annashay 
Ten-year-old Ella’s body starts developing in a surprising way.
| Image generated with OpenAI |
Ma’s been burning incense and chanting, but the bumps aren’t going away. At first they itched, but now they’re big and burny and the only relief is to rub them against the doorjamb, a tree or the rusty aluminum siding on our doublewide. The skin oozes pus. If it doesn’t get better, Ma swears she’ll take me to a doctor.
When feathers break the skin, Ma stops praying. She says if the feathers were white, she’d know I’m an angel for sure. If they were black, it’d be a different story. But gray with dun stripes? I look like a pigeon.
I put on my first bra backwards to cup the wings. At school I wear my backpack in the hall, keep my coat on through class. At recess I stand with my back to the wall, grinning incessantly. The most difficult part is faking sick for gym, but not so sick they send me to the nurse. I have to tell the gym teacher I got diarrhea, cramps, my period.
The wings keep growing until a bra isn’t enough. Every morning Ma ties them flat with rope, which blisters my skin, though not my feathers. The lying also wears on me. I need to tell somebody. Ma acts either superstitious or paranoid when I bring up the wings, depending on whether she’s taken her pills, and keeping this secret is turning me into a freak at school. I’m jacket girl. I sit at the loser table.
I’m gonna tell Suzy. She lives in my same park, the EZ Breeze, four units down. She’s the most grown-up kid in our class, but also a snob because her parents are still together. Her dad’s a manager at Pep Boys and her mom an assistant manager at Publix, so she’s always bragging on new shoes and clothes and bags, but I know she’ll keep my secret because I’ve been keeping one of hers since the thing with Mr. Watson’s cat.
I catch Suzy during recess and drag her to the bathroom. “Fuck,” she says. “Can you fly?” I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t think so. They’re not that big. “You want me to cut them off?” I tried that. It hurt and there was blood. “What’d the doctor say?”
“Ma says the doctors will experiment on me until they figure out how to make money.”
Suzy nods in her adult way. “Your ma’s a smart lady sometimes. You better not tell anybody else.”
By the end of the day, everybody’s staring. One fucker tries to pull off my backpack, but I spin and kick and everybody gets distracted watching him dance the nutcracker. Waiting for the bus, some girls start squawking and scratching the ground, calling me chickenlady. I say what’s more likely, that I’ve got wings or that Suzy’s a lying skank? They turn on Suzy and I make it home okay, but I can’t go back to school. I tell Ma to her face I’m not ever going back there. Ma says kids wear sweatshirts in hot weather all the time. I should bash myself on the arms with a book and blame it on her.
That works at school, but it’s not gonna work with the adults at the EZ Breeze. They make jacket-weather comments. They try to pat my back. Mr. Watson tries to hug me, but he’s always doing that. I just smile in his face and wait. It’s so hot, he says. Don’t I want help putting on my bathing suit?
The wings get so long they peek out the bottom of my long coat. Ma yanks me from the last two weeks of school, then it’s summer break so I can stay in bed watching movies with the AC cranked. Ma says she’ll pray on it, but she’s out of pills until the first, so when she kneels before her plaster Jesus nothing she says makes any sense. I imagine Jesus throwing out her prayers like junk mail.
I avoid the mirror, living in hoodies, basically stopped showering, so when the truancy officer shows up in September, he sniffs me. Ma says I been real sick, but the guy isn’t fooled. I groan and clutch my stomach. The scary thing is I feel fine. The wings don’t hurt. They feel strong. I feel normal, though I’m obviously not.
Then the power goes out. It’s a hot September, nasty in the doublewide, and I smell bad the way Ma does, so I shower, but it doesn’t cool me off, and Ma’s in the kitchen wailing about Satan, so I tie down my wings, put on a coat and shorts and get outside. It’s hardly any better out here. There’s a line of kids waiting at the pump for underground water, cold water. I hang around the end of the line, but I can tell right away it’s a mistake. Everybody’s out, the adults are all grumbling, people just uppity. A grown-up grabs at me, and it’s Mr. Watson. I’ve been waiting for him to give me an excuse. I damn near bust my foot on his nuts, so when the other grown-ups come at me I can’t run so fast. One latches on and I gotta ditch my jacket, then really run so they won’t see through my dress.
Usually I’d burn any of these fat-fuck adults, but my foot really hurts and I was out of breath when we started. The farther they chase me, the more they swear. When they catch me they’re gonna beat me like my daddy shoulda. Two of them are pretty fast for white people. They’re getting closer. I’m not gonna make the gate, so I turn toward the woods. I hear the other kids cheering for me. I got that perv good, but I’m screwed now. I’m not gonna make the woods either.
I ditch my T-shirt and pull the knot and my wings pop out, cupping the wind, and I jump going full speed, glide about five feet, then land on my face, roll up and keep running. The second time I beat my wings when I jump. The air picks me up. I keep flapping and now I’m over them, over the woods, heading out toward the river. Way down below, they’re filming me on their phones.
Near the river there’s a good field to land in, but there’s a factory across the highway with men outside, and I’m not wearing a shirt, though I guess that’s not my main problem. I follow the river so later I can at least find my way home. Everything looks different from up here. I can’t really tell where I am until I land. It’s the field where we buried that pedophile’s cat after Suzy burned it. I could get home from here easy, if I had clothes. I’ll hide in the tall grass until dark. While I lie there, I hear cops passing. I hope they’re not for me. I hope I get to fly again. I’d try right now, but it’s too scary in the dark.
The power’s still out so the streetlights are dead, and I hide in ditches or the grass when headlights pop up. Cops keep passing. I get home and the street’s full of them, news vans, a helicopter with a spotlight searching the woods. I get through the fence near the basketball court, behind the hedges, and I hear Mr. Watson talking about me. “Girl weren’t no angel,” he says. “Ain’t no demon neither. Just born wrongways.”
I get in through my bedroom window, pull the blinds and lock the door. I want to throw up. I wish I could. There’s something gross in me. In the mirror I see my wings down to my knees. I’ve had them tied up so long, I didn’t realize how they’d grown. Ma shouldn’ta called me a pigeon. If she hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t have noticed. Now it’s all I can see.
I’m almost sleeping when Ma tries the door. “Angel, you in there?” Ma’s voice trembles like the knob, rattling frantic. She chants and burns incense outside my door, while I fall back asleep hugging the fire extinguisher.
When I wake up Ma’s on the phone to somebody, but it’s not Aunt Charlise or 911. I smell bacon. Ma knows I’m in here, and that bacon is how to get me out. Her voice sounds weird, and when I open the door I hear her say she’ll be “awaiting your call.” Ma’s got on make-up and a new dress. She cut her hair, or got somebody to cut it for her.
I tell her I’m never leaving the trailer again. Not for new clothes or a cavity or if the roof’s on fire. She says just talk to the men. Or don’t talk. “Let them talk, maybe answer some questions? You can lie, I won’t tell. Flap your wings, let them get a good look, they’ll get bored and go away. You gotta do this, baby. Our prayers got answered. God gave us these wings to fly outta this shithole.”
The people outside sound like bees. The helicopter’s gone, but there are still cops around and everybody knows how cops do. I take the rest of my breakfast to my room. “Don’t screw this up for me, angel,” Ma hollers through the door. “I love you.”
They got Fast and Furious on all weekend, so that’s my plan, and those people can just wait. I hear them out there all afternoon. By the end of Fast Five, though, I’m pretty starving and Ma’s doing pork chops, and she says she got tater tots and Choco Taco. I don’t hear anyone out there but her, banging pans. I come out and she’s wearing high heels and a gold bangle.
“Lawyerman came by,” she tells me. She’s not eating, just smoking, but she’s been taking her pills. Her hands don’t shake, eyelids don’t twitch, though she keeps glancing under the table. “He says I gotta do right for your future. I gotta sign some papers, then some reporters coming after dinner. After the cameras come the moneymen, and that’s it. It’s all done.”
Lawyerman introduces Ma to the cameras like they’re old friends and Ma lets them cram the kitchen, bug eyes all pointed at me. Lawyerman knows my name too, says everybody better keep it respectful or he’s gonna sue them all to hell. Clicking cameras like mandibles, hungry bugs.
I wish the pork bone and leftover tater tots weren’t sitting right there. They’re in all the shots. I wanna go back to bed. They don’t care what I say. I tell them yeah and nah and dunno, and when they ask if there are any boys I like and I tell them Vin Diesel they all laugh. They keep asking about the pope, and I wanna tell them he’s just a stale cracker with too much cheese, but Ma would kill me, so I just sit there while Lawyerman talks. They say there’s no dumb questions, but Brock Samson asks if I was created in a lab. That’s when I bail. Around and under the sweaty adults, I push one outta my way to get the door slammed and locked.
I can hear them breathing behind me, like in a horror movie. They’re in my closet and my drawers, reading my diary, sniffing my underwear. I scream and Lawyerman busts down the door, cameras pile in, and I climb out the window onto the roof.
The cops get their spotlights in my eyes. Cameramen climb the siding, rocking the trailer so I can hardly stand. I give them what they want. I take off my shirt, untie my wings, and from down in the dark there are howls of anguish. I’m ruining the shot. I gotta cover my nipples, please, somebody get some draperies on that bitch. I take off my shorts, too, and my underwear, bundle everything up. When I beat my wings the cameramen stagger and cover their faces.
Using the river like a road I can fly as high and far as I want and never get lost. I land near strip malls where I can snatch leftovers from café tables, and supermarkets where I steal candy and chips. I stash everything in a cave upriver from school, and I circle the EZ Breeze every few days, watching for the crowds to disappear. Ma’s never outside, but there’s a permanent line at the front door, so I guess she’s okay.
My stomach hurts a lot. Sometimes from hunger, sometimes from junk food, mostly from loneliness. I didn’t think I’d miss Ma this much. It was us against the world, and now it’s just me, and the world got bigger fast. I got a rotten tooth and some of my feathers are falling out. On my eleventh birthday I cry myself to sleep in a cave. If the paparazzi don’t clear out soon I’m gonna go home the way I left, buck naked, and they try shit I’ll have Lawyerman sue them all for pervery.
Then, one day, they’re gone. No cops or news vans, neighbors minding their own beeswax. I land in a tree, one of the things I learned this week. It’s like stepping on an escalator. Nobody saw me, so I flap to the ground.
My bedroom window is locked. My bedroom is empty, just the bare bed, empty closet and shelves. Ma’s room is the same, and the front door’s locked. Ma moved out. There’s no note, no phone number. I hold onto a post, feeling like I’m lost in the supermarket. Then I think of Suzy. Suzy might know what to do, or where Ma went.
I knock and Suzy answers. “You can come in,” she says. Her parents are at work. Some people’s parents do that, she says. Do I want a cherry soda?
“Where’s Ma?”
“Moved to the beach. She got a mansion down there.” Did she leave an address, a phone number? “She said you’ll find it. Big white place with a pool, right on the beach next to the river. You can invite me to your pool. I’d come. Marcia and Toni would come, too.” I tell her yeah, sure, if she gives me some food. She makes me a tuna sandwich. “I heard they’re gonna make a movie about you,” she says. “If I had wings, I’d get Vin Diesel in my movie, fuck him and then dump him for The Rock.”
If Suzy had wings she’d hide them like I do. Also, Vinnie would never fuck a skank like her. The Rock neither.
“Whatever. You’re sleeping over, right? My parents aren’t really at work. Mom’s out drinking and Dad’s with his girlfriend. Let’s call the girls. They wanna see you, obviously. You’re famous now, you know that? Like, the president talks about you, Korean girls are getting wing implants, you’re a superstar, kid. So let’s hang. I’ll tell the girls to bring wine coolers.”
Yeah, sure I tell her. Call everybody. I’m just gonna step outside. I climb onto her roof, and waiting for a breeze, I hear her calling Channel Five asking for Brock Samson. Then the breeze comes and I can’t hear anything. Up and up, the moonlit river is a sparkly slime trail to the ocean. I feel like I’ve flown into dinosaur times, a world of airborne beasts that’d snatch up Brock Samson, carry him off in their talons to feed their young.
The wind is against me the whole way, but I make it to the beach and find Ma’s house easily. It’s the one with the helicopter circling. The yard’s as big as the entire EZ Breeze and Ma’s outside, pacing by the pool, haranguing the shrubbery. I land right behind her, ninja quiet.
Ma scowls when she sees me. “Where have you been?”
“You moved.”
“What was I supposed to do? Stay in that hellhole the rest of my life?”
“You could have waited. Left a note. Anything.”
“I told your skanky little friend. You found me. What’s with the attitude?”
I start to tell her about living in a cave, my rotten tooth, finding the trailer empty, all my stuff gone, her gone. Ma’s not fidgeting, not scanning the bushes for the dictator’s spies, but she’s also not paying attention. When I’ve got nothing left to say, she starts talking about how beautiful the house, how beautiful the gardens, wait until I see my new bedroom. “We got servants, baby. I’ll call them, you ask for whatever you want. Ask for an elephant.”
It’s like I gotta ask her to hug me. She’s supposed to wanna, but she doesn’t. I might as well forget it. “Can I get a strawberry milkshake?”
Ma jumps out of her skin calling for Gregory, a white-haired white man in a white tuxedo. “Phone the police, too,” she tells him. “Tell them to call off the search. Phone Brock, and the institute. My angel’s home!”
The helicopter spotlight passes, then returns and fixes on us. Ma puts on sunglasses and waves. She seems happy the spies are real. “Your things are in the junior suite,” she tells me. “Third floor, ocean view.”
“What institute?” I ask.
“Huh?”
“You told that guy to call the institute. What institute?”
Ma says it’s no big deal. A hospital place or something for some tests, some non-invasions tests. They paid a lot, almost as much as the church. “You need money, baby? You take a shoe box from my closet. Take as many boxes as you want. When you feel ready to see people, you tell me. Are you hungry? We got about a hundred bags of tater tots. Want the cook to make pork chops?”
I clap and skip and beat my wings yes.
The big house is lonely during the day and scary at night. The maids make fun of Ma behind her back, but they’ve got no idea. She’s so much better. She takes her pills every morning, and every afternoon a doctor comes to talk to her. They lock up in the library and I’ve listened at the door. I found out who my dad is, and why nobody talks about my grandpa. I found out having wings isn’t the worst that can happen.
People come from the institute. I’m scared at first, but the only scary thing is how dumb their questions are. How far, how long, how fast can I fly? How should I know? Who cares? After a couple hours I actually try to explain flying to them, navigating by the river, finding updrafts over parking lots and fields, how warm wind in your face means you’re going up and when it turns cold you’re about to drop, how high thin air can hardly hold me, but down low it’s thick and sticky and slows me down. They don’t care. They make me fly in circles around the pool so they can grunt and scribble on clipboards.
Another new thing is we go to church. It’s in my contract. Usually I can just sit there, but sometimes they make me go up front and flap my wings while the choir sings hallelujah and they pass the collection baskets. I do commercials, and that’s fun. The Red Bull people want me to do tricks, and I’m getting good at some of them. I practice over the ocean, barrel rolls and loop-de-loops, diving and stalls, flips and twists. The first time I crash into the ocean I panic and take off upside down, but after that it’s fun to crash. Eventually I say something on camera, not about the pope, but another bigmouth who needs to mind his own beeswax, and there are no more cameras after that.
The institute people keep coming, though. They want my pee and poop, which they carry off like treasure. They want fingernails, hair, blood and feathers. One day a doctor shocks me with a silver ball on a stick to see what I’ll do, then acts all surprised when I punch him in his stupid face. A couple days after that, I hear them telling Ma they want to stick a chip in me. They have a form for her to sign.
“We’ll talk about it,” Ma tells them. “Alone.” I could hug her. When the doctors are gone, Ma takes me out to the garage to talk. She says their spy equipment won’t work there, and I take her word for it. “Nobody’s putting a chip in my little girl,” she says. She’d rather kill me herself.
“Thanks, Ma. Sorta. So, can I stop doing the tests?”
Well, no, she signed some papers. She’ll talk to Lawyerman, but the contract was for twelve years. I didn’t sign anything, but it doesn’t matter, I don’t count.
“What if I went away?”
Ma’s eyelid twitches. “Away?”
“For a day or two.”
“But where?”
“Nowhere. Fly around.”
Ma’s lips slither over her teeth. “Baby, look at this house. We won. We’re winners. What else can you want? Why would you leave?”
I can’t tell Ma I’ve been listening at the library door. I know what grandpa did and how hard it was for her to take care of me after. She deserves this house. It makes her happy. But for me it’s a birdcage. My bedroom’s big, but not big like the sky. If I can just get away for a while, forget about the institute people, forget about people in general, it’s not so bad being a bird. I’ve got no problems with birds. No bird ever shocked me with a metal ball or tried to put a chip in me. I tell her that if I have to pick between human or bird, I pick bird.
The idea of me leaving is setting Ma off. She’s muttering to Jesus, asking when’s it my turn, when do I get to fly, Lord? Been carrying a kid since she was a kid, that’s why she never took off. Baby too heavy. “Pray on a miracle my whole life, then the miracle comes and it’s her, and she flies away? Flies away with all that money? Who’s gonna love her? Who’s gonna love a filthy little pigeon?”
“If you want to fly, Ma, I can carry you.” That might be true. I’m getting stronger and Ma’s lost weight. But she’s too worked up. She says I’ll drop her. She says I’ll make it look like an accident because I’ve always hated her, because she embarrasses me. “I prayed you’d grow up right, and you was praying not to grow up like me. Isn’t that true? I see it’s true. And look what God done. I’m not the freak now, am I? Shoo, pigeon! Shoo, nasty little scavenger.”
“I’m not leaving forever. I just said what if I go, like for a day? Let’s go together. Don’t you want to fly? It’s a full moon, we can fly over the ocean. We can fly to some island where people don’t go. It’s so pretty, Ma. You should see it, right? See the world like I do?”
But Ma is gone. The woman fetching the broom isn’t Ma. She swings it in my face screaming shoo, but that’s just a ghost, the old hate stirring her up. This other woman is so small. I could beat my wings and knock her down with nothing but air. She whacks me on the arm and I let her.
When I take off my shirt, she’s quiet. She looks at her feet and holds the broom like she was sweeping. The wind’s still heading out to sea, hot land, cool water. “I don’t like when you call me a pigeon.”
“Freak.”
“Ma, I’m going away now, but I’m coming back. You go take your pill. I’ll be back tomorrow, day after. I’ll be okay. Everything will be okay. Please?”
Ma says never come back, but I can hardly hear her. The updraft’s in my ears and I’m circling the house, Ma ranting, receding, swinging her fists at the child-robbing air. All down the road people stare into the sky, cameras for faces. On the next block someone’s grilling burgers, a woman walking her dog, some kids playing wiffleball. I head out to sea.
