Icarus and The Magpie (Short Story)

(5) Pennon, The name of All things

There were many types of birds. MANY in the woods. At any given time there were at least ten or more separate species that called the trees in the hidden meadow their home. There were the grackles. With their swooping and perching and pecking, there were blackbirds. Their whistling trills in the reeds at the creekside let all others know that they were the most beautiful. The starlings and cowbirds, chickadees and bluejays. The unkindness of Ravens that glided amongst the treetops and canopies. Waiting for something to die. For something to cease to be that they might devour it to bones. Everything was a flicker of movement, of life lived in between minutes. A million and one moments caught up in feathers and claws, and mercury scales. It was an orderly chaos. A mimicry of motion. Even if, things never truly changed there.

Yes, there were new buds, new creatures. Something was always being born. So every day was a birthday. Every day, was a celebration. But there were also things dying. In the quiet. Under the brambles, lying side up in the kilter. Faltering hearts beating their last, soft gasps singing lyric to the shadow. So every day was a celebration of sameness. Of life, and of death. Today. Something was born. It had come in the night. Had taken its first chilled breath somewhere out in the dark and had given it back to the world. A thing with wings. A thing, much, like a bird. A thing. 

A thing.

"I remember... my name."

Iris saw him. He, had changed. Her hands made fists, ripping at the grasses and taking up palms of soil. "You have-" Logic had all but gone. She was not looking at a man, she was not looking at a dream, she was not seeing an angel. "-wings." She was seeing him. For what he was. And what a sight he was.

"They came with my name." He let his wings unfold.

Feathers as dark and inky as swirling oil let spill in the Dead Sea. As long as he was tall and for all she knew, were entirely made in the way she had imagined them to be. Iris couldn't find her legs. In her mind they had melted away and could never be gathered up again. They had withered. "Can you... fly?" She wiped the tears from her face.

The Magpie looked up, watching the fiery sky change from red to peach. "I cannot." He whispered. The wings ruffled and gathered together behind him. "I don't think I'm meant to. At least, not now. Not yet."

Iris was as relieved as she was mystified. Wings. He had wings all along. "What is your name?"

"My name-" He lowered in front of her so quickly and haphazardly that his wings barely had the time to spread and counter his weight. But they did, and he rocked on the balls of his feet. "-is Pennon."

"Pennon" She copied steadily. Letting the syllables spin on her tongue.

"Pennon." He cooed. Fitting his palm against her cheek.

"I- like it." Iris smiled. "It fits you." She grabbed his wrist lightly. "Help me up?"

"Of course." He took hold and lifted, catching her as she staggered. So she did have legs, they just barely could hold her.

Iris brushed her hair away from her face. Freeing the pieces that stuck to her moist skin. "Can I..." She looked over his shoulder at the feathered things that fell behind him.

"Mhm." He turned. "They are yours after all." Fanning them slow.

Iris had never felt something like them. They were velvet and silk, both leathery and made of lace. indefinably structured of a foreign substance not from here. Not from reality. Her reality. She wondered how something could be both solid, and made of mist at once. They were as much feather as they were ash. and they left black bands on her hands. His wings were messy. Not nearly as neatly done up as any bird she had seen. They looked scrabbled in haste. She let her fingers feed down the longer primaries and flip away at their tips. Then she wandered across them to the spaces between. Between his shoulders, where his shirt hung in shreds. "Did it hurt?" His skin held a reddened hue where the wings seemed to connect, running in parallel lines the length of his back.