above due to how the eyes’ orientation on the face.

He spotted a couple of Wingfolk about 400 meters southeast and 45 degrees up from the horizon. His body tensed as he saw them, but relaxed as he realized his concealment, especially on the ground, particularly since they were flying in a transverse direction relative to where he stood and their attention wasn’t towards him.

At least he hoped not.

He started detaching the feathers, at least the ones he had left, from his body, wincing with each one as the wax he had used to attach the feathers was yanking out a sizable clump of body hair with each “pluck”. Given the breezy conditions, he didn’t have to worry about cleaning up the mess this time. The wind ripped each feather out of his hand before he could set it on the ground. By the time he had gotten to the last feather, he had resolved to never try the “Icarus” method again.

He never recalled feeling so defoliated.

The two Wingfolk continued to soar on the breeze. From that distance, it was difficult for him to tell whether they were holding hands or not. He could tell they were male and female, but that was it. They were wind surfing, just seeing how long they could stay aloft without flapping while facing the wind. The idea was to hold your position as long as you could without backtracking.

Luke remembered it being a pleasant waste of time, but one in which a Wingfolk typically can have profound thoughts they otherwise might not have. His Wingschool teachers, he noticed, would do it often, as would the storytellers. Before his wingloss a few months back, he practiced it whenever he could, as often as he could, primarily so his body wouldn’t forget.

More than anything else, he wanted to fly again.

His wingloss, when it occurred, followed the three standard signals. He had learned these having watched roughly three-quarters of his classmates go through it and become grounders. The first signal, loss of keenness, began when his teacher spotted Orville squinting while reading the textbook his teacher held up in class.

“Luke, you’re squinting,” Miss Bloutzei noticed as she scanned the class reaction from behind the book. “While it’s a natural instinct to contort one’s eyeballs to see better, it’s actually much better for one’s eyes to take a few moments to gaze. Don’t squint.”

Luke knew she meant well, but he thought it started with that instant. Everyone knew that keenness went first. If the mind followed the body’s cues, there wasn’t much one could do to alter the outcome. Once the mind was locked into a pattern, even if the person’s current sensibilities abhorred the change, the body would follow.

The next signal, loss of strength, started a few days later, when Orville thrashed him at sky wrestling. Luke had always won before that time. He was always known as the strong one between the two friends.

“What in Hades, Luke?” Orville panted after the match, swatting a pesky starling out of the otherwise open sky. “I thought for sure you would take me when I tried the Yaeger roll. I mean, you always do.”

“I guess I’m tired,” Luke sighed as he watched the starling drop a few hundred feet before recovering itself.

Within minutes, they were surrounded by a few thousand starlings, all of them swirling just out of reach of either Luke or Orville. With two Wingfolk flying, it was possible to conduct the starlings as if a grand orchestra of sight and bird song.

“That’s what I was hoping for,” Luke said, mainly to himself, as they maneuvered the murmuration through the whirls and expansions, painting the sky with light and thousands of shadows.

The final signal, lack of dominance, was apparent that same afternoon as they were flying through Megalipoli.

“Hey Luke, I’m hungry,” Orville shouted, then pointed at a grounder with his hands full of hot dogs. “I’m going to ruin his day.”

Luke scanned the ground below as he dove after Orville. It took him a few seconds to spot the hot dog guy.

There was a hot dog vendor in a park and the grounder had just ordered one for each member of his family, which included his wife and three winged children. The grounder was in the middle of handing one of the hot dogs to one of his children when Orville swooped down and snatched it.

Luke saw bits of anticipatory saliva dribble in each of the kids’ mouths. The family looked like they hadn’t eaten in about a week.

Ordinarily, Luke would have taken the rest of the hot dogs while the grounder began to make a fuss. It was Luke and Orville’s modus operandi of lunch at least three days a week, sometimes up to six.

This time, he smacked Orville upside the head while grabbing the child’s hot dog as Orville fumbled it as a result of being slapped. He then returned the hot dog to the father, who cautiously took it from Luke and gave it to his daughter.

“Thanks! I guess,” said the father, watching his 3-year-old daughter flap into a tree happily with her hot dog, cramming most of it into her mouth at once.

The father ushered his family away from the two boys, taking a bite out of his hot dog while he could.

“What the Hades, Luke?” Orville snapped at him, rubbing the fresh red welt to his face. “That hurt!”

“I didn’t think it was right…for you to steal the guy’s hot dog like that.”

“You did the same thing last week,” Orville pushed Luke hard enough that he had to flex his wings to keep from stumbling. “Last week you even thought it was hilarious.”

“The guy last week wasn’t trying to feed his family,” Luke cowered back. “This family didn’t look like they had eaten that much recently. I mean look at them.”

Luke grabbed Orville’s head into a tight head lock and directed his friend’s ferocious gaze toward the skinnier than most family.

Orville recoiled from the head lock, again shoving his friend as he puffed out his chest and expanded his wings.

“Why should I care? I’m already on the Sky Patrol. I can do whatever I want.”

“How about I buy you a hot dog, instead?” Luke held his palms up, indicating a surrender of sorts. “You just said you were hungry. Those people are already too far away to make miserable, and besides that. They’ve all finished theirs.”

Orville stomped his foot angrily and turned away for a second.

“What is with you lately?” Orville demanded as he spun back around to face Luke. “First you’re getting all squinty in class. Don’t deny it, we all saw you!”

Orville did a mocking imitation of the squint, sticking his neck out in front of him as well.

“Then you go soft on me with the sky wrestling,” Orville stated.

Luke kicked the ground silently in response.

“Now you’re being all chummy with grounders you don’t know.”

“There’s a difference. They clearly needed the hot dogs more than you. And I didn’t go soft on you just now, did I?”

Orville scowled as he brought his hand up to his face where Luke had smacked him.

“Just give me fair warning before you try something like that next time. That really hurt.”

That night, before going to sleep, he had an unusual itch where his wings connected with his back. He would typically sleep in a tree outside, often with his friends. That night, he felt an urge to sleep indoors with his family. Luke woke the next morning to discover himself, and his wings, on the floor of his room. The itching was still there, on his back, but his wings were no longer attached to his body. Luke was surprised by the lack of blood. It almost looked like they had simply fallen off his back.

He sighed in remembrance of that day, when he suddenly learned to walk, talk, and relate to the world around him as a grounder. No one ever paid attention in Grounders 101.

The most painful part was when Orville squawked at him.

It was that moment of squawking, in that he realized he could no longer understand, or make the sounds, in Birdspeak. He realized he lacked his former speed when he tried to go after a rabbit in the yard. He felt like an awful sentence had been thrust upon him, as he was no longer one among the gods.

He realized he lacked his former strength just moving his body about the house, finding himself struggling to do things ordinarily easy for him, such as opening jars for his mother.

It was those moments, that new reality, that made him want to fly again. Who was to say if he succeeded in flying, just once, that he wouldn’t regain his former abilities, that he would reconfigure his role in the universe?

Shaking himself off, he limped back to the shed in his parent’s backyard to work on his next design, not fully expecting it to work, but hopeful. What else did he have to do in the languid weeks of summer?

He ditched the Icarus idea entirely and instead focused on practical materials. Instead of feathers, he used canvass. In place of wax, he substituted staples. He had a Linden tree growing in his yard and he used branches from that for the skeleton of the wings. He had to soak a couple of the branches a bit to warp them into the shape he needed, but he was certain that wouldn’t affect the strength. His main concern was making the wings as light as possible while also maintaining a structural integrity that wouldn’t fall apart the instant he started flapping.

The flapping part was problematic at best. He had no idea how he should do it, simply because he had never thought about it. To some degree, he always thought his old wings had a mind of their own.

There was also the issue of his core muscles. The act of walking upright over the last few months, as opposed to the generally horizontal position of flying, meant that his core muscles had begun to atrophy from not using them. He still had significantly more than most grounders, but not enough that he could soar on a breeze for any duration of time.

One of the exercises the students universally hated at Wingschool was known as “the diving board”. For this exercise, one student was designated as the diving board, while another student would hold on to that student’s feet. To strengthen the core muscles, the diving board had to keep their body as horizontal as possible while maintaining flight. After that initial horizontal plane was achieved, then the diving board had to fly both themselves and the person holding on to their feet.

The final exercise of the diving board sequence had the student diving straight down 1000 feet, stopping in mid-air, then immediately going horizontal on their backside, all while another student held on to their feet, not flapping at all for their own sake. The objective was meant to “flip” the student holding the feet off the diving board. If a student did that, they were automatically granted elite training for Sky Patrol.

Both Luke and Orville had been able to do it on their first try.

In contrast, the first time Luke tried these new wings, he’d given himself a running start, initially running like the idiots run on those anime cartoons with his arms, and wings, behind him. He jumped forward, straightening out his body horizontally, while flapping his wings frantically…

…and he plunged on his face. But with a slight caveat.

Unlike any of his other attempts, these wings actually bent the air a little bit. At first he thought it was a fluke, but after coughing out more mud, he pieced together the milliseconds of air time and discovered, much to his surprise, that there had been a slight flight time. It occurred when he had the wings turned down while thrusting them slightly forward relative to his shoulders. When he did that, he recalled an unusual resistance. The wings, he noticed, seemed to fight against his movements. His forward momentum was slowed when he brought his arms forward to break the fall. Most importantly, he coasted slightly on the air.

At any rate, he hadn’t plunged on his face with the same force as before.

He took off the wings and headed back to the shed to think about what had happened. At that instant, a starling thudded against the window to the shed. He remembered that he needed to check around him, starting at the zenith.

A smaller murmuration of starlings painted the skies directly overhead. He tried to look around and past the birds but didn’t see any Wingfolk in the sky near him.

He dashed over and carefully studied the stunned bird, allocating most of his attention on the shape of the wing. Most notably, he noticed it matched what he had observed with the shape of his own wing. The air was forced to move faster over the top than over the bottom when the wing moved forward through the air. With his own wing, it happened as a result of the panicked forward thrust of his arms as opposed to flapping. With the bird wing, it happened due to what looked like a curved teardrop shape at the front end of the wing.

Within a minute, the bird had staggered a bit and then flown off again. While the bird didn’t need a running start, in his case he figured it couldn’t hurt. He went back in the shed to work on his wings.

While he wasn’t confident about the outcome, he reshaped the wings, directly using his arms as a part of the curved teardrop shape of the wings, which ironically, also meant a much tighter fit to his body. He also made the wings much longer than his arms, extending about half a meter longer on each side plus making them broader, extending them right to the base of his knees.

It was well past nightfall by the time he left the shed. He decided to try again in a few hours at dawn.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Luke woke up the next day feeling hopeful. He hadn’t slept much at all the night before, trying to remember all the subtleties of sustained flight while he was supposed to be sleeping.

If he was to be successful, he would have to fly as high as possible. Landing might be an issue, but there was time to worry about that later. Or at least that was his reasoning based on two hours of sleep.

It was just before sunrise when Luke strapped on the wings. Like most mornings, the wind was almost non-existent, but a few cottonwood seeds and feathers from the day before bobbled about the air. The weather looked like it would be windy later. He tried to taste the breeze, like he used to, but instead ended up snorting a cottonwood seed and gagging.

After he recovered from that, he again checked out the wings he had created. They certainly weren’t pretty.

A lot of poorly rendered stitching over patchwork canvas and worse stapling initially overwhelmed his senses. He didn’t want to try flying with these, he told himself. If nothing else, the Sky Patrol might arrest him just for being too ugly.

As he inspected them closer, he realized while the aesthetics were lacking, the practicality was there. They were evenly balanced to their counterparts; slightly wider than conventional wings but also much more broad. Even if he flew for ten seconds, it would still constitute a victory for him. It might even rewire some of the broken synapses as a result of wingloss.

He checked the skies around him, starting with the zenith, then spiraling down to the horizon. He saw no one about, and he sprinted across the yard, heading east.

As the sun peeked over the horizon, it blinded him enough that he tripped over a tree stump that had been hidden by a clump of feathers. He brought his arms up in front of him to catch himself…

…but he never hit the ground. Instead, he flew.

It wasn’t a spectacular flight in any sense of the word, but it lasted just over 20 seconds. He flew across the rest of his parent’s yard, his neighbor’s yard, and out into the street barely missing a passing car. He wasn’t able to steer very well, or make any significant gains or losses in altitude. He just coasted on his own momentum from his initial sprint. As he flew longer, his body automatically went into a horizontal plane.

He still had his core muscles after all.

Then he heard the squawking crows all about him, and he knew it was only a matter of time. The crows served as spies for the Sky Patrol. He had to reach the ground and destroy the wings, quickly.

He tried to stop by bringing his body down vertically, relative to the horizontal direction he was flying. As it was, he was still coasting and gaining a bit of altitude, but not much. When he adjusted himself back to vertical orientation, he instead found himself gaining even more altitude as he surprised himself to have tilted the wings in a vertical direction as well, bringing himself into a stall about fifteen feet above the street below.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to get horizontal on his belly, there was far too much resistance from the wings. He kicked his legs up and tried to flip himself over onto his back. He relaxed a bit as he realized he still had the muscles to do so.

Then he saw his former friends, the Sky Patrol recruits, coming at him with their swords in hand. He saw Orville and Burton hanging back a little. All of them were squawking loud enough that lights were coming on in neighborhood houses. Front doors were opening.

He briefly glimpsed his dad opening the door to his house. He saw his dad recoil a bit as the recruits each grabbed one of his limbs. He wasn’t sure if his dad knew it was him.

The next thing he saw were his limbs being sliced off, along with his wings. Before he fell to the ground, he discovered himself held up, having been run through with a sword by Orville. Orville flinched a bit under the weight of his friend, now oozing onto his hand.

Orville mouthed the words, “I’m sorry,” to his friend.

When Burton decapitated him while his blood gushed around him, he merely sighed.

The Sky Patrol left his pieces in the street, after setting fire to the wings.