Wings

Freak of Nature

Everyone thinks that I am a freak of nature. Hey, maybe they’re right. After all, I do have giant wings growing out of my shoulders. But I always thought that they made me special, not some kind of inhuman animal. At least, I thought that before. Now, I’m not so sure. I used to live with my sister up in the mountains, just us. Both different, both unique. She was older than me, and could take care of me. No one came to bother us, so no one knew about our wings.  

But one day she was flying when she had one of her seizures, seizures that run in the family. She was over a rocky gorge, and fell to her death. When the authorities stopped hearing from us, they came to see what was up. They weren’t prepared for me, a scared teenager who had just lost her only family member- with huge black and white wings. They were horrified, and treated me like I was some kind of dog. They put a sack over my head and shoved me in a vehicle.

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I tried to escape the bindings, but it was impossible. The cloth of the sack scratched at my head and neck. The space they put me in was way too small for my large wings, and in only a couple of minutes I was cramped and uncomfortable. I would try screaming, but the house where Isabella and I lived was in the middle of nowhere, and we hadn’t been driving for very long. There was nothing I could do, so I lay silently. But I wasn’t giving up.

I don’t know how long I had been in the car, because I had fallen asleep eventually, but after a long time I started to hear sounds of life. I screamed at the top of my lungs until my throat was hoarse, but no one stopped the car or anything. Unless the car was soundproof, these must be callous people to be ignoring someone screaming. Even though my throat felt like some was sticking a bread knife down it, I kept shouting till my voice was completely gone.

Shit. Nothing. The space where I was kept was incredibly dark, but I could make out something above me that I pounded on as hard as I can. I wasn’t hoping as much that it would open that someone would hear me. But to my surprise, it popped open and light streamed in through the sack over my face, hurting my eyes so much that I squeezed them shut and put my arm over my face. It took a few minutes for them to get adjusted, and when they finally did someone reached forward and yanked off the bag. A person came into focus. She was surrounded by light so it was hard to see exactly what she looked like, but she seemed tall and thin, with hair above her shoulders. She had an extremely thin bony face and was wearing loose fitting clothes. As I was able to see more and more clearly I was that her small brown eyes looked unsure; in fact her whole face looked a little scared. I only had a faint idea why. Isa had told me that people weren’t used to humans with wings, and that I should never go looking for them. She told me to trust no one but her. So I glared up at the woman. I wasn’t prepared for her reaction. She stepped back in horror and called out to one of her companions.

“Rick!” She shouted quietly. “Please come here.” I heard footsteps and another person came around the side of the vehicle. I was pretty sure if was a van. He was shorter that the woman but just as skinny. He too regarded me like I was a lion that was going to eat their faces off. God. I wasn’t like that. I was just a normal girl.

“What is it, Mary? Is the thing moving?” Jesus Christ. Now I was a thing?

“Fuck off.” Both people stepped backward with a gasp. What was their problem? Rather than watching their freaked out stares, I closed my eyes. After a couple of minutes I heard the trunk slam shut again, and we were moving. Realizing that there was nothing I could do to get away yet, I fell back asleep.

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I was awoken by the van halting with a lurch and the trunk being opened with a creak. Mostly it was just the unbearable light though. Ugh. I really had to get used to that. The man was there now, and he quickly put the horrible itchy sack over my head again. He also tied up my wrists and ankles. Oh dear god. What was this? It felt like one of those horrible unrealistic kidnap movies. He half carried half dragged me out of the trunk. As soon as I was standing upright on the gravel, I struck out with my tied fists, catching him in the nuts. He doubled over in pain and I started to run away. But I had forgotten about the stupid ropes around my ankles. I almost fell over and tripped. God, what I sight that would’ve been…  I managed to catch myself, and knelt down to untie my bindings. I had expected them to come off easily, like in the aforementioned movies, but the knots were really good. I wondered if my captor was a sailor.

“MARY! She’s getting away!” Said the freaky man, and before I could even make a little progress on the knots, she had shoved me, and was holding me against her chest. That might seem kind of gross, but it was in the ‘there is no way you are escaping’ way, not the ‘I am lesbian and want to have sex with you’ way. Ok, now I just made it even weirder….

I kicked and flailed my arms so much that both of them had to hold me as they dragged me toward their destination. When we finally arrived, no thanks to me, I saw that it was a huge building made of glass and shiny metal. I had never seen something like it before, and stopped fighting for a second to stare up in wonder. But a second was enough for them to get me inside the building, and a whole bunch more people to show up and help them kidnap me. It seemed really weird that all these professional people in this professional building were helping them do something illegal. But then again, I didn’t realize that this was just as illegal as capturing a pigeon to test it’s genes. Probably less.

I didn’t have ANY hope against this many people, so I just gave in and let them lead me away. I was planning on escaping when there was less. I don’t think they really knew where they were going to put me. I was assuming that they had never had to put a human (except I don’t think they viewed me as that) in one of their lab cages. They led me up a staircase made out of the same ugly metal as the rest of the place. It was horrible, because all of them kept staring at me like I was an alien, especially at my wings. I tried to keep them as close to my body as possible, but they were still cramped from the long ride here. Occasionally they would spring up and unfurl a little, and all the people dragging me would gasp and step back a little. The first time this happened I tried to hop away, but as you might guess it was kind of a fail. Eventually we came to the area where I guess they kept all of the other ‘lab rats’. It was horrible. It wasn’t dirty, not at all, but that somehow made it worse. Everything was bright white and sterilized, the bars on the cages gleaming in the florescent lights. There were all sorts of animal noises, barks, meows, birdcalls and squeaks. My lovely ‘escorts’ led me to a cage on the far wall. Damn. They were really going to put me in a fucking cage. When I realized this, I started to struggle. I punched blindly, but there were too many of them. They shoved me in the cage and slammed the door shut. The sound rang out creepily in the wide room. The locked it using a huge heavy looking bolt and I shuddered to hear it thump into the floor. I threw myself against the bars, and shuddered when my bare arms touched the cold metal. They all flinched when I rattled the bars, but after a couple of times they stopped. When they were sure I wasn’t going to hurt them, all 15 or 20 of them stood and stared at me in silence. It was really freaky. After a couple of awkward minutes, I couldn’t take it any more.

“Leave me the hell alone.” All of them seemed really surprised by this, but after I glared at them for a few seconds, they filed slowly out, sneaking looks at me from around their shoulders. Finally the last one closed the door and I shook the bars a couple more times before deciding it was useless.  I trudged the couple of steps to the back of the cell and sat down against the wall. The freezing iron raised goose bumps against my skin. I stared at the bright white ceiling for a couple of minutes and then closed my eyes, not falling asleep but just sitting there, empty and dejected. My sister was dead and I was imprisoned in a cage for a reason I didn’t know.

But I wasn’t defeated. And I would never stop trying to get away.

If they were expecting an angel, they were going to be disappointed.