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UNTITLED 08 | Wings & the autobiographical Remus, who is a werebird. Posted first in my journal.
WHAT PLACE YOU HAD PLANNED FOR YOUR BODY. this point, this fragment, this turning of treason. MY DARLING, YOU’RE NO AQUILINE MIRACLE. you’ll feel no elevation from the fading mass that is the rest of us. we are your counterweight. you won’t FLY like this.
,
I have two memories, see: only two; poignant as they are, only two. When I was five I killed a bird. How it was done was never pursued, and how I got there matters even less than the mechanism of its death. The subject of this memory (and thus this remembrance) is the pained care with which I remember the damp, naked feathers. The crepuscular field. The autumn. The passing headlights and the way everything around me shifted to their eyes. I remember twisting its wings. On the map of my childhood I can pinpoint the exact coordinates at which I understood death-standing amid ghosty grass, arms up, flinging the damned thing upward in hopes that it will catch the wind and be out of my sight. And the creature, a common Turdus merula (with vivid obsession I find these after-details from this pastiche of senses), legs obscene, beaks yellow, feathers greasy and more black in the sunset’s blood. Thirteen ways of looking at it but I cannot name one. I’d stomped my feet, childishly, as expected. Then I’d done something I can neither remember or understand, and suddenly the bird disappeared. (Magic. A professor explained to me later in the most sterile of words. I dangled my feet on the too-high cornice of the chair in his office. The kind that flared in children who can evoke it, changing and calming in substance until some criticality, at which point magic becomes decidedly dangerous.) By the next new moon I remembered wings. Even without them I would have been an awkward child; my parents sought for a cure, and found from chest X-ray photography (obliviate being an easy spell) that my scapulas were held tenuously to two outgrowing appendages. They never tried for surgery. My mother was Muggle and not stupid. These were the seeds of a curse, the prints of magic. Watered by whatever lunacy a full moon claims heritage, they would grow into full vines shot through the intricate lacework of my skeleton, bending and threading, breaking and sowing. And the skin would raise sin-red, sear like needlework, and feathers would bind themselves to me like glue. Sticky. Uncomfortable.
,
and sometimes you remember flying.
or have dreamt of it. that much remains uncertain.
you have long stopped to convince yourself that you had made-up the initial incident. you do not remember the clotting smell of blood as it flew up to meet fire. or the emergency of night crawling up on you. you have no other memories. you have only two, poignant as they are, only two. you had tried to fly again and again, tight-roping the branches into the lake. later, shadowed attempts, in the disguise of the city, over skyscrapers and clotheslines. you could not afford acrophobia. you’d swooped down and magic saved you from the ground.
you feared death more.
:
The second memory is the same way connected, eleven years after. Sirius Black, roommate to this awkward boy, knew, like the two others who shared the room, wherefore the boy spent some nights away. I knew they knew, so it was time’s game. He had followed me. I had not been careful. I think I was deliberate in that. On the floorboard of the small glen I’d arched and turned. Lumos was bright by the tip of his wand and I was drawn to the light. Like any other night there was pain as my back realigned. The night snapped to place. I smiled. He asked (whispered, voice melancholy, lively) if I could fly like this, and I informed the negative. I could not. There were no muscles that would bow these wings back, no lightness in my bones, no lifting that can accomplish such feat. I tipped my head back. The stars were glowing, in that pale, tender way they do sometimes, and suddenly I felt light, in that way newness does sometimes. A breeze winked through the waters, making patterns and feathers and hair meander. His arm was nether-pale despite the sun, and when he reached toward the wings they were almost blue. He spoke in a voice frantic and soft.
.
You felt the pulse of your neck on his finger. Then lips. The ground was soft and newly autumn, soothing skin, dissipating heat, giving surrogate life to flesh. The wings twitched as muscle untrained were pressed loose. Afterwards you made maps of the bones of those wings. Touching could not have described the way he had traced them. Hands like an anatomist’s. (Teeth. Fingers. Laugh.) You sprawled backward, and clenched your knuckles. Moving in that way you had first become aware of your fingers and the sensations pain had robbed from you. Awkward.
Half-functioning, half-pulsing with the anatomy of flight.
.
UNTITLED 08 | Wings & the autobiographical Remus, who is a werebird. Posted first in my journal.
WHAT PLACE YOU HAD PLANNED FOR YOUR BODY. this point, this fragment, this turning of treason. MY DARLING, YOU’RE NO AQUILINE MIRACLE. you’ll feel no elevation from the fading mass that is the rest of us. we are your counterweight. you won’t FLY like this.
,
I have two memories, see: only two; poignant as they are, only two. When I was five I killed a bird. How it was done was never pursued, and how I got there matters even less than the mechanism of its death. The subject of this memory (and thus this remembrance) is the pained care with which I remember the damp, naked feathers. The crepuscular field. The autumn. The passing headlights and the way everything around me shifted to their eyes. I remember twisting its wings. On the map of my childhood I can pinpoint the exact coordinates at which I understood death-standing amid ghosty grass, arms up, flinging the damned thing upward in hopes that it will catch the wind and be out of my sight. And the creature, a common Turdus merula (with vivid obsession I find these after-details from this pastiche of senses), legs obscene, beaks yellow, feathers greasy and more black in the sunset’s blood. Thirteen ways of looking at it but I cannot name one. I’d stomped my feet, childishly, as expected. Then I’d done something I can neither remember or understand, and suddenly the bird disappeared. (Magic. A professor explained to me later in the most sterile of words. I dangled my feet on the too-high cornice of the chair in his office. The kind that flared in children who can evoke it, changing and calming in substance until some criticality, at which point magic becomes decidedly dangerous.) By the next new moon I remembered wings. Even without them I would have been an awkward child; my parents sought for a cure, and found from chest X-ray photography (obliviate being an easy spell) that my scapulas were held tenuously to two outgrowing appendages. They never tried for surgery. My mother was Muggle and not stupid. These were the seeds of a curse, the prints of magic. Watered by whatever lunacy a full moon claims heritage, they would grow into full vines shot through the intricate lacework of my skeleton, bending and threading, breaking and sowing. And the skin would raise sin-red, sear like needlework, and feathers would bind themselves to me like glue. Sticky. Uncomfortable.
,
and sometimes you remember flying.
or have dreamt of it. that much remains uncertain.
you have long stopped to convince yourself that you had made-up the initial incident. you do not remember the clotting smell of blood as it flew up to meet fire. or the emergency of night crawling up on you. you have no other memories. you have only two, poignant as they are, only two. you had tried to fly again and again, tight-roping the branches into the lake. later, shadowed attempts, in the disguise of the city, over skyscrapers and clotheslines. you could not afford acrophobia. you’d swooped down and magic saved you from the ground.
you feared death more.
:
The second memory is the same way connected, eleven years after. Sirius Black, roommate to this awkward boy, knew, like the two others who shared the room, wherefore the boy spent some nights away. I knew they knew, so it was time’s game. He had followed me. I had not been careful. I think I was deliberate in that. On the floorboard of the small glen I’d arched and turned. Lumos was bright by the tip of his wand and I was drawn to the light. Like any other night there was pain as my back realigned. The night snapped to place. I smiled. He asked (whispered, voice melancholy, lively) if I could fly like this, and I informed the negative. I could not. There were no muscles that would bow these wings back, no lightness in my bones, no lifting that can accomplish such feat. I tipped my head back. The stars were glowing, in that pale, tender way they do sometimes, and suddenly I felt light, in that way newness does sometimes. A breeze winked through the waters, making patterns and feathers and hair meander. His arm was nether-pale despite the sun, and when he reached toward the wings they were almost blue. He spoke in a voice frantic and soft.
.
You felt the pulse of your neck on his finger. Then lips. The ground was soft and newly autumn, soothing skin, dissipating heat, giving surrogate life to flesh. The wings twitched as muscle untrained were pressed loose. Afterwards you made maps of the bones of those wings. Touching could not have described the way he had traced them. Hands like an anatomist’s. (Teeth. Fingers. Laugh.) You sprawled backward, and clenched your knuckles. Moving in that way you had first become aware of your fingers and the sensations pain had robbed from you. Awkward.
Half-functioning, half-pulsing with the anatomy of flight.
.