Where My Wings Turn to Ash
How can you fly when your wings have been broken?
Writing Skins is a reader supported author newsletter that shares excerpts from an award nominated speculative fiction writer’s craft journals. It offers a vulnerable, funny, and interesting look at the writing life, craft, and storytelling.
The Graveyard is the fiction side of the newsletter where I share unpublished or reprinted literary speculative fiction short stories, novelettes, and potentially even a novella or two.
It’s one of those sunny Thursday afternoons that makes me want to leave all the windows open, let the sunlight creep in and shine on me, my plants, and the red hardwood floors of my small house. The only shadows that fly across are those of my belongings, those old dusty things that grow monstrous as the day grows into night. If I listen close enough, I can hear the echo of long dead voices calling out to me—I try never to listen too close to the silence slowly swooping in on me, though, because it reminds me of what has been taken from me.
My days, long and short ones, are spent in my chair; that was my daddy’s chair, originally. It’s worn through leather as brown and tarnished as my own skin is broken and hard like me too, and no one could ever find the comfortable spot; that was except for me and my daddy before me. Settling in after lunch for the rest of my day until night come, I do as my daddy always did and fold my shoulders back into the chair, letting it take me, hold my scarred body, as I stare down the streets of my neighborhood, watching all the babies to make sure they don’t end up like my babies.
Dead. Gone. Given to memory.
Outside, my neighbors’ homes are bright, almost reflective, in the daylight. Each roof is set where it ought to be. Sprinklers fling water to hydrate all that green, supple grass. It’s hot enough that the water seems inviting. It sends me down a back-alley memory that I had forgotten until now of flying through water much younger and freer than I am now. My back itches, aches, but I do not scratch it.
That’s when something odd and frighteningly familiar catches my eye. Before looking at it straight on, I close my eyes and make a wish that what I saw was not what I think it is, but of course, an old man’s wishes never come true.
On the roof of my across the way neighbor’s house—the one with the young gay mixed couple from the city, thank god, not the one next door to them with the 15-foot pole supporting the trailer-sized American flag, whipping carelessly in the wind—is a young boy who scurries over the tiles like a kid playing tag or hide and go seek.
But doesn’t he know?
Doesn’t he know what will happen if they catch him? If they even see him acting up?
As he reaches the edge of the roof, he pulls his white t-shirt off, revealing a double set of wings. He is smiling. Smiling so hard the sun reflects off him, himself and damn near blinds me with the audacity to be so beautiful, so proud.
Doesn’t he know what those wings mean? The cost of flight?
There’s no one on the streets. No one looking but me. I want to try my hardest to hobble outside, wave my arms at him, do whatever I can to get him down off that roof and out of sight. By the time he’s flapping and lifting off the tiles, I’m rising out of the chair, knees shaking, creaking under my weight. He’s off, though, flying out into the blue. I’m too late.
He’ll learn soon enough what happens to Black boys who dare fly.
My hands hurt. Must have been wringing them in worry, scrubbing them in fear, trying to get the blood out that has long since dried up, become apart of my skin. In the shining sun, it all looks red to me.
Then, another movement in the distance catches my eye. There is yet another young Black thing crawling across a roof. Another, then more, until there are tons of children peeling off their shirts and tanks and dresses all to flutter their dark iridescent wings, showing what beauty lay hidden beneath.
But don’t they know? Coming out like this will only get them—
“Hey!” above me a shirtless Black boy stands, flexing his wings. “Sir.”
It is the same boy from my neighbor’s house, the one who initiated flight. Sweat clings to his body and he seems tired out of breath, but happy all the same.
“Hey,” I call up, careful not to lose my balance on the stone walkway outside my house. “Hey, don’t you know what they’ll do to you if they catch you up there?”
He stares down at me, almost amused, but mostly sad.
“Naw,” he says, shaking his head. “Don’t you know what they’ll do to you if you stay down there?”
He starts rising from my roof, his wings beating against each other in a pounding rhythm that calls to every trace of me.
“I just wanted you to know,” he shouts down. “That you don’t have to be scared or nothing. We just soaring.”
“Wait,” I call out, but he can’t hear me over the song of his flight.
He and the others fly on, beautiful Black buzzards in the sun.
Could I possibly fly with them? Join them in their journey? Would my body even remember what it was like to be so brave?
I strip off my shirt, pushing through the pain until I can’t, so let it drape down around my shoulders enough to expose the back of my fatty Black back. Even if my wings don’t flutter, my heart, my mind joins the babies gliding through the sky.