This is just a little something I cooked up...I was bored OK! If anybody wants to give me criticism please feel free...
Wings
By Derek V
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“Ever flown before?”
“Sure…I’ve been to South Carolina. We flew from JFK. It was actually pretty peaceful, almost like we were sailing, not flying.”
“No, I mean really flown! Not inside a metal cocoon.”
“I don’t understand…”
“Flying by yourself.”
“No, I’ve never done any hang-gliding or parachuting, I’m not that suicidal!”
He rolls his eyes at her and stands slightly away from his embrace of a moment ago. Her velvety brown eyes blink up at him, his slightly taller body casting a shadow neatly across her face, bisecting it into two halves. Light and dark, amongst tenderness.
“I’ll show you how to fly!” he shouts, grabbing her hand and running. On a rooftop in the Bronx, surrounded by the squalor of everyday life, they’ve found a moment of quiet and solitude, a little closer to the starry skies than most of the people around them. Puzzled, she allows herself to be dragged along, until eventually they reach the opposite edge of the large apartment block’s roof. Searing wind blasts them away from it for an instant, and then they are alone with the primal fear of height blocking out all rational thought. Teetering on the edge, he turns around. Something is shining in his hand.
“Stick out your tongue.” She pushes a dainty pink triangle from between her lips, screwing up her face comically. He laughs, and then his face freezes in concentration as he gently touches the tip of her tongue with his index finger. Something sticks to it, a small tab of paper.
“Oh no, I hate acid!” she says, spitting out the tab of thick paper. Frowning at him, she sits on the ledge surrounding the rooftop. Noticing her displeasure, he steps down and holds her head in his hands.
“My sweetheart.”
Still she says nothing. Buried in her sulk, she doesn’t even look at him.
A bird cries out, and she shivers, and he drags her up and into his arms. “Bastard!” she mutters as he smoothes her hair down, her face buried in his neck. Hot tears run down the skin of his neck.
Why am I crying? she thinks to herself. There is no reason to be sad. Here I am with this amazing boy and all I want to do is bawl. I’m so stupid! A hug – and a release. Now he’s holding her at arm length, as if appraising her for purchase in a slave market, or like a much hated aunt about to kiss a reluctant boy. His grin lights up his face like a nuclear weapon.
“It’s starting!”
“What’s starting?” she sniffles, wiping her left eye with her sleeve.
“Something wonderful…” he says as he turns her palms inward and toward her face so she can see them.
Silver is spreading across her skin, a layer of mercury so thin she can see it highlighting individual grooves in her skin. Racing up her arms, her wonder quickly turns into abject panic, and she begins to scream. As the silver covers more skin, it goes faster and faster, sliding painlessly but mercilessly underneath her clothes, disregarding her privacy, filling her most private zones with an incredibly thin, warm layer of liquid metal. Before she can drag in enough breath to let out another scream, the silver pulses shut over her face, and she suffocates momentarily until she realizes that she can still breathe perfectly well. In fact, she’s comfortably warm now, whereas moments ago she was shivering in the autumn cold of New York.
Standing before her is a man who moments ago looked perfectly normal. Now he too is covered in this second skin of liquid steel. Starlight and neon advertising boards from below coruscate across his face and neck like a Technicolor hallucination carved from the mind of a diseased artist. A strange calm has descended over the both of them.
“Now take off your clothes. They’ll just get in the way later,” he says, slowly removing his thick sweater. Underneath, she can make out the form of his chest and shoulders, those familiar curves she has run her hands across so many times. She does the same, and before she finished taking her clothes off, she is suddenly so aroused she can barely stand still. Her knees feel rubbery and a super-intense rush of feeling cruises around her body, radiating from her lower pelvis.
He glances down, grins, and says: “There’ll be time for that later. Now, we’re gonna fly!” He jumps onto the ledge, light exploding from his body as it catches the reflection of a particularly bright street sign miles beneath them. Radiating from his fingers are rapidly expanding tendrils of silver, like the claws of a frog. Between them webbing grows and pencils itself in, a trillion little strips of silver weaving themselves together as the claws extend. Within seconds a formidable pair of wings has grown and shaped themselves to fit the contours of his shoulders.
Now he looks like Daedelus.
She gasps as he bends down, bunching up his thigh muscles, and leaps into the air in front of the ledge. At first she is sure he will die and be gone forever, so she runs up to the ledge, nearly falling over it in her own haste to see where he has gone. And jumps back off it again just as quickly when he pops up right in front of her, hovering silently in the air. Below them, hundreds of taxis and cars vie for a narrow stretch of tar, horns blaring stridently.
“You’ll have them too. Just think about it and it will happen!” he says, shouting because of the distance between them. Bravely containing her fear, since she doesn’t know what’s real anymore, she stands on the ledge and stretches out her arms. Sure enough, the intoxicating swarm of silver lines rocket out from all her fingers except her thumbs, forming giant silver wings that an eagle would have been proud of.
“Now this is the hard part. You must jump off the ledge. The wings will take care of the rest.”
Coming closer to sheer panic than ever before in her life, heart-stoppingly close, she nearly does it. Her failed attempt leaves her teetering at the very edge of the precipice of steel and concrete which is her home, this noble hive of humanity holding her up only barely. Sighing with relief, she stumbles back.
“I can’t do it!” she screams.
“Just let the wings take you.”
Closing her eyes, she feels a very odd sensation. Her entire body is lifting, losing it’s specific gravity. It’s like somebody has attached a large winch to her back and is pulling her up with it. When she next opens her eyes, she is nearly twenty feet above the roof, and he is hovering in the air in front of her. She giggles, looking down, assured by the cast of his face, which breathes confidence at her.
“Now repeat after me – tulip…”
“Tulip.”
“Adiago.”
“Adiago.”
“Cruciform.”
“Cruciform.”
“Neptune.”
“Neptune.”
“Ghost.”
“Ghost.”
Almost imperceptibly, her view of the world around her has changed. Now she no longer sees it through her eyes, but is feeling it through her wings. Each air current tickling her fifty foot wide wings tells a story, a story bereft of nature, a story of being battered by factory pipes and sewers and of being sucked into internal combustion engines and violently carbonised. All around her are hot air currents, their voices merging into a keening sound she can touch as if they were made of rock, not gaseous nitrogen and oxygen.
Stretching out her wings, she tacks into the wind and allows gravity to perform it’s ordained duty, and she begins falling into the massive spatial distortion centred at the core of the Earth, using it’s gravity slope to accelerate her through the air. These feelings are so ancient, so simple, that she feels like she’s known about them her whole life. Her lover hurtles through the air alongside her, and their twin fifty-foot wingspans slice through the air, falling, falling, but gaining speed, until they are almost at the level of the streetlamps, and space becomes constricted.
No longer aided by the gentle slope of Earth’s gravity well, they focus their energy and zoom upwards, hundreds of tiny bright rectangular windows flashing past every second. Within a heartbeat, they are six kilometres above the City, looking down at it through their eagle eyes.
“This, this is true beauty. To see the folly of man. Now do you see why I brought you here?” he asks her, his silver-covered eyes twinkling in the moon, which has chosen this moment to reveal itself from behind a cloud and cast a lonely bluish light over the City.
Gazing down at it, the little ant’s-nest of hyperactivity, a giant, ultra-complex hamster wheel turning beneath her toes, she is forced to agree. Everything below seems so trivial to her now.
“I think I understand a little.”
“No. You believe, but you do no understand. Understanding is reserved for those with true knowledge, with the truth in their hearts. Your peculiar societal and brain structure have allowed your civilization to trap itself in a series of infinite mouse wheels, and there is no escape. Your only hope now lies in someone else, a 3rd party, destroying the wheel.
But we cannot destroy the wheel without completely destroying it’s occupants. This, truly, is the great tragedy of your world. In your case, to destroy the parasite is to destroy the host. Nothing changes this.”
One of her rapidly welling tears breaks away from the rest and begins it’s journey to the ground six miles below.
“Why are you sad? Do not mourn, for I have come before, and I am here again now. In fact, I only ever left in a symbolic way. Been watching you guys, your antics, your culture, your diseases. Been analysing. Been crying. Yes, I cried and cried for this planet. If only you knew of the things we have sacrificed for your kind, maybe you would not cry. Great losses have been made by us in order to try and save you.”
A hand touched hers – he was now wingless. He stayed in the air through sheer magic.
But her wings had also stopped flapping. Now they were shrinking, and she was afraid.
“One final time, we must dive. We’ve run out of energy. Alarms are going off!”
His grip tightened, and she curled up in his arms again. She could feel him through the silver skin as if it wasn’t there, and he kissed her for a long time. How long, she would never know, because before his lips stopped touching hers they were already falling.
Concrete reared savagely around her head as they fell, buildings jutting towards her in fast-forward, and she was absolutely terrified. This wasn’t a dive, it was a fall!
Beside her, he laughed and laughed, the raucous sound echoing off the walls. Air whistled past her head violently, flinging her silver-coated hair about like a bunch of leaves in an autumn draft.
Luckily they didn’t hurt anyone when they hit the pavement on the corner of 54th and Browne.
But people talked about the two doped-up teenagers who had painted themselves silver with spray cans and jumped off a building for years.
Epilogue:
Four miles away from the corner of 54th and Browne, just above a crowded street, something glittered momentarily. A little child was walking, her mother holding the child’s hand in her left, while wrestling with several pounds of groceries in the other. She looked a bit flustered.
Suddenly a fat drop of water landed on the bridge of the toddler’s nose, and she said: “Mommy, mommy, it’s raining!” Ignoring her child’s pleas, the mother sighed and carried on walking. It had been a long day at the office. Before they went into the taxi waiting for them, the mother glanced up. There was not a cloud in sight, but the moon was riding high above the City.
The earlier in the forenoon you take the sun bath, the greater will be the beneficial effect, because you get more of the ultra-violet rays, which are healing. - The Golden Age