Grounded

by Narrelle M. Harris

  Neither Benedick nor the Chief were called to the stand that day after all. ‘Stay on standby,’ the Crown prosecutor told them. ‘I’ll let you know when to come in again.’

  Benedick decided to walk by Lake Griffin. He’d avoided the place in the last twelve months, but the day was bright and warm, the sky cloudless.

  I survived. I fell and I survived.

  He shied from the memory, but didn’t feel himself falling into rage or fear or grief as he skirted it either.

  I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination. The potential for success and happiness reside in me.

  When his phone rang with Clementine’s number displayed on the screen, he smiled as he thumbed to accept it.

  ‘Clementine. How’s your day?’

  ‘Over. The paint’s drying for a day or two and I’ll have a few things to touch up, but everything’s back on track, more or less.’

  ‘Good to hear it.’

  ‘So. Candy moths. Tomorrow morning?’

  ‘It’s a date,’ he said.

  ‘You sound like you’re actually looking forward to it.’

  ‘You promised me moths worth burrowing under pines for, Torres. Don’t let me down.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Sasaki. I’ll collect you tomorrow at nine, all right?’

  ‘I’ll be waiting.’

  They rang off and Benedick resumed his walk, his step sprightly and his grin broad and filled with anticipation.

  ***

  Next morning, Clementine spent the necessary hour completing her morning exercises, despite how much she detested them. Her back muscles were designed to support and move the wings she’d never grown. They needed to move so that muscle deterioration wouldn’t lead to restricted lung capacity or potential loss of mobility in her upper arms. The scar tissue along her scapula—from the procedures which removed the unformed wing cells that might otherwise have turned cancerous—had to be kept as supple as possible as well.

  Physio and ablutions done, she now stood at her wardrobe and leafed through her selection of shirts for the third time. The blue looked great with her eyes and skin, but was too fine a weave for burrowing around under the pines for a moth hunt. Her usual burrowing gear was sturdy and practical, but stained with years of plant-based mishaps and bore the marks of several repairs, so it made her look like a hobo. She didn’t want to look like a hobo with Benedick Sasaki in attendance.

  She’d known almost immediately who he was, of course. The policeman who had saved the Foreign Minister from assassination and nearly died in doing so. A year ago, and again now with the trial, the newscasts had been plastered with pictures of him as a graduate cadet. He’d been all dark hair and brown-flecked black wings, and those confident dark eyes were such a contrast to that awful video they kept playing: the on-the-scene footage of the assassination attempt. It played in her memory even now, a series of vid-bites:

  The Service escort as the Minister arrived at Parliament.

  The flash of movement from the rooftop of the Kurrajong Plaza Hotel—a half block from the Grain Research and Development building—signifying the firing of the bullet that missed its target.

  Four guards arrowing towards the sniper.

  The compact form of Captain Sasaki pulling his wings in to dive as the second shot was fired, then fanning out his wings to protect Bennelong.

  The sudden crumpling of his wing.

  Bennelong trying to grab the Captain in his arms and hold him up, but his grip faltering as the policeman’s weight pulled them both down.

  Sasaki slipping, his left wing flapping frantically, but the right unable to extend and trailing blood.

  Captain Sasaki falling, legs, arms, and wings flailing, out of shot.

  Horrible. Horrible. But he’d survived both the bullet and the fall. The damaged wing wouldn’t let him fly anymore, but he was alive, the shooter was facing court, and Bennelong had been able to complete the treaty talks. And now Benedick Sasaki was her neighbour, and she was going to make up to him for their rude introduction by showing him the candy moths.

  But not in that hobo-esque work shirt.

  The red was another great shirt for colouring, but the high collar could act like a cone, inviting bugs to tumble down it onto the back of her neck. Though she was very fond of bugs, drooping pines were home to some itchy types of caterpillar and, no, she did not want to be cursing and leaping about like a panicked frog in a sock while she tried to shake it loose.

  Then she spotted the emerald green shirt, which was both flattering and practical. She’d bought it for the colour and fabric, but had cut off the waist ties and stitched up the back slits from hem to shoulder blades. The stitching was neat, done in contrasting gold thread.

  An art studio colleague had suggested that the colour scheme drew too much attention to her lack of wings. Clementine coolly pointed out that the lack of wings was pretty much the first thing people noticed, and that drawing attention to the stitching was the whole idea of the shirt.

  Backslits, like armholes, were naturally standard, but Clementine had never had wings to make use of them. Regular clothes were likely to leave her with a chill in the kidneys. When she was little, she’d often been sick in winter with them, until her parents had found a supplier who made clothes with enclosed backs and reinforced padding to make up for the lack of warming wings.

  From early on, Clementine had never had any interest in pandering to other people’s discomfort with her body.

  Make a statement, her mother had always advised. Never apologise for who you are. Make wingspan with your life.

  Clementine took the shirt off the hanger and held it up against her skin. The green matched well with the tan trousers. The trousers were a bit scuffed. Maybe she should …

  Damnit, I’m going on a bug hunt for art. Benedick couldn’t possibly care about my damned trousers.

  Shirt on, walking boots on and hair brushed, Clementine picked up her work satchel, with its sketchpads and pencils. She dropped her wallet and keypass into a side pocket, and only then did she see the envelope on the floor. No-one had knocked on the door, she was certain.

  Wary, she tore the envelope open. She removed the three-folded sheet of thick paper. Red ink sprawled across it, dense and thick as paint; or blood.

  Wingless freak. Know your place.

  A sharp inhale through the nose. Hold. Two. Three. Exhale to the count of five.

  Clementine slipped the paper back into the envelope. She put the envelope into the satchel.

  Inhale. Two. Three. Exhale. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  Worse things had been said quietly in the street by people who thought her deaf as well as flightless. Worse things had been said with more thoughtless intentions. Meaner, quieter, more dismissive things; words designed to make her into nothing, to render her invisible as air.

  She would take it to the police later, to go with all the other letters. But not now. She would not let the cruelty spoil her day. She had not spent her life fighting for wingspan to let an anonymous damned letter make her small and scared. Nobody was ever going to make her feel helpless.

  Clementine lifted her chin, squared her shoulders and left her flat. She met Benedick at his front door. Benedick was dressed casually too, she noted—dark canvas trousers and a rough-weave burgundy shirt with a black waist tie that emphasised the leanness of his body. He looked good. A bit thin, but fit.

  He also looked brighter than he had on their first meeting; less uncomfortable with his surroundings, and with an appealing keenness to get into the neighbourhood. Clementine was glad she’d decided to ignore that bloody letter.

  ‘I’ve got my camera,’ said Benedick, waggling the instrument. ‘Octavia made me promise to use it. She’s been pushing me to take pictures. Art therapy, she says.’ He shrugged, a flash of discomfort returning. ‘I never was very artistic.’ His feathers rustled with his shrug.

  Clementine dismissed his concern with a wave. ‘Artistic doesn’t matter. I work with
people in rehab hospitals, kids especially, and the main thing is just to try things that you don’t need words for. It’s good to express parts of yourself you maybe haven’t expressed before.’

  ‘Hmm. My therapist says that I’m still me, even if my life’s nothing like it was. I just have to find other ways of being me.’

  Clementine nodded. ‘My therapist when I was a kid was all about finding the part of me that wasn’t all about absence—the not having wings. It had to be about what I had. Art started like that for me. It’s hard when everything around you is geared for flying. Then I decided to make necessity a virtue and started to paint the things that other people couldn’t easily see.’

  ‘Like candy moths; whatever they are.’

  ‘Come and I’ll show you,’ she said, and led the way to the avenue and down to the park by the river.

  The drooping pines grew in a sweeping clump overhanging the water, sprawling for metres in every direction. The scent of the needles rose into the warm air along with rhythmic chirruping from the depths.

  ‘So where are these candy moths?’ asked Benedick. He peered into the draping branches and leaves with interest but no idea. Clementine watched how his brow furrowed as his dark black-flecked-brown eyes (which echoed the elegant colour of his wings) searched the outer branches for fluttering things.

  ‘They live right near the trunk,’ she explained. ‘I’ll check if they’ve emerged from their chrysalis state first. Hold this a minute.’ She gave him her satchel and dropped to her hands and knees to look for a gap close to the ground. Then she squirmed underneath the pines on her belly, using her elbows to propel her into the undergrowth.

  The sound of the world outside the pines dimmed, absorbed by the plant life. She wriggled through the growth, dried leaves crunching under her body. Tiny clumps of flowers grew here in the filtered light that penetrated the branches. Bright little beetles and humming insects darted away from her as she crawled right into the heart of the low-hanging branches. A body-length in, the branches above her lifted and she was able to rise onto hands and knees again. She moved slowly forward, like a ponderous cat, until she could inspect branches that rose from halfway up the trunk. Most of the cocoons hung flaccid and empty, though a few were still plump and silvery-pink. As she watched, one of the cocoons shivered and its tip began to split. Slowly, a moth emerged, a dark, wet-looking pink. It spread its wings and before long they took on the brighter, fuzzier-looking pink-to-orange hue of the candy moth. It sat on a leaf fanning its wings and then it fluttered off.

  Clementine peered into the low branches and smiled. She could see dozens of the pretty moths resting on branches, holding still because of the disturbance she’d made.

  Carefully, Clementine reversed direction until she re-emerged into daylight. She found Benedick looking at her with that furrowed-brow concern that was beginning to strike her as stupidly endearing.

  ‘How far in does that go? I lost sight of your feet and you kept on going.’

  ‘A few metres. It’s not a tunnel to Arcadia.’ She grinned as he laughed, and she resolved to make him laugh again if she could.

  ‘I loved the Lady Arcadia books when I was little,’ he confessed.

  ‘Everyone with a soul loved the Lady Arcadia books,’ asserted Clementine as she took back her satchel. ‘And she’d have loved it under the pines. The moths are mostly out of their chrysalises now. It’ll be lovely. Want to see?’

  Benedick blinked as he processed the question. ‘Under there?’

  ‘Yeah. They don’t come out except at night towards the end of their life cycle, after they’ve laid the next lot of eggs, and they’ve changed colour by then. If you want to see them candy pink, you have to get under there.’

  Benedick frowned and plucked briefly at his shirt front. Clementine thought he was going to get fussy about the garment, and to be fair, the burgundy red of it made his golden colouring very fetching indeed. But then his wings shivered. ‘I won’t fit.’

  ‘Yes you will.’

  Still he hesitated. Clementine placed her hand on his arm and squeezed the muscle reassuringly.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she said gently. ‘I know you’re not used to being down here on the ground all the time, but it’s beautiful, even down in the dark places you never see. The ground can’t swallow you up.’

  ‘It tried to once,’ he said, then clamped his jaw shut.

  Clementine grimaced at her own idiocy. He’d fallen from the sky and broken his wing beyond repair. He’d nearly died. Of course he didn’t see the ground as any kind of friend.

  ‘I won’t let anything hurt you,’ she promised solemnly, without a trace of mockery.

  He swallowed, his gaze still locked on hers. ‘I used to be the one to protect others.’

  ‘Then it must be your turn.’

  Benedick’s surprise at her comment turned into a laugh. ‘Okay. Okay then. But how do I get my wings under there?’

  ‘I’ll help,’ she said. She guided him down to his knees and found the point where she’d entered the pine canopy. ‘Can you see the gap about a metre ahead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ll have more space for your wings there. Up till then you’ll feel the twigs and needles on them, but they can’t hurt you. Keep your wings tucked in tight as you can and you’ll be okay.’

  Benedick lowered himself to his belly and inched forward. He bunched his wings close to his body and struggled further in. He stopped and his wings shuddered before he began to move again.

  ‘Okay there?’

  ‘It feels weird,’ he said, ‘But okay.’

  His right wing twitched and rustled the branches above. It twitched again. ‘Damn …’

  ‘I can help with that one if you like.’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be good. It’s reacting to the twigs on it and I can’t make it stop.’

  ‘You can come out if you’d rather.’

  ‘No, I’m good. Halfway in and all that. Returning were as tedious as go o’er, as the Swan of Avon wrote. Anyway, I want to see these candy moths of yours.’ His voice sounded strained but determined.

  Clementine insinuated herself under the branches to his right side. She placed a hand on the apex of the wing—the joint that had been shattered by the bullet. It shivered under her fingers. Slowly, she smoothed her palm down the closely packed fibres that formed in clusters along thin ridges of keratin, like avian feathers but made of hair.

  Where her palm passed, the shivering eased. She firmly stroked down his wing again, acutely and suddenly aware of the intimacy of what she was doing. The air here was warm and earthy, smelling of fresh pine and mulch, and now of Benedick’s clean skin and faint aftershave, and the scent of a liniment made of mint and witch hazel rising from his lame wing and back muscles.

  ‘I’ll … I’ll just hold you down here, if— if that’s all right. You keep going and it’ll open out in a minute.’

  Benedick, who had held very still while she stroked his wing, nodded and inched forward. Clementine balanced on her hip and ribs and used both hands to keep the wing close against his body, while he kept the left tucked in tightly. He passed her as she pressed the awkward limb to his back, ribs, over his backside and thighs, and then he was through and she could let him go.

  Clementine closed her eyes. She could smell the mintiness of the liniment on her fingers, and Benedick’s masculine scent beneath that. Lovely. And ridiculous that the scent of him should make her heart flutter and her body tingle in nameless anticipation.

  ‘Clementine?’

  She huffed out a breath and crawled up next to him. With the branches higher above them now, his wings could stretch and the right had stopped spasming.

  ‘Up here,’ she said. They moved closer to the trunk of the pine. She pointed out the remaining cocoons and the moths sitting quietly in the shade, in hiding after the noisy human progress into their realm.

  ‘Wait,’ Clementine breathed. ‘They’ll rouse again soon.’

  Sure
enough, after a few minutes the moths began to move. They slowly flapped their vibrant pink-and-orange wings, fuzzy and thick like felt. One by one, and then all at once, they rose and flapped elegantly about the undergrowth, seeking the greenest pine needles or choice spots on the branches to drink sap.

  The moths retreated to the shadows and were still again when Clementine brought out her sketchbook, and Benedick his camera, but soon the moths were fluttering about in the pine-scented, dozy-warm, diffusely lit hollow again. The faint whirr of the occasional photograph and the small motions and sounds of nib on paper caused no appreciable consternation among the prettily coloured lepidopterans.

  One came to rest on Benedick’s index finger, which was poised on the shutter button. Benedick became perfectly still. The little pink creature’s wings moved slowly and its tiny black feelers probed the edge of his finger. It walked down his skin to the camera itself, seeking moisture. Finally, finding no sustenance, it fluttered away into the low branches again.

  Beside him in the hushed green hollow, Clementine’s brush-nibbed pen flowed over the page, capturing the shapes of the moths as they moved. She sensed Benedick looking at her, and smiled at him. His eyes crinkled back at her.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ he breathed.

  Her smile broadened, dimpling her cheeks. A moth settled briefly on her dark fringe then fluttered away.

  Benedick took more photographs, moving with mute grace to adjust the shutter and aperture speeds, while Clementine drew her pictures, until she noticed Benedick’s wings ripple as his skin began to twitch.

  ‘Come on,’ she whispered. ‘We need a stretch. Just go back the way we came.’

  The hollow offered no space to turn, so they crawled backwards. Benedick soon had to stop, wing twitching in earnest at the scrapes on its surface.

  ‘Can you help again?’