Bird Wings

Chapter 10

That feeling persisted. Bit by bit, Wren had felt the focus of her thoughts being pulled from her old cares and concerns and centred on Hawk. She still missed her home so much, and yet its memory had become almost insubstantial in her mind - lacking somehow. She could see now how alike everyone had been, how similar their lives were, how predictable their stories. The familiarity was a part of what she missed, but when she looked back now she couldn't understand how her mind could have fit into such a small life.

Now, it felt like her mind was the thing that was much too small for this big world. She had used to think that she knew the answers to everything, or at least where to find them; who to ask. Every problem had felt solvable, every issue was black and white. But what was the answer for Hawk? He certainly was not right, but was he really wrong? Over and over, her mind would pull itself back and forth from one answer to another until she wished she could give up, run away, turn her thoughts off like she would snuff out a candle. That was impossible of course, Hawk was undeniably real and not even going home could give her relief now. She couldn't pretend he didn't exist.

Sometimes she braved her fear of the height and came near to the cave mouth to look down at the treetops below her. When she looked closely enough she could see some small parts of the village through their protective cover. Nothing stood between her and the vast sky now, nothing was shielding her from all the space of the world around her. She was a tiny dot on the side of a vast mountain, a mere speck in the grand scheme of things.

She was sitting there one evening, feeling overwhelmed and ill-equipped (as usual), when she saw Hawk's shadowy form emerge from the treetops below and begin to rise up towards her. Wren's mood was not improved by hunger - he had gone to the village in search of food - and she watched him fly with growing irritation. The light was mostly gone by this time, but what was left of it caught on the glossy bits of his feathers as they moved. Here and there she glimpsed the outline of his wings fully outstretched. Funny how she found birds and their wings beautiful, but seeing Hawk in flight only brought a chill to the back of her neck. He was uncanny, surely, but wasn't he beautiful too? She was annoyed at him at the moment, or just generally annoyed and lacking in targets, so the possibility of Hawk being beautiful sat uncomfortably in her mind.

Until now, Wren had really only been able to see him the way she had the first time, when he had looked like a grotesque mashup of human and animal. He had remained a startling sight, something difficult to look at because her eyes refused to get used to it. That man and wings should not be things seen together was something so cemented in her perceptions that she continued to have a moment of alarm every time she saw him. What if her mind had been more open from the beginning? What would Hawk have seemed like to someone with no preconceived ideas? Or just the reverse, where a person without wings would look wrong somehow, incomplete?

Wren sighed, exhausted. Fixing her eyes was just more work to do and she was having a hard enough time just trying to decide how to feel about him and what he'd done. She wondered how big a part the way she saw him played in what she thought of him. If she could learn to stop reacting to the sight of the wings growing out of his back the same way she would have reacted to a cancerous growth, could she come to a place of peace over him?

It was worth a shot, she had approached this problem from every other angle she could think of. When Hawk finally flew into the cave and landed on the rocky ground, Wren fixed her eyes on him, ready to scrutinise, hoping to change. What met her eyes instead was a very distracting, very alarming looking gash on one of his arms. Blood had already run all the way down to his hand and was starting to drip from his fingertips.

"Hawk!"

"I don't think it's as bad as it looks - I'm just here to get something to use as a bandage." He said quickly. "Could you grab that shirt? I don't want to drip everywhere. I'll go and get cleaned up by the stream."