You know, I could conceivably end this post there, but I wanted to share a portion of my latest short story with you. It still needs work, but that's one of the best things about studying creative writing: Nothing is ever finished; your professors understand that, so you turn things in anyway. It's a great system.
The story is an inset adaptation (a story based off another story or piece of art, not fanfiction) of Billy Collins' poem Questions About Angels and this painting by Joanna Sierko-Filipowska. I've titled it Mortal Angel. I hope you enjoy this scene.
When Gabrielle’s hair tickled her awake the next morning, she realized she had accidentally left the window open all night. Some wind had made its way through the window and a couple papers were haphazardly flying about the room. She got out of bed, closed the window, and was all the way into the shower – still numb to the world around her – before she noticed that the pain in her back was much relieved.
At the same time, she noticed that the water falling on her was not obeying gravity in its usual fashion. It felt almost as if something was between parts of her back and … While Gabrielle was forming this thought, she brought her hand up to her back to investigate. Her fingers touched something solid, and it was covered with wet feathers.
Gabrielle scrambled out of the shower in a panic. She slipped on the tiled floor and grabbed the counter to save herself from falling, then straightened up to face herself in the mirror. The reflection showed a wet young woman with suds in her hair standing stark naked with small, pigeon-gray, feathered wings sprouting from between her shoulder blades.
Each wing was about a hand span in length and three inches from top to bottom at the widest, and though they were undoubtedly growing from her body, she had no feeling in them. If she had been able to feel them as one feels one’s fingers, she would have noticed them a lot earlier. As it was, they were like growths on her back and to this point had only caused her pain and irritation.
Now, however, they also caused near-hysteria. Gabrielle had sunk to the rug on the bathroom floor, too weak to stand. Her hands were trembling terribly and her breath was shallow and quick. She wondered if she would pass out. She wondered if the wings were really there. Stretching a hand behind her, she felt the small feathers slip between her fingers as she ran them down the length of each wing.
To list all the things she wondered would be absurd for the sheer number of them. She sat on the bathroom floor with the suds in her hair and goose bumps all over her body, her eyes shifting quickly from item to item in the bathroom, searching for stability as she tried to get her breathing under control. Her head was buzzing, her heart was fluttering, and she soon found herself vomiting into the toilet.
Bracing herself against the counter, she washed out her mouth and did her best to start breathing slowly, performing a breathing exercise that had worked once before. She closed her eyes and focused on counting and breathing, counting and breathing, counting and breathing, anything but the wings (heart palpitation), counting and breathing.
When she had herself under control again, Gabrielle stepped back into the shower, which had continued to run, and rinsed out her hair, carefully continuing to count and breathe. Getting out of the shower, she toweled herself off, avoiding the wings (how was she supposed to dry them off?), and then got dressed in a loose T-shirt and some jeans. Putting on a bra presented a bit of a problem, but after struggling for a moment, she was able to hook the back strap beneath the wings. She decided that if she was to go to school that day, she would have to wear a large hoodie. Luckily, the wings were still small enough to be hidden.
Class was a relief, and by throwing herself into the lectures and labs, Gabrielle was able to forget the fungi on her back. Brandon gave her a questioning look once, which reminded her of the wings and launched her into a hurried breathing exercise, but other than that, no one seemed to notice that anything was strange about her that day.
Brandon tried to strike up a conversation with her after their last class, asking her for advice for his friend, a photography major who needed to figure out what to do for a final project. She shrugged him off and hurried for home.
Time away from staring at her wings had allowed her to think and come to grips with her situation, and now she wanted to do a little research. Gabrielle locked herself inside her bedroom and took off the hoodie and shirt so she could see the wings in her full length mirror.
They had grown since that morning, and were now twice as big as they had been before. It was a miracle, really, that no one had noticed them. The wings lay, docile, against her back. She tentatively attempted to move them, to fan them out, but it was useless. So she gently bent her arm and moved one wing with her hand. It was as if the wings were paralyzed – Gabrielle had no feeling in the wings themselves, but her back could feel that they had been moved as she handled first one, then the other. They felt warm.
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