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Painted Wings


Warm vacations are most excellent. Gloves on your fingertips when ice gnaws. Marshmallows roasting on a spit with the wind at your back.  Warm when blankets are torn away, when soup chills. When unicorn blood is poured over soft, syrupy pancakes. Severed with a fork.
Warm remembers and is remembered. Warm gazes into windows not to see her own reflection, but to peer through and beyond until she forgets herself.
               On The Island Calyx, Laurie memorizes warmth. She stuffs warmth into her bundle on a stick over her shoulder, on a stick that digs into her shoulder. Laurie is a flitting thing hovering near a candle flame. Not too close, dearie, but not too far away. She must go about seeking goodness of youth before the decay.
Some of the giants make soup from burnt wings. They melt all those fairy wings. All those soft, subtle moth wings. All those eagle wings, pixie wings, wings that have not yet grown. What is that scent of brown sugar, drifting up from wing soup in a putrid cloud? Some scents move silently through the air. Not this one. Wind and raindrops. Hailstorms and high pitched waves. Screech.
               Giants melt wings because they forget how it feels to be warm. They drink syrup wings drizzled on pancakes, filling their bloated troll stomachs. Laurie had a dream about selling her wings to the giants. Some of her friends sold theirs for various reasons. Starving relatives, college expenses. Cancer, Christmas trees, porcelain dolls, white picket fences. Pitiful reasons, really. If Laurie ever sold her real wings she would just up and buy fake ones.
               So Laurie is one of the lucky folks who avoided sacrifice for the longest time. She was able to fly into warmth, into the deep blue sky and the deep blue sea and the shallow sky and the shallow sea. Laurie sips coffee in the Italian villas, jazz flutists wailing in the background. Laurie glides over waves, barefoot, over so many colors swaddled in bright lights and ships sailing. Sun setting in the cerulean eggplant. Moon rising in the silky fur, cashmere folds of the sky where dusk smells of gumdrops and mothballs. Jupiter whistles, winks, screams Washougal. Ah, the cascading scent of pine needles. . . and wild things. Wild things ache sometimes, comforted on The Island Calyx with a cup of
               Melted wing.
               Laurie aches. Shivers because the remembrance of warmth is no longer. Because she felt sorry for those without wings. Because she melted her wings into paint and painted The Island Calyx and framed it so others would see. Because beauty requires sacrifice. Even giants know that.


                

                

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