Winged

Chapter 3

That night, Michael stared blankly out the window. "Why are we not allowed to use our wings?'' Michael muttered to himself. You can. Said a womanly voice. Michael immediately stood up, looking about to see who said that. But he couldn't see anyone. Furthermore, not only couldn't he see someone who said that, but he felt as though a cold wind whipped right through him. The windows were bolted closed and there seemed to be no sign of a draft. He checked the the floor vent: sometimes cold air rises from it. He touched it and feels no difference in temperature.

It was just me and my stupid senses. Or something.

However, the curiosity still grappled with him as he lies down again to sleep. He wondered again: "Why have wings if they can't be used?" It was the most heretical thing he could say. If he were to say this around his grandmother, she'd faint from the rudeness. His mother would scold him and his uncle would be completely disgusted in his degeneracy.

His uncle, however, was nowhere near where Michael was living. Uncle Roger lives alone in the outskirts of the known world, in a pathetic squat of a town known as Anthropolis. It was supposed to be a state-of-the-art metropolitan center but a few years after being founded, natural-gas leaks were discovered. Apart from the place usually smelling like rotten eggs, it seemed to be an extremely cheap place to live. And of course, that's where Uncle Roger gets to live. With that thought in mind, Michael smirks.

Then he thinks of his easily upset grandmother: a woman of eighty some years who had her wings removed at birth. She was taught as she grew up, the importance of obedience and cordiality among family members. Michael's grandmother went by the name of Dorothy. When Michael was younger, he resented his grandmother, for her strict teachings and her obsession with obeying family laws. He couldn't understand why she seemed so vicious sometimes. It made little sense. Then, one day, while he was crying after being punished, he overheard a conversation between his mother and his grandmother. His mother was actually upset with his grandmother for being so hard and she asked her in an angry tone: "Why? Why do you have to do this to him? He doesn't know any better! He's too young for any of this."

And his had grandmother replied: "I'm going to be honest with you - he's going to grow up and he's going to have his wings removed the common way and he's going to love it. I was only born when I lost mine. And I never had the satisfaction of having them removed."

The womanly voice broke Michael's train of thought again: She lied.

Michael, rather startled, stood up and bonked his head on the low ceiling. He stumbled backward and rolled off his bed while holding his head in pain.

"Damn it!" he roared in pain. "But... what did she lie about?" Michael asked himself a few moments later.

A voice can be heard outside his bedroom door: "What are you doing in there? You should be asleep, there's school tomorrow."

"Ugh... Sorry mom!"

And, with that, he returned to bed. He lied there for a moment but eventually he grabbed his notebook from his bedside table. He found his favorite pen tucked between the pages and he started to write in the dim light cast in by the outside street lamp. He wrote what the womanly voice told him. After writing all that, he laid the notebook down and fell asleep.

This chapter took so long....sorry. But this was written by me, Zaina tack, and my best friend, Seth Herendeen. So thank you Seth for helping me with this chapter! I will be coming out with more stuff soon.