Wings

She takes her wings out. Sometimes, when she’s alone. She holds them out in front of her the way you might a long dress, shaking them a couple of times to see how the shimmery fabric falls. They’re as soft, as silky, as glittery as ever. Time hasn’t diminished them.

Unlike her.

She jokes amongst her secret friends that she’s three-hundred years old but only looks eighty. But it’s a brittle, over-bright joke. The truth in it is a stark, dark, staring one. These years are not equal are they, fey vs human?

“Come back with us,” they whisper, “reclaim your beauty, and your thousands of years. This is too high a price to pay, you know it is.”

And she could. This troubles her at nights, at times. She could so easily shrug these wings back onto her back, she could open her heart to that inner part of herself, she could flood herself with energy, with purified light, with all the magic that’s been bottled up in her soul.

And then she looks across the pillow to where he sleeps beside her. His face, like hers, is worn with the brevity of human life, the lines are written deep into his face, the same face soft with sagging and creasing, the milky-pale eyes, the strands of white hair that still curl up against his head. This: this is what she could never part from.

The wings rustle in her fingers. Quickly, quickly, they seem to tell her, before it is too late, before you wait too long and you lose this beautiful thing that you are. And that temptation, lodged inside her; dark, very dark, that nugget of hard, restless fear. So easily she could do it, feel the vitality restored, unearthly beauty, a future measured in tens of thousands of years. This is madness, and you know you must end it.

Maybe. If his human hourglass flows faster than hers. In the aftermath of that. She looks over at him, still sleeping. Not before then. Not before. She folds the wings neatly and slides them back into the secret space between drawers and universes. She spares one glance for that ravaged, declining face of hers in the mirror, then climbs back into bed beside him and reaches to touch his hand.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work