Flutter Camp: Short Story

Flutter Camp

Bea hoisted the wooden sign up over her shoulders, her sweat-slick fingers catching against the splinters as she shouted for people's attention. The crowd of the market shuffled past, their feathered wings brushing against one another's. Grumpy and tired, sun-beat glances were all Bea and her friends could get. Who would listen to a late-nub, anyway?

"STOP Flutter Camp!" She called. "It's a death camp!"

A few eyerolls, scoffs. Some laughed and took off, flying into the upper shopping level stacked chaotically on top of the ground level. Some of the booths carved into the giant trees of Dasrydon that lined the outside of the market, some small and big shops sticking out of them in random places, like log cabins defying gravity with their homey orange-lit windows.

Bea hadn't been to one of those shops in a...a long time. The only way to get to them was to fly or to be carried, and her parents stopped carrying her to the shops when she was...well, eight? Wow. It had been nine years since she'd been off the ground.

"I know you're not letting them get to you," a teasing voice broke her thoughts. She smirked and looked back at Xoe, who was leaning on her own sign, sweat beading her pink face and misting her big, round glasses. She nudged her purple-haired friend.

"Pfft. Of course not. They can fly away from me all they want. I bet they can still hear me shout in the upper levels."

"Oh, please. My parents can probably hear you from the nest." She snorted and readjusted her glasses. Nest was a modest word for the large mansion her parents owned as a wealthy family of their community.

"She's not that loud!" The bright, timid voice of the girl beside Xoe broke through the hubbub of the market. Glora's neck craned around Xoe's tall, thin frame, the top of her head reaching Xoe's shoulders. Her curly dark hair was separated into two puffballs on her head, her deep brown eyes sparkling as she smiled up at Bea. She had a smaller sign, and it seemed like every person in the market who caught sight of her smiled and adored her, despite her sign painted with the red, angry letters, "STOP FLUTTER CAMP." Perhaps it was her twelve-year-old face, her baby fat that hadn't quite disappeared—her cuteness level was at its prime.

Glora beamed, her small wing nubs on her back flapping with the few white feathers they had. "I think your voice is nice, Bea."

"Thank you." Bea nodded, shooting a smirk at Xoe. Xoe rolled her eyes.

"Well, I'm exhausted, and we've been taking up this corner for two hours. Do you think it's time to go home?"

"No one's taken a pamphlet," Bea frowned.

"I know, but no one's taken a pamphlet since we started this. I don't think shouting at people will change their minds about the draft."

"But, Xoe—" Bea started, then stopped when she saw Xoe's defeated expression, her shoulders slumping a little.

"I know. I leave next week. The draft isn't going to stop existing by next week, so I want to spend time doing things I want to do, not protesting. I might not get to do them again."

Xoe clutched her sign, feeling the weight of her wing nubs on her back. The nubs were supposed to sprout into wings around the ages of eleven to thirteen, but she was seventeen. Xoe was eighteen. They were late-nubs—their bodies, for one reason or another, decided not to grow the wings they desperately needed. Even if she grew them now, people would always remember her as a late-nub, not getting her wings until such a late age. People certainly remembered how Xoe's younger sister, Alyss, got her wings at the early age of nine.

"Wings so early? She'll have such a bright future," people would say, and then they would whisper about how Xoe was eighteen—eighteen!—and still didn't have wings. They would shake their heads and sigh.