She saw the bloodied coat of
feathers before anything else.
In the dark, she couldn't be certain
if what she had seen was the result of a mind running on snatches of shut-eye
for the past week. Surely it was just an injured bird, even if the bird
appeared to be human-sized.
But then his eyes flickered into
view, a flash of silver, like liquid mercury. She didn't know how she knew the
intruder was male – maybe it was the set of his jaw, the regal slope of his
nose or the planes under his cheekbones – but she froze at the sight, tracking
the shallow beats of her heart as she waited.
Now, he was perched atop the tree
directly outside her window, head dipped and motionless, like a frightful bird
of prey roosting. Though half-obscured by the canopy of leaves, the shards of
moonlight that danced off the facets of his wings revealed how ravaged they
were. In the scant light, she noticed the feathers that stuck out, frayed and
bloodstained, and one of his wings bent at an awkward angle.
He looked like something from her
dream – literally. It had been ages since she had that dream, but she could
remember it as vividly as though she were living in it. In the dream, a winged
boy no older than eighteen extended his hand to her, hovering a few feet in
mid-air. His eyes shone like polished metal, a smile curling at the edges of
his lips as he waited for her to take his hand. How certain he was that she
would, and oh how she longed to.
She could see the vague resemblance
between the boy in her dreams and the one right before her eyes. Just as she
debated whether to open the windows to get a closer look, the boy lifted his
gaze. It cut to her and she let out an involuntary gasp. There was no mistaking
those eyes: like those of the boy in her dream, they were alert, defiant and
brimming with life – along with something else she couldn’t quite pinpoint –
despite the state of his body. He looked almost inhuman.
Of course he’s not human, she thought. He has wings.
Later, she would wonder why she
decided to open the window and let him in, why she trusted that he meant her no
harm, that the savagery in his eyes was not intended for her. Later, she would
struggle to recall the trepidation as she held out her hand, because all she
would remember was the inexplicable exhilaration that stirred in her.
She decided then that this had to be
a dream, an extended version of the one she had as a child, because in no
circumstance now would she let a complete – inhuman
– stranger into the house.
He seemed duly surprised that she
could see him, even more so that she would reach out for him. Still, he spared
only a sliver of hesitation before tumbling through the windows and crashing into
her arms as though he had found home.
The swiftness of his movement caught
her off guard. She only had time to take a step back before she found herself
pinned under him. For a while, neither of them moved. She could feel his heartbeat,
clopping heavily like erratic hoof-beats, and her own hummingbird one, buzzing
and light and ready to take flight.
With a soft moan, he slid off her
and struggled to sit up.
Up close, she saw that one of his
wings was definitely broken. His face was slick and ashen, stark against his
shock of dark hair. He seemed so incongruously human, crumpled beneath the
weight of his battered wings.
“Let me see,” she said. Her first
words to him sounded much braver than she felt.
His brows pulled towards each other
as he appraised her, but he was either too weak to protest or trusted her to
know what she was doing. He flinched when she touched him with a slightly
shaking hand and inspected the damage and she said, rather lamely, “It’s okay,”
even though she struggled to make sense of everything that was happening.
There was something disconcerting
about his gaze, as though it held a confession, and she kept her attention
doggedly on mending his ruined wings, preparing the First Aid kit, a towel and
a bowl of warm water as surreptitiously as she could without waking her family.
She worked in silence, all the while
contending with the feeling that there was something she ought to say,
something she meant to say. Questions
sat in her stomach like swallowed air bubbles, but her mind was in too violent
a tumult to string the words together. There was something in the silence that
she didn’t want to upset, anyway.
He watched her run her fingers over
the ridges of his wings, cleaning up his fresh wounds, and winced when her hand
skated across the broken bone. She muttered an apology, then resumed working with
that narrow, almost stubborn, intensity, as though pushing a memory, a nagging
thought, out of her mind. Could it be? Could she possibly remember?
On her his attention felt like a
scythe, and she babbled, “Some of these wounds are deep. I can clean them up,
but the broken bone I can’t mend.”
“I will heal,” he replied. His voice
was stronger than she expected, the baritone of someone who was used to making
assurances.
“You might not be able to … fly for a while.”
“Wings only mean as much as the
places you go.”
“Not if there are better places for
you to be.”
His eyes sparked with surprise, as
though she had stolen his line. “Would you
like to be someplace else?”
She could hear the offer in his
voice, see his outstretched hand inviting her to take to the skies, and like in
that dream she ached to slip her hand into his and tear free from the watchful
eye of her father, if only for a while.
Flight terrified her. The sense of
giving yourself up to the wind, of losing control. Water was her element; it
grounded her in a way air never could. But after what happened to her mother,
her father had forbidden her to go near the water. Now, it felt like all the
water in the world – seas and lakes and rivers and lagoons, puddles and
raindrops and thawed ice – sat in her gut, growing heavier as days passed. She
only just realised that it was the need to move, to escape, to live.
Still, that was not enough to make
her turn to flying.
“I – I’m happy where I am,” she
lied.
He let out a low chuckle – a sound
that seemed irreconcilable with his wide serious eyes – as though he saw right through
her feebly constructed lie and expected nothing less of her answer. This was
followed by a coughing fit so violent she feared for him and worried that they
would be heard.
“Maybe you should rest,” she
suggested, helping him into the beanbag chair by the bookshelf.
He sank into it gratefully, but didn’t
close his eyes until he said, “It was nice meeting you.” He might have said her
name – in a whisper like an afterthought – but that wasn’t possible since she
had never offered that information.
She didn’t know how long it took for
either of them to finally settle into sleep, but the sight of his tranquil resting
face made her racing heart peter to a sedated rhythm that lulled her back to
sleep.
When the first shaft of sunlight edged
its way into her room, she jolted awake to find herself back in her bed. There
was no sign of the boy, or traces of the tools she used to nurse his wounds. In
the daylight, everything seemed innocuously ordinary, almost taunting in its
normalcy.
It had to have been a dream, she
thought, although she couldn’t recall the last time a dream felt this surreal. But
already, she was beginning to regret falling back to sleep, or keeping her questions
to herself.
The window was tightly shut, though
she recalled how wide open she had flung it last night, how he had crashed
through it and fallen upon her.
She tried to beat down the flush
creeping up her neck. Could she really have dreamed it all up?
She was just about to head over to
the window when she saw it – the only proof he left behind: a single feather,
pure and white as a freshly fallen snowflake, resting on the bedside table.