Changing Planes

OH, YES, WHEN I FIRST found out—when it started happening to me, you know—I was floored. Terrified! I couldn’t believe it. I’d been so sure it wouldn’t happen to me. When we were kids, you know, we used to joke about so-and-so being “flighty,” or say, “He’ll be taking off one of these days.” But me? Me grow wings? It wasn’t going to happen to me. So when I got this headache, and then my teeth ached for a while, and then my back began to hurt, I kept telling myself it was a toothache, I had an infection, an abscess… But when it really began, there was no more fooling myself. It was terrible. I really can’t remember much about it. It was bad. It hurt. First like knives running back and forth between my shoulders, and claws digging up and down my spine. And then all over, my arms, my legs, my fingers, my face… And I was so weak I couldn’t stand up. I got out of bed and fell down on the floor and I couldn’t get up. I lay there calling my mother, “Mama! Mama, please come!” She was asleep. She worked late, waiting in a restaurant, and didn’t get home till way after midnight, and so she slept hard. And I could feel the floor getting hot underneath me, I was so hot with fever, and I’d try to move my face to a cooler place on the floor…

Well, I don’t know if the pain eased off or I just got used to it, but it was a bit better after a couple of months. It was hard, though. And long, and dull, and strange. Lying there. But not on my back. You can’t lie on your back, ever, you know. Hard to sleep at night. When it hurt, it always hurt most at night. Always a little fevery, thinking strange thoughts, having funny ideas. And never able to think a thought through, never able quite to hold on to an idea. I felt as if I myself really couldn’t think any more. Thoughts just came into me and went through me and I watched them. And no plans for the future any more because what was my future now? I’d thought of being a schoolteacher. My mother had been so excited about that, she’d encouraged me to stay in school the extra year, to qualify for teachers’ college… Well. I had my nineteenth birthday lying there in my little room in our three-room flat over the grocery on Lacemakers Lane. My mother brought some fancy food from the restaurant and a bottle of honey wine, and we tried to have a celebration, but I couldn’t drink the wine, and she couldn’t eat because she was crying. But I could eat, I was always starving hungry, and that cheered her up… Poor Mama!

Well, so, I came out of that, little by little, and the wings grew in, great ugly dangling naked things, disgusting, to start with, and even worse when they started to fledge, with the pin-feathers like great pimples. But when the primaries and secondaries came out, and I began to feel the muscles there, and to be able to shudder my wings, shake them, raise them a little— and I wasn’t feverish any more, or I’d got used to running a fever all the time, I’m not really sure which it is—and I was able to get up and walk around, and feel how light my body was now, as if gravity couldn’t affect me, even with the weight of those huge wings dragging after me… but I could lift them, get them up off the floor…

Not myself, though. I was earthbound. My body felt light, but I wore out even trying to walk, got weak and shaky. I used to be pretty good at the broad jump, but now I couldn’t get both feet off the ground at once.

I was feeling a lot better, but it bothered me to be so weak, and I felt closed in. Trapped. Then a flier came by, a man from uptown, who’d heard about me. Fliers look after kids going through the change. He’d looked in a couple of times to reassure my mother and make sure I was doing all right. I was grateful for that. Now he came and talked to me for a long time, and showed me the exercises I could do. And I did them, every day, all the time—hours and hours. What else did I have to do? I used to like reading, but it didn’t seem to hold my attention any more. I used to like going to the theater, but I couldn’t do that, I still wasn’t strong enough. And places like theaters, they don’t have room for people with unbound wings. You take up too much space, you cause a fuss. I’d been good at mathematics in school, but I couldn’t fix my attention on the problems any more. They didn’t seem to matter. So I had nothing to do but the exercises the flier taught me. And I did them. All the time.

The exercises helped. There really wasn’t enough room even in our sitting room, I never could do a vertical stretch fully, but I did what I could. I felt better, I got stronger. I finally began to feel like my wings were mine. Were part of me. Or I was part of them.