Rina Palumbo
Wingspan
They had told you that, as you flew higher and higher above the earth and closer and closer to the sun, the heat would melt the wax on your wings, and you would plummet into the ocean.
They had lied.
The first feather fell off when you leapt from the rocky cliff and started a long, slow ascent on a rising column of warm air. You watched it slip away as you moved your wings in counterpoint to lesser breezes. Flight was relatively easy once you understood what your body had to do to the fabricated machinery of wood, leather, wax, and feathers. Flight was relatively easy once you found the currents in the air that would lift you and those that would propel you forward.
But winds are precarious. Just as some move you in the direction you want, others push you back; flapping uses energy and strains the tendons and muscles in your arms and upper body. The only release in that tension is gliding; to glide, you must keep rising.
But, as you rise, the air temperature gets colder. Cold temperatures shrink the spaces between the molecules in wood, leather, wax, and feathers. What you feel, beyond aching muscles, is how stiff and tight everything becomes. The leather straps that connect you with the wings contract, becoming less subtle and more challenging to move. So, you must climb higher into the sky, farther from the earth's surface, to hold out your wings.
There is a point when you move in slow circles, climbing higher and feeling the wind lift you and carry you forward. But it is so much colder now, and the wood that felt so soft yet had hard tensile strength becomes more brittle as the moisture still trapped within it evaporates. As it dissipates into the atmosphere, acute fractures begin to erupt, minimal at first, but each a threat to the integrity of your wings, the very objects between you, the sea, and the sun.
So, you stay at that altitude as long as possible. The coastline had disappeared long ago, but you can see the vague outline of the island in the distance. Follow the sun and let the wind carry you.
And, for a while, it was almost exhilarating. Until that is, you need to climb even higher. The wind was biting now, and in that thinner air, your pounding heart and aching lungs made each necessary breath an agony. You feel yourself growing tired, almost sleepy, so high above the earth, between the sea and the sun.
And then, the wax. Wax does not melt at high altitudes. The wax that bound the feathers to the wood, which had been carefully placed on each quill, was allowed to dry and harden and then overlapped in tessellated patterns that repeated from smaller to larger along each wing and from apex to nadir, that binding medium was contracting. The wax was cracking, and as it did so, it separated itself from wood and feathers. You saw more and more feathers loosen and then be pulled away by the currents of air.
You started tumbling in the sky, fighting to follow the sun.
The cold had seeped into the wings as much as it had into blood and bone. You stretched the wings out as far as you could, and, for a little while, the spiral currents found you again, and you circled with them, looking at your shadow on the ocean below.
But the wood, leather, wax, and feathers no longer worked as they should. You felt each tightening, each break, each contraction, and each loss; you felt the pain in your lungs, the muscle ache, and the growing shadow.
Rina Palumbo (she/her) is working on a novel and two nonfiction long-form writing projects alongside short fiction, creative nonfiction, and prose poetry. Her work appears in The Hopkins Review, Ghost Parachute, Milk Candy, Bending Genres, Anti-Heroin Chic, Identity Theory, Stonecoast Review, et al. Read more at her website.
