cindered feathers

A beautiful girl swan-dives from a balcony, wings strapped to her skin, trailing a wake of feathers.

*

‘I have never belonged anywhere, I felt,’ she whispered, curling into herself. ‘Only while running away to here I felt I truly belonged to myself.’ Please do not take this as a revenge on you, world; you cannot help the cruelty and the cold and the heartlessness. It is not your fault. I am merely running again. She shifts out of her stockings, her feathers rustling a mobile nest around her. To be beautiful is to be tragic, because beauty dies, beauty always dies. There was a time she’d wanted Nabokov to love her forever, to be forever fourteen (to quite deliberately wrap her mouth around hard candy dyed red-and-white, wielding heady power she is not yet to understand). She takes a step into the wind. It is a long way down.

‘Please don’t think that you have pushed me to this. All I wanted was to be beautiful, forever.’ And who is to say she cannot fly?

The buildings are on fire with molten light, sun glinting off of every windowpane. Every rooftop is impassive.

A light push off of tiptoes serves as take-off, and then a never-ending dip—by plummeting, the impromptu ballerina’s chosen not to die. The image is seared into the skyline.

And then the helmeted hang-glider swoops past, grabs her inelegantly around the armpits. The violent red wingspan is a blot on the would-be painting of heartbreak. Her teeth are gritted beneath the murky goggles. She is a reluctant vigilante, lifeguard of the skies. There have been too many would-be romantics trying to smear themselves on the asphalt in the wrong—the clean and polished—part of town. The job pays well, but it is depressing and a touch ridiculous. This girl is ridiculous. Briefly, she wonders if saving lives she has nothing but contempt for is at all damaging.

The swan sobs for her interrupted song.