by Carmel Bird
He isn’t the only one who’s noticed her change. He sees Yani, watching her over the fire, his eyes on the skin that hides under her hair.
The wings are made of coat-hangers. The upper hook of the two silver wires twisted together in the middle of her spine. She’s found cellophane somewhere, blue, like her hair, and used the waxy red tape she stole, for binding up her boots, to fasten it over the face of the wings. They are strapped to her shoulders with Yani’s old braces. The cellophane crackles when she moves a certain way. They cast a blue shadow on the cracked kitchen window, across the hallway’s rising damp. They are already torn.
The last time he sees her wear them there’s a DJin the warehouse on the far edge of the park. He climbs the scaffolding behind the dancefloor and he can see her on the ground below, drifting in and out of a kaleidoscope of light. She is spinning, the wings falling off her shoulders, folding, unfolding, reflecting the lights. He watches her dissolve into the colours of the crowd. Her eyes are closed, and he wonders for a moment if she’s found some kind of answer.
As she turns, she cranes back her neck and opens her bloodshot eyes and beckons to him, but the crowd swarms in around her again. The lights turn red, turn golden. The music is thumping, the dancers shuddering, hovering together, they roll across the floor of the warehouse like a wave, engulfing everything but the tips of her wings.
