KELSIE QUA
H i d d e n Pa r t s
Y
ou were thirteen when your wings started to grow out. At first you were proud. You showed your mother, your sister, and all your aunts. “Guess who’s finally a little woman now?” they said among themselves, smiling a little sadly at how time had passed them by since their own becoming. You bragged at school with your friends, complaining about the binders you were forced to wear so you wouldn’t distract the boys. As if the boys didn’t notice, anyway. As if they didn’t stare at your hidden parts while they sat behind you in class, awed by the strange magic of female bodies, hidden from them by little more than taut, taunting bands of fabric. Some of your classmates were ashamed when their transformations started. Ella needed a back brace because her tiny frame could barely support her giant wingspan. Jane, the perennial tomboy, was found in her bed one morning surrounded by bloody feathers, because she didn’t want to become anything other than what she already was. You were different. Every night after you locked your door and closed the curtains you studied yourself in the mirror. The strange little puffs near your shoulder blades, the silver feathers at the tips that had the shape and shine of steak knives. You loved everything about your wings, especially how broad they were. When you spread them fully they couldn’t even fit in your bedroom mirror. This is how big I am, you’d think. I’m bigger than anybody knows, but me. // You were fourteen the first time you heard about sky swimming. One of the other girls at a slumber party had done it on a visit to her parents’ homeland. She said there were places across the ocean where women flew straight up into the night, only to race down like shooting stars. The thought both frightened and excited you. There was no sky swimming where you grew up. Only reports of men casting nets to catch young girls brave and foolish enough to flaunt their bodies. You’d seen pictures on true crime shows of their mangled forms tangled in webs of rope. Their wings hacked off, their limbs drooping like wilted flower petals. You tried to imagine a place where that didn’t happen. A place where you would be safe and free to fly. Whenever you fell asleep after that night, you’d take in the soft, strange texture of your feathers with your fingertips, and try to conjure such a place, but it never seemed quite real.
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