Pair of Wings, Never Used

Eliza Raben

Grade 8

I saw an advertisement in the paper yesterday.

It read “Pair of Wings, Never Used.”

There was a photo and it was a pair of wings. It was hard to tell the scale but they looked big.

They were the color of something you saw in a dream once, where you wake up and you can’t quite pin down what it looked like.

I tried to recount my dream to a friend and she said

It sounds like you don’t remember much.

I know, I said,

But I thought I did.

Pair of Wings, never used.

The feathers remind me of coins falling through fountain waters.

I wonder what kind of bird they came from. The number in the advertisement is out of order, but I try twice and on the second ring someone picks up.

You can keep the wings, She says.

I got them from an angel, but they don’t go with my wall decor.

I give her fve dollars for those wings. They arrive on my doorstep before the moon rises.

The feathers are very soft beneath my hands.

When I hold the wings up to the ceiling light, they drip translucent like hot wax.

I set them on the mantelpiece and they fash like coins in the ceiling light.

They look beautiful. They look wilted.

They look like something old and past its prime that you see in your dead grandmother’s house when they come to collect her things.

They look like something bequeathed in the will that you don’t quite know what to do with.

They look beautiful.

I don’t think I should have seen them.

When I go to bed, I dream of overhearing half of a conversation in the airport.

Someone is talking on her phone. I don’t know what she’s saying, but I know that I shouldn’t’ve heard it.

I think the plane crashed but I don’t really remember.

There were birds singing outside the little square window.

I wake up.

I don’t talk about my dream.

I don’t look up,

Because what if the ceiling is made of wax?

The wings watch (over?) me when I pass.

They were never used.