Bird Wings

Chapter 9

(Part 3)

When the light started slanting in the doorway and she knew they only had a few hours of daylight left, Wren picked up the book again and went to sit near the cave mouth.

"Do you want me to read out loud?" She asked Hawk.

He was in the very back of the cave, hanging wet laundry on some outcropping rock to dry. An unusual sight.

"You don't mind? You could just read to yourself too."

This boy who seemed too shy to ask for a story was the same one who had offered her any type of relationship with him she wanted, with eye contact. Wren rolled her eyes.

"Come sit over here when you're finished with that."

She flipped through the pages thoughtfully. She knew all these stories, and liked them, but which should she choose? The last one in the volume was very sad. Maybe it was just the warm glow of the brewing sunset outside, but Wren was in the mood for something mournful.

Hawk came and sat across from her, and she began reading without looking up. It was the tale of a young man who fought a sea monster that threatened his home and his true love, but only killed it at the cost of his own life. The story ended with the girl he died to save wandering up and down the beach for years afterwards, grieving him.

"Is that what books are like?" Hawk demanded, as soon as she finished. "You saved up your money and hoarded them like gold, for that?"

She looked up at him, surprised, to see him looking truly upset.

"They're not all this sad, Hawk. This is just one that doesn't have a happy ending."

"Somebody wrote that, right? Why would they write something that ends like that? If they were in charge of the story they could have let him live. And then that girl wouldn't have to be alone."

"Sad stories are a part of life too, though, aren't they? Not everybody is happy all the time."

"All the more reason to write happy stories! No one wants to hear something that just makes them sad."

Wren closed the book and folded her arms around her knees, looking at him thoughtfully.

"The story you told me once, about yourself, was very sad." She said.

"But that was true. I needed to tell you so you could understand. I didn't make it up and put it in a book for entertainment."

"This might be fiction," She tapped the book's cover, "but grief is real. Losing a loved one is something that happens to everyone eventually. Maybe the writer wanted to explain that somehow."

Hawk leaned his head back against the cave wall and stared outside. The sun had set enough that his face was mostly in shadow, and he was pinching at his fingertips again.

"I'm so tired of pain." he said quietly. "I don't understand why people can't just be happy. Some people die when we don't want them to and others keep on living without any reason to be here. What's the reason, Wren?"

As usual, Wren's response had very little to do with what he had actually said.

"What was it like to live here alone so long?"

He smiled, only slightly, and passed a hand over his face.

"Boring, I guess. I didn't spend very much time here, honestly. I'd get up in the morning and either spend the day flying out of sight of the village, or watching whatever was going on down there. I hated both of those ways of spending my time though."

"Why?"

"Well... If I watched people I got to thinking how much I wished I was one of them, instead of me, until I didn't know how to stand it anymore. It would get dark and everyone would go inside, and I'd have nowhere to go but back here. To a hole in a rock.

"But being by myself was worse, I guess. I couldn't see what I was missing, but after a while I'd start to feel like I didn't actually exist. When I felt like that, it was like I wasn't in my body properly. I could fly so high I'd black out and come to again halfway to hitting the ground, or get so tired I'd have to fight to catch my breath, but it was like I couldn't completely feel it. I'd know somehow that I was tired or in pain, but I couldn't feel it.

"In the end, no matter what I did or where I went... nothing ever changed. I always still needed to eat, I still woke up in the morning. I'd check my pulse sometimes and my heart would still be beating. Time just went by, and took me with it."

He turned to look at her again then, when he finished speaking, and Wren jumped. She had been sitting very still and to her surprise, she had tears on her cheeks. She wiped them on her sleeve and looked away from him. What was there to say?

Outside, the sun was nothing more than a glowing line at the horizon. Shadows deepened in the trees below, and the sky faded from azure, to pink, to yellow. A tiny white star appeared, and then another.

For the first time, Wren felt like maybe she wouldn't trade this to be at home. Maybe she would rather be sitting here in the growing dark, across from this strange sad boy, than safe under her parent's roof where everything was familiar and nothing made her heart hurt like this.

***

🌄

-Laura