The Wings (fiction)

I entered a short story competition with a barn owl theme. I didn't win, but I do love the story that birthed here, about a girl, an owl, and an unusual transformation. 

​There was a girl. She was an odd thing. While other girls traded barbies and cruelty, she collected feathers and fallen nests. Boys made more sense, but they weren’t interested in her, so she climbed trees to talk to the magpies, who were.

The girl loved the moon.

She loved it when it was a sharp curved sliver slicing the night. She loved it when it was half a glowing eye, like someone had split it down the middle and stolen the other half. She loved it when it peeked over the horizon all huge and orange and round as a coin, chasing the sun, which it could never catch. She loved the way moonlight scooped up all things familiar and painted them eerie and magical. Her red dressing gown lost its colour and the silver in her father’s beard turned blue. The beach rang like glass struck with a spoon. Insects shouted and animals scuffled and the world felt like a puzzle only she could solve.

One night when the moon sang loud as loneliness in her ears, she slipped into the night on a waft of seabreeze and a dim restless hunger for something nameless, something wild-drenched and shivery.

Her bare feet took her to the forest. She wandered in her red dressing gown that wasn’t red, and sat with her back to the huge spotty-gum that had cradled her yearnings for years, and turned her senses to the night.

Cicadas screamed their release from seven years trapped in the earth. Waves tumbled against the shore and a curlew screeched at nothing. The willie wagtail chattered as it always did, all night. Something rustled in the scrub, and then a pointy nose poked into a patch of moonlight, followed by a long body and tail.

Her breath stilled. She’d never seen a bandicoot before, digging into the dirt with its funny nose, leaving little perfect holes behind. Strange hops, scruffly hands pulling at roots. The sudden crunch of a beetle snack.

Oh, she whispered in her mind. Hello, you beautiful thing.

Maybe she’d whispered out loud, because the bandicoot suddenly froze, ears twitching.

‘It’s ok’, whispered the girl. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
The bandicoot’s nose wrinkled. It hunched its back.
‘Are you pretending to be a rock?’

And then something impossible thumped onto the creature and the bandicoot wasn’t a bandicoot any more, it was a thrashing frenzy of fur and feathers and claws and a single shrill squeak cut off like a twisted tap.

The girl dared not even breathe. A winged wraith so pale it glowed as blue as the moon glared at her as the bandicoot twitched and jerked. Its face was a heart and its eyes opened to forever. The owl shifted its grip on the bandicoot, which gradually stopped thrashing, until after an eon, or perhaps a couple of minutes, the creature was still. The bird turned its whirling eyes to the girl. For a moment she saw herself in them, reflected, a curved girl floating in discs of black glass. And then the owl was gone as if it had never been there at all. It was only much later she realised that she never once heard it make a sound.

I didn’t know any of this, of course, when I first came to myself. I was only a line of ink on skin and a buzzing sound and the smell of antiseptic and a trickle of hot blood, quickly wiped away. Can we know ourselves from the first line of the sketch of who we will be? When all we are is an idea, yet to be animated? A dream of purpose, of forked paths and possible futures, of all the ways we will change the lives around us, simply by being? We can’t. I couldn’t, anyway. In the beginning there was only sensation, with no real sense of the substrate into which I was being called.

That took time, and more lines, many of them. I had plenty of space to wonder, because wonder was all I was. I had no true form yet, so I could not know myself. But gradually, my lines joined together.

Shape defines story. Mine had wings cleverly drawn, overlapping intricate scales of feather stretching across a beach of skin, one on each shoulder of a girl, now a woman, calling me into life. Calling me to dance with her until the end of her days.

Over time, my story seeped in, and it was hers, a jumbled mishmash of pain and grief and love and confusion and kindness and cruelty, tumbled like stones in a river until the only way she could let her story out was to carve it on her skin until the world made sense. She was a magician, conjuring the phantom barn owl from her childhood, the bird that had wrapped her heart in its claws and stolen a piece of her soul until now, here, with blood and suffering and a joy as fierce as hunger, she let it all the way through and birthed me in blood and ink.

So began my life with the woman.

Her name was Estelle. She was tiny, small boned, pale as milk, wiry as a snake. When the last lines of me were finally etched onto her shoulders she fair burst with pride. Her friends oohed and aahed and strangers stopped her in the street to admire her wings.

Her story seeped in to me, but mine also seeped in to her. Magic runs both ways. All the owls who have ever been live in the idea of owl. Now they lived in me. And I lived in her.

She took to wandering at night as she had done as a child, away from her boyfriend with his long tanned arm thrown over her waist, who snored in light whuffles and farted when they’d had ice cream for dessert. She slid his arm off her bony hip, padded to the door and slipped into the beckoning warm arms of darkness as the siren moon called us both to life.

I lent her my sight and my smell and she followed the paths I nudged her along. Here, now. This way. Foraging creatures went quiet as we glided along trackless paths. Insects wheezed and creaked and sometimes the light patter of rain sounded like the bush had a thousand feet and was dancing just for us. I felt the cracks in her heart start to mend. New ones opened up in their place, faultlines leading to the molten heart of the world, to deep caves painted with ochre, to skies raining stars in different orbits. Her dreams were of flying, and hunting, and moonlight, and the warm embrace of firesmoke, and the plucking fingers of wind.

Estelle began to drift. She slept first on the front porch, and then in the yard. Her boyfriend didn’t understand and she couldn’t explain. One day he wasn’t there any more and there was nothing to hold her inside where the light fizzed and hummed and the walls were too white and straight. The last time she left she locked the door carefully and did not look back.

She made a shelter of sticks and leaves against a tree that reminded her of the old spotty-gum she’d leaned into as a little girl. Her first traps were clumsy and crude, but she got better, deadfalls and snares and cunning baskets to catch fat pigeons she cooked on the fire.

Every night we wandered further into the forest. One night a pack of dingoes ran with us. They appeared without a sound, brushing her legs with wiry fur, loping through the bush like wary ghosts. Their leader looked to her, to us, and we led them to where the kangaroos were bedded down. When the pack had made their kill they stopped and waited, until she had sliced off some meat with her small curved dagger. She made a fire, rolling slices of meat in hot ash and throwing them to the dogs, who tugged at long ropes of intestines and snarled at each other over the best bits. When she ate the kangaroo’s heart, her eyes glowed the same colour as the moon.

Transformation hurts. Newborns cry when they meet the light, emerging from dark and watery wombs into noise and light like embers on flesh that has never seen the sun. Snakes split their skins, crabs shuck their shells, larvae hatch into winged monsters. Everything changes into something else, it is the way of things.

I didn’t know this. All I knew was that I burned. Every filament of ink screamed and bled. Estelle thrashed and picked at the scabs, which wept and oozed. Her fever lasted days, days I cannot remember. I was in such agony I had no sense of time. An endless haze of fire and smoke and pain to sunder trees with lightning and burn them to ash. Even the moon did not help, she gazed uncaring on our struggle as Estelle moaned and I pulled against the prison chaining me to torment.

And then it happened. One feather pulled away from her skin, tearing loose, and with it relief like ice on a burn. I was in a fury, could not stop, and I pulled again, which tore another feather loose. And another, and another. Estelle howled as I set myself against her, tugging and yanking and thrashing like a mouse under the claws of an owl, ripping myself free, first one wing, then the other. Her wail of grief was unearthly.

I flopped on the ground, just a series of glowing lines, pathetic in the dirt. Estelle’s eyes were pure madness. I had never seen her from the outside and now I did. Hair the colour of dirty white straw, a wide, heart shaped face with huge dark eyes. She huddled and shivered, blood streaming down her shoulders.
Just then, the moon shifted to glaze the glade with possibility. As the light touched me, I began to…. fill. Between my wings new lines scribbled, faster and faster. A downy chest, long strong talons, a wide back, round head, wicked curved beak, sharp as defiance. Estelle grew quiet, her huge eyes even wider.

I hopped on my new feet and spread my wings for balance. Cocked my head, clattered my beak.

‘Are you… real?’ she said, reaching out her hand. I nibbled her finger.

‘Ohhhhhh. You’re real.’

My lines kept filling in, from mystery to matter. I felt the moment my heart started to beat. I felt the moment air moved in my lungs. I felt the moment true hunger sang in my bones.

And then I spread my wings and launched into the dark, away from the bereft shriek chasing me into the forest until I'd flown so far all I could hear was the thundering silence of my wings slicing the night into silk.

There is no way to describe flight. If you have never flown, you can never know. To guide your glide with a thought. To understand the landscape of air, mountains and valleys of it, lifting you this way, dropping you that, because the spaces in your bones show you how. All the owls that had ever been flew with my wings as I knew for the very first time what it was to be utterly myself.

I hunted. The taste of raw flesh filled my cells with ecstasy. I was a spectre in the moonlight, with wings of velvet and the air was honey and the part of me that was still human wished to be able to cry but the bird could not. And so I flew, and I hunted, and I feasted until I was fat and heavy and tired and then I finally circled back to her.

She was empty, listless, curled into the earth like a brown dry leaf, and she would not wake when I pecked at her hands. I pecked harder, nipping her skin until she stirred, turning her pale, heart shaped face to me in abject misery.

‘What will I do?’ she whispered. ‘What will I do now you have left me?’

The moon rose in my blood and I knew. I hopped onto her arm and pressed my beak to her mouth. She tasted of salt and despair. I breathed, blood and fur and the wild scent of the night. She took it all in, and then she breathed back, into me.

I grabbed her spirit with my strong sharp beak, and pulled it hard. She screamed and twisted but I am an owl and owls know how to pin a squirming thing. I dragged it out of her, a limp wet mass. And then I ate it.

She woke inside me as I had woken inside her. Confused, curious, in a haze of wonder.

‘What am I?’ she said.
‘You are me. I am you.’
‘Oh,’ she sighed. Then.
‘Can we fly?’

The moon’s pale song was so loud it drowned out everything but the beating of our heart. Music trembled and spun through the leaves, through branches reaching to claw at the indigo sky, through myriad creatures woven into the filigree silver web of night. Music wove and rose and soared and throbbed with a thousand thousand voices: come, come, come.
​
We flew.