WATERMARK

It began with a slight tension in her shoulders, a pulling. She was compelled to sit, and stand, straight. Just as her grandmother always had told her: stand up straight. There was some pain, but it eased as she learned to maintain this stance, this soldier-like position. The rest of her body — her back, her legs, her upper arms — protested for awhile, but eventually they quieted. She found this new way of moving odd, at first, demanding; but she adjusted.

She had always slept on her back, but this became untenable. It felt like she slept on stones. One night, she climbed from her bed, went into the bathroom, turned on the lights and stood looking over her shoulder into the mirror. There were the stones, two long lines of bumps down her back, one on each side of her spine. She could feel them, pushing her shoulders apart. This was when she realized she was dying.

She took to sleeping on her stomach. Her back became more and more sensitive; more painful. She took to wearing large, loose dresses, and avoiding public encounters. She waited for this disease, whatever strangeness it was, to kill her. She went about her daily chores in new postures; even bent over, sweeping dust into a pan, her back stayed straight as an arrow. An arrow, pointing to her head.

She was not afraid; she was old; she was ready. But this was not what she had expected, this oddness, this distortion.

And her back was growing, it was extending outward. She was like an old woman with a hump, except that she did not bend, she could not slouch. This long hump, instead of bending her forward, was pulling her backwards, was pulling her upwards.

One morning, she woke in agony. The sheet, then the air, on the skin of her back was like a rough board. She feared the bumps had broken through her skin, her flesh. When she got the hand mirror from the drawer, and looked into it, and from it into the long mirror behind her, she saw that her flesh was creasing into two long lines, along the lines of the ever-growing bumps. The bumps grew outwards; her skin fell inwards. Her body was a stranger to her.

This one time, she considered seeing a physician. But no, what would be the point? She had always hated and feared those cold and dangerous places, those places where they would want to put her. No, let it be. Let whatever would happen, happen.

 

She could still move, she could still slide through her days. Stiffly, and sometimes with silent tears on her cheeks — but she could still move. She took to closing all the drapes, going from room to room naked, because — painful as the air was, scratching against her back, clothing was worse.

That she slept at all seemed a miracle, lying stiff there on the bed, on her belly, trying to not feel. Though she tried to resist, at least once a day she went into the bath, took out the mirror, examined this new, raw self with both fear and wonder. Now her limbs, too, seemed to be changing. Her arms seemed softer and more fragile; her legs seemed thinner; the flesh and fat on her buttocks was disappearing. Her breasts, never large, diminished even further.

What was odd, though, was — aside from the pain — she seemed healthy. Her skin was clear, more flexible. Her hair shone for the first time in years. Even her teeth seemed whiter.

But her shoulders continued to separate, the channel between them growing. Her body seemed to be regrowing itself, into something different.

One morning she woke, without pain. She lay there, stunned. Carefully, she flexed her shoulders — they moved. Though she felt she could leap from her bed, she left it slowly, carefully. Experimentally.

She raised her arms in a long stretch — an unaccustomed stretch — and there was no pain, but suddenly she was falling backward, and just as suddenly, something — something caught the air, caught her, steadied her. She could feel it. Them. From her back, two strange limbs, reaching higher than her arms; wider than her body — much wider, much larger — she was much larger than she had ever been.

She could, somehow, feel the ceiling. She looked up, she wanted to see, and there above her were — wing tips? They bent forward at her will. They came around her at her wanting. When she touched them, she felt it twice — on her fingers, and on the wing itself. The wings were hers. The wings were her. When she sat, gingerly, in the side of the bed, the wings came forward, enclosing her in a kind of embrace.

 

They were not beautiful. They were not feathered. They were not bright like butterfly wings.

They were more like — bat wings. Expanses of thin skin, with long, delicate bones — or cartilage? — holding the skin together, giving it shape and form and movement. She moved her shoulders, and the wings moved. She sat, holding the — her — left wing in her right hand, pulling it across the front of her, thinking — I've gone insane. Or I've died. Perhaps I'm dead? Are these, these pale and ugly — well, not ugly, exactly, but certainly not white and pure and feathered — these are my angel wings?

But no. This was her ordinary room; this was her ordinary bed. This was her — not, now, ordinary — life.

She stood up again. She wondered how she was to leave the room, the doorway being so much shorter than she, now, was, with these wings towering above her. She walked toward the door, and the wings … compressed, somehow; folded down, so that she could walk through. She stood in the hallway, and experimented. She thought, or felt, that the wings should be small, and they seemed to fold themselves up against — even partly into — her back.

She went into the bathroom. This room was suddenly much too small to hold all of her, but it was the only room with a mirror. She stood in front of that mirror, and thought, open. There, behind her, appeared these strange appendages, bent, cramped a bit in this small room, brushing the window to her right, the wall to her left, the ceiling. Yes. Those are wings, she thought. Wings.

She thought, close, and they folded into themselves — she could see it, they folded down from the ceiling, and in from the sides, like paper fans. She picked up the hand mirror, turned, and tried the experiment once more. Now she could see, but only with difficulty, that these wings came from the bumps, folded into the creases, on either side of her spine. Now she saw that they extended nearly to the floor, past her butt, and folded up and inward at her thought — at her command. Her back, now, with the wings folded in, was huge. It looked like she carried a large organic backpack.

 

How did someone with wings carry things, she wondered? No shoulder straps, no backpacks, no waist packs, for her. What kind of clothes does a winged person wear? Does a winged person go naked all the time?

She sat, suddenly, on the toilet, her wings — automatically, apparently — folding themselves out of the way. Now she was filled with questions. Am I still dying, she wondered? Can I fly? Is this a disease? Was this in me, somewhere, coded in my genes, all along?

Is this what I've been waiting for?

She thought of all the logistical problems she was now confronting. How to leave the house unnoticed. Where to go to — safely as possible — see if these really are wings; if she really can fly. Where can a woman fly, unnoticed, unremarked? Does one start on the ground, run, and lift off? Or does one try to find a high place, a mountain side, a cliff, and jump off? How does one avoid being shot at by some unnerved hunter; colliding with some startled bird?

How does one slide into a car, with a large hump of wings? At this, she looked down at the wings brushing the floor on either side of the toilet, stood up again, thought: close. This time, instead of simply pulling back and out of the way, the wings folded up, somehow; they were entirely on her back now, folded up against, into, her spine. She released them once more — that was how it felt, that she released them — and sat down again, with her wings relaxed around her.

So many questions. So many challenges. So much to discover.

She stood up again, and opened her wings as wide as they would go. She stood, looking at her self in the tall mirror — as much of herself as it would hold. She turned this way, and that.

She thought, these wings need tattoos.

Then they will be beautiful.