Pulling Off Wings

Dreaming is what she did best, when she was young and unburdened and capable of clinging to the present like the life short-lived by a butterfly, but she's old now, thin-limbed but heavy with eyes that are always bruised. She scrapes fat tent caterpillars from tree limbs and crushes their silky white homes. She wants to burn them, protect the flowers that blossom pink and fragrant over the limbs of weeping cherry trees, and the cruelty has tugged her inward. Her senses can't collect the textures, smells, sights, tastes, sounds of the world to pack into dreams.

She's left with nightmare.

She remembers dreaming of her mother, another version of her mother, one tall and blond with smooth arms and legs. They sat cross-legged on her mother's apartment carpet, necks craned upwards towards an illuminated screen that fell down over the far wall like a sheet. The film projector hummed and clicked from somewhere in the room. Astrological signs, images of a Leo lion and Aquarius, the goat with curled horns and a wide fin, filled circles. Strange symbols crested the waves of empty space looping around the curved, black lines.

It happens in a moment of heightened emotion, she remembers her mother explaining earlier, and now her mother says, "This is what I was watching when it happened to me."

The girl wants it, too. She watches the screen with hunger but feels nothing shift inside her body.

She should be watching the three toddlers sitting in the corner of the room rolling colorful plastic blocks across the floor. They're dressed in blue, and their eyes are the eyes of older people. They flick them towards the girl, yellow and irised marbles in their balled skulls, and continue plucking at the blocks with stunted fingers. The couch is sitting uncomfortably to the children's' left. The girl should've placed the toddlers on the couch, high above the floor.

But she forgets about them, absorbed in her envy, and she and her mother stride down the hallway to the apartment's only bedroom. A large window is filled with blackness and the moon. Everything becomes silver in the bright shadows, and they fall asleep.

When the girl wakes, she smells water. The moon is burning like a cool light bulb, and darkness is muffled daylight, a silver and translucent ghost. She stirs up in bed, the sheets cold around her limbs. Moon-drenched water curls through the apartment, rising almost as high as the top of the mattress. The covers are like sand and she's trembling on a soft island when she realizes the children are still huddled in the living room corner, now drowning. Her mother is awake, with azure eyes and her left leg tilted into the water, slick and grey. Mother's right leg unfolds and slips into the domestic sea, melts into the other like candle wax. A fin blooms where her toes should be, and she slides off the sheets, her face the last part of her body to submerge. The girl leans over the bed and watches her mother's nose grow long and grey-blue, her eyes spread apart, her neck tilt back. Mother is a dolphin, and she swims away towards the ancient-eyed children.

The girl wants to be like her, but she's not. She must trudge on legs through the black hallway. When she dips her arms deep into the icy bottom and lifts the children free, they are wrinkled and snarling. Grey. With hollow sockets where the eyes once were. They are bloated, dead, animal-like bodies. She can do nothing but drop them into the water, wade back to bed, and sleep.

She wakes. Daylight shows a clean, dry floor. Three scuttling shadows dash past the wide crack of the closed door. Shadows of small, naked feet spread over the carpet, and beams of red light move ahead of them. Their eyes are the glowing eyes of red vermin. She let the children drown, and in their suffering they transformed into river rats. Wise-eyed, snarling rats of the water. The girl wants what they have.

Her organs grow hot and cruel with envy.

She follows her mother into a building, hoping to undo what's happened. They move through a white hallway smelling of alcohol, her mother striding ahead with blond hair and the girl craning her neck to the right as she notices a roomful of scientists in baking soda-white lab coats. Vials and tubes and tunnels of enigmatic, sparkling, burbling liquid steam and drop one particle at a time into clean beakers. The scientists scuttle back and forth across the room, quick and with pursed mouths and furrowed brows, scribbling in notebooks, dribbling beads of sweat. Small mammals are in cages, she thinks of the children, but the doors of the elevator open to her left and let a stream of white-clothed humans tumble out into the hallway. The girl's transfixed by the elevator. The elevator with a heavy wooden door looming black against the back wall. The door that suddenly opens like the throbbing, hot walls of her hormone-infested heart.

Her skin grows prickly at the sight of a tall, ragged-faced man blowing from the hidden room like a storm wind, his black coat billowing, his skin a wrinkled, cloudy mass beneath disheveled hair. From his shoulder sprouts the mutated, dead face of a lion, its paws jutting out into the cold air with sharp claws. They are reaching for the girl, and this man is a failed experiment. Her experiment. She's hot and burbling inside like lava. People in white coats flutter toward her like frightened sheep, but she won't peel her sight from the grey-skinned man. He turns towards her. His eyes are old. He is a storm cloud billowing and swelling with skin cold as ice. And the world is silent and suddenly black.

Diagonal slashes of red. Three times across the black screen of her vision. She doesn't know what's happening, but, finally, she wakes.

Glass shattered. Paper loosed and violent. Shimmering liquid dripping from remaining shards of smooth tubes. A ticking sound. Dead scientists drooped over sterilized counters. Red staining white, and the hollow tunnel of one man's throat exposed. The girl's mouth and hands coated in the acrid, sticky presence of blood.

One scientist with his ribs gashed open is still alive. He looks at the girl and holds out his bloody hands. "You didn't do this. You didn't do this. We just have to convince them that you didn't do this."

But she knows the truth.

She is the lion.

She is envy.

She is the one, the killer, who pulled wings from the moth before they grew.