04-28-2015, 05:44 PM
Here’s one step crueler: give glass the hope of flight. Of escape, however brief.
Stich wings across its back, long and tapered. But make them paper thin. Do not pay attention to the way wings are supposed to work, only to how they might look when folded against pale skin. Hollow the bones, like a bird, but make it so they’d shatter like ice if you beat them too hard.
Make them beautiful. Make them useless. Give glass hope, take it away.
He unfolds his wings at their mention. They are strange things, a delicate membrane stretched thinly over hollowed bones. No, they do not bear him aloft. So little of his body functions as it should, it should be have been no surprise to him when he once saw horses take flight and beat his wings to join them, only to hear a thin crack, like a twig snapping, and feeling the agony radiate from his left wing and into his skin.
(The fracture since healed, leaving only a slight twist to the line of his wings, unremarkable to the untrained eye.)
“A pleasure to meet you too,” he says, for it is, because she is strong and powerful and grounded and he likes it, likes watching her.
“No, they don’t work,” he says, moving them again. They make for a fine silhouette but little else.
“Were you born in the falls, or have you lived elsewhere?” he asks, because he does not want to think of useless wings, of the way he once thought he might fly.
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark