A boy with wings, pale and flat, lay underneath the surface of the water. Metallic fish swirled around him like razorblades, slicing this way and that, drawing sharp, bloody cuts in the water.
Above the boy and the fish, the water roared by, waves sandpapering rocks with their rolling bellies. The hostile sky, a lightyear away, swam dark and malignant, a cancerous tumor, spreading rapidly. Multiplying cells.
There was a toadstool on the bottom. The boy’s toe gently scuffed it, the cap falling off in slow motion, pieces of mushroom cascading across pebbles. Floating away. To another place.
The boy with wings' hand was pinned against a rock, his fingers lean and flat, as if tacked to a bulletin board. Something fluttered inside them, consciousness awakening from a long hibernation, pale and rasping to be let out. His fingernails whispering against the rough, asking to be let free.
But she couldn't let him go, the girl perched above on the smooth stone, worn by water, fitted to her frailness like a throne. The princess of flat boys with wings. The princess of boys drowning beneath rocks. The pastel rays of light reflected off her gunmetal dress, the hem crinkled and brittle, stainless steel dripping down the sides of the rock, solid silver teardrops falling on the boys' wings. The waterline was rising. The boy was drowning. And she sat there waiting.
"I can't let you go yet." The boy with wings was under water. Swishhh swishh. He was slowly vanishing beneath the swirl of liquid, the life leaking from his toenails, purple. "I can't let you go yet." What was she waiting for?
As the boy dissolved, he arched his blue spine, and slipped out of the wings. Snap. Snap. The elastic caught on his wrist, wrapped around his ineffectual thumb. His thumb dissolved.
The girl saw the wings, ascending, sparkling beneath the grime, the grime from a drowning boy who no longer had wings. The wings emerged from the depths, floating like a lullaby across the still, inky water, the liquid that had cut rocks. They fluttered, lifted off the water.
They were caught on a whisper from a watcher who had seen a sister and a brother fighting over a pair of wings, fighting over two pieces of wire threaded with lace cut-outs, shimmering tantalizingly. A watcher who had been these children, seen their covetous looks at the sight of these wings. A watcher who knew that their mother had told them to share, a mother who was now a mother of one, a girl with wings.
High above, above the girl and the wings, and the glassy violet water, above the storm, the watcher watched, watched his sister. Watched her standing on a rock, watched the wings lift off the water and glide to her outstretched hands like a small bird. The boy watched his sister, a girl with wings, turn and throw them back to the water, the water which swallowed the wings, rolling and crashing, shredding them against the rocks. The boy who used to have wings watched the girl crouch above the waves, saw her face melt, the real tears, running down to the water, mixing and rolling. The boy turned and saw that behind him, attached to his back, was a pair of real wings.
