They touched me, grazed me, and destroyed my already armless shoulder further. But I was just another piece of wood.
Surrounded with broken wood, dead wood, if not branches, I began putting myself in order. One splinter in my hand, just to have something approximating a thumb, then a larger piece of wood, a peg leg.
From there, I could move. I could hobble.
Through the store, out the emergency exit at the side.
Half a block down, to the downtown street. Old fashioned buildings for stores. Trees at set distances, leaves gone for the winter.
At the base, broken branches.
Knowing every second counted, I began putting myself together.
Leg first, in case the giant spotted me.
Then…
I thought of the vision the abyss had given me. A view of my possible future.
I thought of how the dragon had flown.
Not arms. Wings.
I set to building.
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14.04
I’d committed to walking the line between human and Other. If I felt like wings were somehow more of an appeal to my human side, despite all conflicting evidence, was that a bad sign?
I wasn’t an artist. I wanted to be, but my memories of trying were ones of frustration. Of false starts and disappointment and of putting two elements together and getting something other than what I’d wanted. Alexis had turned flaws into features, and was adept at working with the mistakes of others, doing her thing with the tattoos. Tiff, going by what I’d seen, worked in a sketchier style. Ty, well, he made a lot of mistakes to start with, but in all the time that I’d worked on…
On painting?
I couldn’t remember what I’d actually done.
Which said a lot. As I thought on it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever been able to remember exactly what projects I’d attempted and failed. There was only my crude exercise in drawing the circles around the demon Ur. Fragments here and there.
That, in turn, led me to the understanding that the art wasn’t mine. I paused for a moment, hands freezing midway through my work. A quiet horror, almost a sense of betrayal, but far from specific, hard to place, in terms of blame.
Had Rose experienced moments like this? She’d known what we were for some time now. Had she dwelt on it? Those elements that were missing?
That dawning realization that some of the most intense, heartbreaking moments of frustration were because the other person had something we needed?
Friends. The idea hit me.
For Rose, quite possibly, it was friends. When she had failed to form bonds to the others, the same natural camaraderie, did she think of me?
I’d been given the desire to create, but left without the ability. Rose had that ability. I had little doubt. Too useful to a potential practitioner.
The other things were things I could understand. But this? This felt like a slap in the face. The cold stir of anger inside me prompted me to resume the work. That felt more Other than human.
Or maybe it just felt more like the me I didn’t want to become.
The branches reached out and seized that which was offered, as if I were patching up a part of me that simply needed to be healed. Wings that I’d been missing for a long time. They made the wings twisted, gnarled.
Very quickly, I realized that it was lopsided. I had only one arm, and the branches didn’t all match. The wing on my left seized the stump, replacing the arm. I panicked momentarily, trying to undo the process, but time I spent on trying to pry branches back and put the basic constructions in place for an arm gave the rest of the wings more time to develop on their own. The branches rearranged, drew the broken extra rib from my chest to give structure and shore up areas I’d yet to find a branch for.
If I’d been an artist like Tiff or Ty or Alexis or Joel or Joseph, maybe I could have worked with it. Tending to a garden that grew nearly as fast as I could cut, or position. I could have worked with mistakes, developed them.
I could have made it elegant, made it fit right.
I’d studied birds at one point. Birds had evolved from land creatures, and the first thing one had to do when understanding wings was to recognize them as fundamentally similar to arms.
The upper arm, the humerus of my wing, extending out from the gnarled spot on my back, it was thin. Lacking support. The elbow joint too small, weak. The biggest problem, considering it was what the entire fucking wing depended on. I tried to add more to it, a larger branch along the humerus, the broken end at the elbow, where I needed the joint more fleshed out. Where, hopefully, the splinters might form the necessary elements of the joint.
Twists of wood reached out, fingers like roots or roots like fingers, and gripped the larger branch, found weak points, and splintered it. Took it to pieces. Carried the pieces down, like so many wriggling worms, one catching the splinters of wood as another let them fall. Building the longer fingers I hadn’t wanted to build. A bat’s wings, not a bird’s.
The horror I experienced was a kind I was getting a hell of a lot more familiar with, since realizing I was only a vestige, a fraction of a person. I wasn’t, it seemed, in control of my own body.