Featherless Birds
A.J. Leigh
People have stopped flying long ago.
My light-footed gaze weaves through the skein of black business bags and winter coats of the street as I pretend. It dances along the right-angled buildings and electric cables, like an invisible bird unable to find a perch. It flaps sky-coloured wings against the force that keeps my feet on the ground, but it is like a leap of the heart against the solid weight of rationality.
Too treacherous, too easy to ‘tumble’ as they say. Sinking, up in the sky with nothing to hold you down. Who had time for that? And then there are the licenses, the academies, or at least one of those 48-hour crash courses. Not that I can afford any of that.
“Robin!”
The man’s fingers reach for my shoulders just as I match the voice to a face. Room 0.16. Desk under the air conditioning. Wren.
“We did it,” he says, bounding towards me. “That client from last week. They signed yesterday.”
My chest echoes of a packed self-praise quiver. “That’s great!”
Wren walks at my side as we enter the building. Glass and steel shelter us from the sky.
“Almost to the quarterly target.” He grins. “Can you feel it? That rush?”
I step into the lift and stark white light pours over my jacket like dry rain. I can feel it. I’m heading up — not physically; the lift hasn’t moved yet — but I might be next in line for a promotion if the budget is met.
I might afford one of those crash courses after all.
Wren’s voice catches before the doors close. “See you at the ten o’clock!”
I press the button for the third floor. The lift shoots up, and for a moment, I pretend again—but there’s no sky for my gaze to chase. My feet remain safely planted on the floor of the lift.
#
I spend the end of my lunch break in the company gym - well, in the grassless garden outside the reception office.
I can barely find the time to stay ahead of work and mental health. I have long since written off my body. My shoulders feel like bony wings strapped to my neck, crisscrossed by pain and stiffness. However, the thought of finding more time in my limited free minutes to train troubles me more than those.
I sit on my usual bench. The concrete flowerbed around a barren land. Spring is still tiptoeing in its defence; only a fleeting whiff of life in the breeze coming from the metal deck overlooking the next building.
I pull out the book I’ve been pretending to read, the one I only get through a few paragraphs of each day. I mostly stare at the pages and try to clear my eyes of the lingering blue halo of the screens. Still, emails I’ve yet to type out ricochet inside my skull as if my brain fears that if it stops humming them, the words will spill from my ear.
The neatly folded square of brown paper lands across my book just as I reread the same line for the fourth time.
“Sorry, can I have that back?”
The silhouette of a woman teeters before me. More shadow than body standing in the pale light of the sun.
I carefully slip the paper from between the pages and offer it to her. My eyes fall on the scrawled words that I make out from the almost illegible stream of ink covering the small square.
“How can one define what is human?” I read it aloud as I hand it over.
“Just some thoughts I was working on.” She folds it quickly and slides it into the pocket of her jeans. Her hands look soft, but in a worn way. Like the hands of a child digging in the earth or scooping up salt-flavoured sand, running their fingers through the grass.
“Thanks.”
She floats upward and it is only as her bare feet rise to my chest, that I realise they never touched the concrete floor.
“You’re a flyer!” I blurt out.
She looks down at me, and there is amusement in the curve of her mouth. “Isn’t anyone?”
“Who do you work for?” I ask immediately. I’ve heard that some home deliveries have started using flying couriers. I looked into it, but they wanted three years of experience and a patent.
“That’s a silly question. Would you ask a bird who it flies for?”
The weight of her question hits me harder than I thought it would. Maybe it’s just because I don’t have an answer, as she looks straight into my eyes. Hers are brown, sun spotted.
“You’re not a bird,” I say.
“Am I not?” She grins sharply, tilting her head. “Says who?”
“Uh, biology?” I say, scrunching up my face.
She floats lower, coming nearly face to face.
“'Maybe I'm a new, undiscovered species. Maybe we all are. After all, all humans fly, and so do birds. There must be something to it, don’t you think?”
“Not all humans fly, and not all birds fly,” is what it seems I bring myself to say, “Take chickens.”
And maybe I just compared myself to a hen.
“Chickens have been bred for centuries,” the woman retorts, leaning back.
“They were selected for producing the most meat, the most eggs. Fat over muscle.” She rolls onto her back and gazes up at the sky, her body weightless. And it’s not as if she’s showing off her skills or anything. “Wings sacrificed for production.” She pauses, her hand reaching up longingly as if floating isn’t enough anymore. “Flying bred out of them.”
All of a sudden, I feel tethered in my bony shoulders and tight jacket.
She turns to me. The strand of her hair should be falling but they don’t. They float, like a halo, around her head. “You cannot tell me that you have never flown. Not even a small leap?”
Her tone belongs to a fifth-grade argument, which brings me to my answer.
“As a child. Sometimes.”
Coming down the stairs, that extra jump, or when my swing went so high that the clouds didn’t seem so far out of reach. In the woods near my grandparents’ house. Lying in rotten leaves with fresh earth flooding my lungs, swaying leaves above me and the sky beneath them. Reaching, yearning, as if a rope pulls at my chest.
“I grew out of it.” My voice goes off.
Maybe not bred.
“Why?” The woman’s question is genuine.
Taught out of me. My sky-coloured, invisible wings turned into these skeletal bones strapped to my back, my feathers made into a grey tailored jacket. Eyes trained for blue screens instead of a blue sky.
“Can I try?” my voice asks evenly, unaffected by the trembling hollowness in my chest. It’s as if my body has just discovered a missing muscle, grasping to fill the absence.
She offers me a hand.
Turns out, flying is not really about the ground disappearing beneath your feet, it’s more about the sky taking you in.
I wade up, into it, and the air ripples like water against my exposed face and weak shoulders, running down my arms and hands. I sink into it as if gently diving into the ocean. But water would have splashed away, wrapped me up, the sky doesn’t. No, it seeps into my skin and muscles, into my bones, as if aiming for something beneath.
The woman leaves my hand, and I float upwards, falling gently until my body settles, stopping in mid-air somewhere above the buildings.
Suddenly I have the thought that this is all I have. This fragile, scrawny body suspended in a vastness that seems to echo the one in my chest.
“I didn’t know you could see the mountains from here,” is all I hear my voice say.
The view is breathtaking. Or maybe it’s not my breath that’s taken away, it’s the vastness, the vastness beneath my ribs. It ripples, great and unrestrained, expanding between reaching and longing.
The woman nods with a subtle satisfaction, her gaze lingering on the horizon.
“This feels close, doesn’t it? To what defines us.”
“Flying?” I ask. I could turn to her, to meet her eyes, but I can’t—not when the whole sky is quenching me.
I barely register her shaking her head before she presses a hand flat against my chest.
“This.”
I understand.
The vastness, or maybe tenderness, unfurling inside me, stretching and curling beneath my ribs. It feeds on the paint-like shape of the sun-kissed clouds above us, on the dark, jagged spine of the mountains, grasping at them, or trying to. I can’t quite hold it, as if my chest is drowning in it. But somehow, it feels just right—this fullness.
“It’s not flying,” she murmurs. “That doesn’t make us humans. Others do that, and there are other ways to do that. But to reach for the sky, without having feathers to belong to it. To still feel it, or trying to. This. I think this makes us human.”
Her voice trails off, and I feel her gaze drifting, drinking in, mirroring my own.
“At least, I believe that.”
I close my eyes, but even like this, it’s all still there. The unreachable distance of the sky, all the times I searched for a place where I could lift my chin and see nothing, no buildings, no electric cables, just the welcoming void. The mountains, with which my gaze, my sky-coloured feathered bird, had run through the car window from the seat behind my mother’s, the curling leaves in the woods, the smell of rain on newly blooming flowers, that whiff of life. And printed words, on a piece of paper, that said something my mind did not understand, but that reached my chest. A vastness seeking the one outside. A fulness.
All in this scrawny suspended body.
“Isn’t your lunch break over?”
“I want to be human for a little bit longer.”
A. J. Leigh
A. J. Leigh was born and raised in a small lakeside town in northern Italy, in an Italian-British family. They have been writing for as long as they can remember and intend to continue doing so.