I nodded to Tove, who put my favorite kite down to look at another. Choose whichever you’d like, I said, a demand disguised as a choice.
Two teenage voices began yelling outside the store.
I pushed Tove quickly into the back workroom. He screeched softly, his hairs smashed down underneath my palms. Stay here, I said, and don’t come out until I tell you. Tove said nothing.
Trust me, I pleaded. I had to leave him there, stuck among my half-finished projects and the cardboard boxes.
I got to the front counter before the bell tinkled, before bald heads rushed into the room, the baldness a physical refusal to be like the Dragonflies with their million bristling, feeling hairs. They blew in with chants of Bugs are Bugs!
Any bugs in here? the leader asked.
No, I said quickly. I stared them down. I recognized one of them, an older girl that Aleo had brought over once after school. Then, I thought she’d been nice, shy, had always called me ma’am. The baldness was new, her scalp paler where hair used to be, and it made her look alien herself. I could tell she recognized me too, the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes, and she hunched her shoulders and tried to melt behind one of the others, a burly man with a sweatband around his forehead.
Lady, I could have sworn, the ringleader said.
See for yourself, I said. I knew it was best to let their anger wash over the store with the least provocation. I had called the cops before, and I knew from experience that they waited until any damage was already done before appearing.
They looked around the store without moving. Their eyes settled on the kites. They knew who my customers were. They started to poke through the racks, the dusty aisles, the afternoon light arriving in golden, violent streaks to illuminate what even the best of us were capable of.
The girl I recognized pushed a display case weakly, so that it tottered, but didn’t fall. One of them brushed a row of yo-yos onto the floor. Another was heading in the direction of the workroom door. The burly man with the sweatband picked up the kite Tove had been looking at, which he had dropped on the floor. I kept eye contact with the girl I recognized, who finally looked up and caught my eye.
Nothing here, she said.
The burly one with the kite handed it to the girl like it was evidence to the contrary. The girl looked at me, snapped the wood of the kite. She ripped the cloth in a struggle of arms.
Shoddy work, she said, tossing the flail of broken kite, the spine akimbo. She led them out of the store. I could hear them whooping on their way down the street to the next establishment.
I picked up the broken kite and put it behind the counter. I spent a moment picking up the scatters of wooden yo-yos, just in case they changed their minds and came back.
When I finally opened the door, Tove was under the giant hang-glider-sized kite that took up most of the ten-foot room. His shape under there flinched when he heard the door open.
I’m sorry, I said. You can come out now.
He moved the giant kite off and nodded.
I held my hand out to help him, but he stood up slowly by himself, his legs curling heavily under his weight, the air pushed from the flutter of his wings tickling my hands. A breeze when there was none.
This one, he said, pointing at the giant kite. This is the one I want.
I had painted it with a mosaic that looked like stained glass, so when it flew, it was like we were inside some great cathedral where we were supposed to pray. Like we were stuck here, underneath its great glass, but our spirit was supposed to rise somehow anyway.
How much? he asked.
I understood Tove, wanting the biggest, best thing you couldn’t have. I wanted his unexhausted hope, that’s what I wanted. I wanted forgiveness without having to name my sins, I wanted tenderness to feel real to me again. Some part of me wanted to fly in the face of everything those skinheads represented, but another part of me wanted the world before the Dragonflies fell in, the world we couldn’t have. Were we tender before? Could we be tender again? Or did the Fallings only awaken the violence we’d always had? Benon had informed me that the Dragonflies were so fragile, all those hairs on their legs and arms and feelers, all those thin appendages, that they were so careful with each other when they loved, that they barely ever touched. Love making was mostly an act of foreplay, their wings manipulating the air around the loved like a cyclone sending all of their hairs and feelers singing with touch. It was like being loved by the air itself. Even this was left wanting from Earth’s atmosphere, their movements clumsier now, the work so much harder on them. But human lungs! We had always been clumsy, but we had more lung force than their wings had now. Instead of answering Tove, giving him the price of a simple kite, I pursed my lips and whistled air in his direction.
Oh, he said, eyes closing. Oh hemena. His throat buzzed.
I whistled again, pushing air across his face in the circular pattern Benon had described.
Oh, I feel unarmored, he said. Oh hemenalala, I am defenseless.
It was like I was pummeling the words out of him, he said them that painfully. I knew he wanted to say Stop. He wanted to say Desist. Were those nicknames he had given his fallen mate? Was he trying to call her ghost back across the years? But it was my name I wanted on his purple lips.
I blew all the way around him to the back, where his four wings trembled, my breath blowing their wing-dust off until they shone translucent. Had he still been able to fly, stripping his wings of their powder would have been even more cruel. Benon had said that their wings were electric colors in the home atmosphere, but in this one they had turned a dusty brown. Now they were drab ghosts of what they used to be. Benon had never told me what came after, what consummation was for them. Had I known, I would have done it. I know I would have done it.
Oh hemenalala, he said as I made my way back to his front, where his thorax armor glistened and tensed.
Finally I stopped, held my breath.
When Tove was finally able to compose himself, I couldn’t look at him. I said, the kite isn’t finished. Come back in a month.
He didn’t answer me and he didn’t turn around. His eyes stayed closed the whole way out of the store.
A few weeks later, I went home to a Dragonfly in the backyard, the neighborhood kids around him with their electronic sticks. Even the older kids were out, excited by the new development. What’s going on? I said.
Ask Benon. Aleo shrugged.
He’s for my project, Benon said. I asked him to come home with us.
Are you fine with this? I asked the Dragonfly kid.
I’m cool, the Dragonfly said.
The Dragonfly looked at me and popped gum from his tiny, pursed mouth. I waited for him to announce himself the way his kind did. It was hard to tell their ages, but this one must have been born here, was already starting to lose the customs of his parents.
Finally, I asked him, Who are you? more combatively than I would have liked.
I am Yeshela Whisperer of Mist, the child said begrudgingly.
Wonderful, I said, and went back inside.
I was not against the kids mixing, unlike other parents I knew who were prying their blinds open to watch across the block. It’s just that I didn’t think the kids were ready. Not after I’d seen what we’d done as adults. But I was willing to bet against myself. I left them to it and pulled aside the curtain.
They were reenacting the Fallings again, which the Dragonflies called the Arkfall Massacres but we did not. Benon sat atop our old swing set and was directing. It seemed like this time they were trying to get everything exactly right. They even had a giant hologram of one of the Arks cracked like an egg projected behind them in the sandbox. Benon was reading the history out loud.