Wings

Written by Kathryn Hatchett

By morning, I was dead. I don’t remember dying. Sleep had come and stayed. I watched my body lie stuck below, as if I were perched in the tree with a fellow bird. Sometimes, I had to remind myself it was me. I was dead.

As the winds had dictated my course, I’d felt the start of the end. I’d felt queasy all day; it sat below a squeezing sensation wrapping around my chest. By dusk, my wings had faltered, and I knew time was abandoning me. Ahead lay a small wood with plenty of perches. I swooped down to find a tree to nestle on. It was hard to breathe. I wanted company. I wanted a friend to tell me it would be alright. To tell me this would pass. I wouldn’t believe them, but it would help.

The sky grew black. I tried to rest and let the pain ebb into numbness. I hoped in the morning, it would be gone, leaving me forgotten, like a strand of seaweed the waves left behind. The thought made me hungry, aware of my thirst. My eyes closed and I lost my balance. Tumbling through fir branches, I hit one and stopped. My long neck wedged between branches. Blood rushed to my head as I dangled.

A voice drew me to the present.

‘Is that an egret?’ a girl said to herself, the dog at her feet unbothered. ‘No, be weird if it was. What’s it doing dead in a tree?’

 She was alone as far as I could tell, talking to herself and watching my body in horrified confusion. Drawing her phone from her pocket, she went to take a picture of me, then contemplated the morality… curiosity won. She tapped the screen and muttered to herself about seeing what everyone thought I was. Then she left, a dog loitering behind her.

I didn’t know how long I would stay by my body. I found comfort in knowing it existed and fright in knowing I would never reunite with it. As the day flashed by, nobody else saw me in the tree. I wanted them to. I wanted them to miss me. Nobody looked up.

I slipped from the world in silence. I disturbed no one. The winds took me into the clouds once more. I’d spent my life running from death; it was the worst outcome of life, to die. Now, Death had come, and I was free of its fear.