The Anatomy of Wings Read Online Free PDF

child.”
    My mother warned me: she said take everything Mrs. O'Malley says with a grain of salt. And some afternoons at Mrs. O'Malley's house it did feel like she was stuffing me full of strange, ripe stories.
    Only she never once told me her own.
    And she never once told me ours.
    Instead, on that very last day, when Dad collected us from school long before any bell had rung, we turned into Dardanelles Court. From the car window I saw her standing on her patio.
    That very last day, stumbling from the car we could hear our mother screaming in circles. When we climbed the front stairs it was like walking a gangplank onto a ship in high raging seas. I looked back once at Mrs. O'Malley from across the street before going inside. She didn't say anything. She only nodded at me.
    The cicadas were singing a song.
    It was one-noted, one-worded; the word sounded like “please.”
    They were singing and singing and singing and the whole world was falling down.
    Once Angela had decided to find my voice there was no stopping her. It was all she talked about. She carried the exercise book with her everywhere.
    Just after school started she got six new underarm hairs and a training bra even though she didn't have any breasts. She counted the hairs every morning and also at night. She showed them to me. I didn't have any underarm hairs at all. Angela said her mother told her it was probably because of shock that my puberty had been retarded, and I said shut up.
    We were in Angela's house, which was a house with no doors. There were only bead curtains and bits of tie-dyed material swaying in doorways and Angela's mother had made Angela's bedspread out of leftover red velvet from their redback panel van, which had won the Panel Van Club Van of the Year twice in a row. The panel van had red velvet benches in the back and mirrors on the ceiling. It had two red stripes painted down either side even though a red-back only has one stripe and any arachnologist would know that.
    “So you still had your voice at the lake?” asked Angela.
    “Yes.”
    She wrote:
    still singing at the lake.
    “Did you lose it after you got home?”
    “No.”
    “What happened next?” Angela asked.
    “How would I know?” I said.
    “God,” she said. “Don't you want to sing again? I bet you don't even care if Anthea Long wins the Memorial Talent Quest. I bet you don't even care if you never get pubic hair.”
    “Don't say pubic,” I said.
    “Pew-bic,” said Angela loud and slow.
    I covered my ears.
    I said what if instead of underarm hair at puberty girls got two little wings budding on their backs and all their friends and sisters and mothers and aunts and grandmothers praised the day they appeared.
    And steadily year by year instead of girls getting more hair under their arms and down below and instead of larger breasts their wings would grow.
    They would start off downy and colorless but end up the velvet green of a peacock's tail or budgerigar blue or the crimson of a king parrot. Every girl would be different. And in the afternoon, after school, they would practice flying in their backyards.
    “I think my wings would be very pink,” said Angela.
    My wings would be brown. I knew it in my bones. They would be earth brown. Mountain brown. Riverbed brown. They would be the magnificent wings of a wedge-tailed eagle. When they unfolded, the golden tips would be revealed.
    “I would never have brown wings,” said Angela.
    The
Merit Students Encyclopedia
says that like other animals birds face many hazards in their lifetime and many chicks do not get a chance to grow up. For example, it says, two robins might have eight chicks but only two will survive until springtime. They might get blown away by the wind or drowned in their nests by rain or eaten by a snake or a lizard.
    I used to think that maybe it was the same for humans, that one out of three young in a family might be always going to die. Then I realized that the only other family I knew where one