Bird Wings

Chapter 4

Wren kept up her silence all the rest of that night and well into the next morning. Hawk came and went, but mostly he sat on the bed he'd made for himself and remained quiet as well. However, as the hours slid by and she did not speak, she began to sense his growing discomfort. He became less and less able to sit still, and eventually he left for much longer than he had before and came back with a folded leaf full of a kind of berry she wasn't familiar with. An offering, she assumed. She ignored them and stayed quiet.

Then, when the sunlight had reached its brightest at midday, he started to talk to her.

"The town I grew up in is a long way from here." He began, shattering the silence. "I don't remember my parents, and no one would tell me about them. Only that they were gone and I had been left at the church. I was normal when I was little - just another orphan boy. I was treated badly sometimes, but we all were. I wasn't special. That's how I got my name and had people who used it."

She could tell he was looking towards her from where he sat, but she stayed still. Was he really going to tell her his entire life story? Now? Captives didn't get to choose their company, so she supposed she'd have to get used to it. Maybe the rest of her life would be spent listening to this boy ramble on about being an orphan in a far off town. She could have rolled her eyes over the orphan part; couldn't he have thought of a backstory to tell her that wasn't so obviously calculated for sympathy? Did he think she was that dense?

"The wings started growing when I was eight or so. I remember feeling lumps on my back when I laid down at night and complaining to the night nurse, but we were neglected and no one paid any attention for a long time - not until they started to show through my shirt."

He sat silently after this for a long moment, probably pretending to be lost in the memories.

"It was painful when they were growing." he began again. "It happened so quickly, and it felt like they were getting heavier every day. Eventually all I could do was lie in my bunk all the time. I was too little then to notice the way people were starting to act around me, or understand what it meant. I remember thinking they must be worried about how sick I was. I couldn't see what the things on my back were, and no one told me either. They just whispered in corners and it made me think that I was going to die. I gave away everything I owned in preparation for the worst.

"I didn't die, obviously, and after a while it stopped hurting as much. It had been months, I think, but finally I could move around a bit again. I was so clumsy at first, when I didn't know how to move them yet. They kept flapping when I was surprised or scared and knocking things over. So when the adults decided to separate me from the other children, I thought it was because I couldn't stop breaking things. They turned a big garden shed into a bedroom and put me there by myself, and they wouldn't let me go outside. So I worked really hard every day to get in control of myself because I wanted to play with my friends again. To me, it felt like I'd come back from the grave.

"They just kept getting bigger, and I was starting to notice that people were wary around me. I only saw a couple of adults now and then who brought me food, and neither of them would look me in the eye. I grabbed one of the nurse's hand one day and she screamed and pushed me. I think that's when I had to realise that things weren't going to go back to the way they had been, no matter what I did.

"When I was maybe eleven they had grown so much that I could flap them and push myself across my room. There wasn't much else for me to do except wait for mealtimes, so I would just do that, and mess around for hours. Or I would jump off my bed and see how far across the room I could go. I was left alone so much that no one noticed what I was up to until I was actually able to fly in a circle around the rafters. It was the same nurse - the one that pushed me - who first found out. She came in with my food one day when I was in the air and completely freaked out.