Fiction Short Story
How Sadie Regrew Wings
Given her dearth of friends, Sadie did worry that her neighbors, mistaking her for a bird, would shoot her down.
To the south, after the water blue palms of the Great Lakes tapered into fingers, in a valley that collected snowfall, Sadie Green was flightless. Her father worked at Cornell’s Ornithology Lab, her mother at the university’s vet clinic. They were experts at fixing broken wings. Their avian patients were the great, great, great grandchildren of dinosaurs; their daughter’s grounded state should have been easily resolved. When Sadie first got sick, red bumps all over her body in late October, her hands swelling to double their size just as the weather turned, her parents tried an array of medications to soothe her skin.
“This should make the swelling go down,” they said. “Sleep is the best medicine,” they said. “I think you may be getting worse,” her mother said, and her father said, “It’s time to go to a doctor.”
The doctor had referred Sadie to a specialist, a person who tested her for adverse reactions to substances usually considered harmless: food and plants and skin products.
After months of testing, the allergist ferreted out the cause: ice.
“Your body rejects the cold,” he said. “Have you considered moving to a warmer climate? At least for winter.”
Sadie was accustomed to bad news.
She had lost her wings at the age of eight, when her family first moved to Dagny. As their new habitat turned windy, dark, and snowswept, her feathers molted, and through the next decade, snail-slow years, time enough for Odysseus to reach Ithaca from Troy, no wings regrew. Her schoolmates, who had been suspicious of her with wings, disliked her outright without her feathers. She grew so quiet and hunched over that her pediatrician, worried about her spine, forbade her from backpacks, purses, and the like.
Her parents bought her a small portable rolling travel suitcase, which she tugged behind her on school days.
“I look like such a dweeb,” said Sadie, wiping away tears.
“Why don’t you like dweebs?” her mother asked.
“I don’t dislike dweebs,” said she, teary still. “I just didn’t want to become one.”
“There, there, baby bird. You can carry your passport,” her father said. “Pretend you’re going somewhere. Every day is a trip.”
Just in case her father was right, she stored her passport in the front pocket of her small polka-dotted, roly-poly-companion suitcase. Sometimes, because of the Dalmatian-like pattern, she pretended she walked a dog instead of her belongings.
Though she was frustrated and sad, Sadie assured herself that she was meant to travel far and wide. She pretended, in spite of what others said and in spite of stark evidence to the contrary, that she was glamorous and globalized.
At first, people asked if she was headed out of town or if she had just gotten back. Without a care for her feelings, kids from all grade levels told her that she looked ridiculous.
Her neighbors never hesitated to approach her. Something in her face must have invited them to her to ask her for “a quick errand,” “one moment,” or “would you deliver this since you’re already rolling that way?” And if the cookies got smashed between houses or the envelope contained divorce papers, it wasn’t her fault: She was just the messenger.
If Sadie could fly again, she would regain her old sense of ascension, and then she’d escape into the ether. When she was younger, she hadn’t been allowed to fly out of her parents sight, but she was old enough now to travel alone. And she had a long list of places to go: islands in the Aegean Sea, desert pyramids, rivieras, and silk roads. November had divided the country, and more than one person had checked Canadian immigration laws. Still, except high school seniors transitioning to college, the residents of Dagny stayed in Dagny.
Sadie pictured soaring on a breeze with views of undulating topography beneath her. Given her dearth of friends (she shied away from terming her relationship to her peers as animosity), she did worry that her neighbors, mistaking her for a bird, would shoot her down.
*
On the day before Thanksgiving, the day of the murder (not premeditated), snow whitened the deadened Tompkins county leaves, and Bert, with his beyond perfect vision, had come to his father’s house in Dagny to hunt. Even though Bert had started to lose his hearing from driving trucks, father and son still spoke near daily on the phone. Flag-loving and loyal, they were each others’ emergency contacts and each others’ holiday plans. They parked their white pickup in a dirt spot at the forest’s edge. Geese, though plump, appeared like decoys circling the pines. Bert wanted an animal large enough to fill his father’s basement freezer. In November, deer would be vulnerable as they foraged the woods for weeds and nuts. The whitetail overpopulation had extended hunting season three of the last five years. Bert felt entitled to a dead carcass.
Father and son walked to the deer blind, hidden in a thicket. The hunting platform was technically illegal, but they had found the wooden structure, not built it. It looked like a makeshift tree house tacked onto a large oak. More than one rung of the crude ladder needed to be re-nailed to the trunk. At the base of the tree, plants so dry they looked like straw angled for a peek of sunlight on the overcast day. The men climbed up the rickety, makeshift ladder and settled in to wait.
If Sadie could fly again, she would regain her old sense of ascension, and then she’d escape into the ether. *
Hunting was so prevalent in Dagny that all of Sadie’s running clothes, purchased by her parents when she joined the crosscountry track team, were neon. Among bird species, bright colors were perceived as flirtatious and risky, but Sadie wore neon for safety. She had learned to balance temperatures and clothing (sleeping bag parkas for Arctic weather, cashmere sweaters against chill, and all-weather cotton). One mile separated her home from Dagny State Forest. As she jogged down the porch steps, the wind chimes tinkled.
School had been short this week, which meant her peers were home, and worse, outside. At the corner of Hill and Settlement, Ron Thatcher and Johnny Ellis crossed the grassy lot. In camo and work boots, they looked like hunters who hadn’t found their way to the forest. Hunters were generally interested in pheasants, grouses, and partridges, the edible birds. But if these hunters constructed a new definition of prey and then applied the term, they might mistake Sadie for a treat.
Sadie was also passionate about birds, air-borne swimmers as she thought of them, but this did not translate into an understanding between her and the gun-friendly. She couldn’t fathom how Ron and Johnny liked Dagny when all she wanted to do was leave. Her bright clothes caught their attention, and when they saw Sadie, Ron and Johnny called.
“Hey, gorgeous.”
“Beautiful, where you running to? I’m right here.”
Sadie picked up speed. Her legs churned as if fueled by something other than blood. The chilly air burned her throat. She imagined they yelled the opposite of what they meant:
“You’re the best-looking thing out here.”
“You’re running the wrong way. My house is the other way.”
Once the boys started, it was hard to stop them. A touch of hatred and they were overtaken with it. She wished they had something else to do. They were a danger to everyone and themselves.
In winter, their hoarse hollers induced a red tint to their cheeks, as if they used their own anger to warm themselves. Their exchange was simple: Sadie gave them something besides themselves to hate, and they gave her something to run from.
*
“I have to piss,” Bert’s father announced when he climbed down from their perch. Past sixty, the elder man kept fit by working home repair jobs. The tan hunting cap bounced with every step until Bert’s father was out of sight. Bert’s father, like his grandfather and possibly even his great-grandfather, was gruff, and though affection was left unspoken in this line of men, Bert trusted that an unvoiced and unnamed love linked them. Care didn’t need to be said to be felt.
“Don’t you want a relationship?” Bert had asked his ex-wife when he moved out of the house that he’d shared with her and their daughter.
“It’s not like we’re leaving town,” she’d said.
*
Propulsion carried Sadie north, past the drooping hellebore and the low road guardrails, toward the forest and the inadequate cover of a barren, leafless canopy. As the grass gave way to mud, the trees thickened around her. Her path trailed the creek, where the last green of the summer irises wilted and where it was illegal to shoot deer, though she didn’t trust her neighbors to follow legal regulations. In order to outrun the whitetails and not be mistaken for one, she brushed past the trunks and dried roots. A neon streak truncated by forest browns.
As she ran, she listened for the birdcalls that punctured the natural, rustling pauses. She raced between the mockingbirds’ chirps, the sparrows’ trills, and the wood-warblers’ chatter. A northern cardinal sent an approving wolf whistle her way. As winter set in, the female mockingbirds vocally claimed their dominion. Sadie’s local female counterparts weren’t as loud or confrontational as Ron and Johnny. They threw eggs at her house while she slept and left buckets of worms on her driveway. Sadie tried to disassociate it from herself, as if it were—
*
An accident.
At his eleven o’clock, a sway in the tree canopy stopped his aimless gaze. A whitetail? Bert peered into the forest and tried to parse shades of tan and russet into a deer. The browns swirled, and he thought he spotted movement, a meandering animal. Other hunters and runners wore orange. He had seen Sadie Green out running more often than he thought safe. She traveled fast—Bert couldn’t get a clear sight of the animal from the deer blind’s perch. He started to climb down to investigate—Sadie should mix more with the local youth. It was sad, the way Sadie Green flew between places like she couldn’t connect to anything.
*
Sadie was not afraid of uprooting. If she shed her Dagny ties and roamed free, she might head south, maybe to Asheville; a town whose name, she’d heard, came from the cindered ruins within its city limits. Rumor suggested Asheville’s four-story buildings had been simplified to steel beams. At the buildings’ feet, the crumbled remains of walls and insulation skirted the tattered first floors. Elsewhere, abroad in Assyria and Bactria, the same planes, fire-dropping bombers, human-crafted monsters ignited flamed filled skies and scorched the land. As long as Sadie could remember, it had seemed that her country had been at war.
Sadie gave them something besides themselves to hate, and they gave her something to run from. Sadie loved the smell of kindling. Under Dagny’s cloudy skies, she specialized in growing once-blooming plants from seeds until they flowered. Then she would cut and discard dead leaves, fertilize the old roots, and start again: phoenix flowers that burst into fire, sparkling and sparking, before disintegrating into compost. Her father wanted her to switch to something lasting, like harvesting sunflowers (feed the birds) or knitting (clothe yourself).
Her neighbors grew roots in their cellars. European oaks, an invasive species that they harvested in long strips, dried, and salted to a rich, fiber-full wood, too chewy and tough for her taste. Sadie’s parents had enrolled her at a wilderness survival school one summer, where she snacked on lichen, wintergreen, puffballs, and golden chanterelles.
When she pictured her future as a professional flyer, a new life where she didn’t season in one place, Sadie went with the wind. Her lungs would adapt to new altitudes and lowered pressures and hold ever more air, which would be especially handy for summer swims. Maybe she’d learn the languages of birds. From a distance, Sadie might sometimes be mistaken for a bird, especially as she raced clouds or rode winds, but she was human, even if she surfed down rainbows with a blaze of iridescent sparks behind her. More seemed possible when she breached the gap between her imagination and the world.
*
Bert’s mouth tasted dry; he hadn’t brought water. He heard a crunch as he set his left foot down, and he paused. Bert rubbed his back molars together. Often, when he was stressed and unconscious of the habit, he ground his teeth in his sleep. His dentists had warned him to wear guards in his mouth at night, or he would wear his teeth flat. They hadn’t told him what to do during the day. He didn’t know—and maybe they didn’t either—where to go to escape stress.
Excited by the prospect of a doe, he tried to wrestle his nerves calm before he risked another step. He had to be steady in order to shoot. The forest tapestry, all pine green, bark, dirt, and snow, stilled. Between the beige of dead leaves and chestnut trees, bits of snow winked as Bert shifted. He tried not to breathe as he eased in the direction of the creek bed. He would only shoot if the animal was fifty feet from the water, and he was fairly certain he wasn’t that close to the creek yet.
*
Stream water trickled along Sadie’s path. A light coating of mud clung to her shoes, weighing her down as she moved. Except for her face, her skin was covered.
Clouds muffled the daylight, and the winged words of birds cut into the natural, static-like rustling of the forest. She didn’t know the hour, but she knew that the run, from her parents’ front door until she returned to the bottom porch step, typically took seventy minutes. She was fast, but she wasn’t hummingbird fast.
If not flight, then she closed in on the heart of the forest when she spotted a terrible scene in full from a distance. Her eyes deceived her. If her vision were true, she had to warn Bert Dyer that he had pointed his gun at his own father. She recognized both men from a summer pig roast hosted by Penny and Odi in nearby Ithaca. Disaster teetered before her. She struggled for speed. But in spite of her best intentions, her throat was mute, her diaphragm taut. Don’t shoot. The messenger blundered for words, but speech failed her.
A gunshot ripped through the other sounds. Sadie’s message wouldn’t make it through to Bert. She needed to be faster. When she failed, or because she failed, she changed. A convulsing pain ruptured the veins of her legs. Her knees weakened, and she tented her fingers to catch herself against the dirt. Her ankles were sprouting; her skin was breaking. Baby-white, dove-like wings burgeoned through her malleolus ankle bones. Sadie Green had regrown wings. As she launched, too late, another form crumpled.
*
His breath released in excited, airless bursts. Bert raced ahead to where the deer had fallen, but as he approached, the prey he’d seen morphed. The browns separated from the patched green, and the form fallen on the leaves wore camo, his tan and furred hat by his side. The bullet aimed at a deer had hit his father instead. Bert’s heart fisted in his chest as he knelt next to the body and called for help. His eyes were so flooded by water that he did not see the winged messenger overhead. Sadie was already on her way to get help for the Dyers, but it was, even then, already too late. If he had understood what he was about to do, Bert never, ever would have shot. He had assumed he saw right. He had believed he saw what he wanted to see. Why hadn’t he taken one more moment to check?
