Wings

When my mother dies, she leaves me her wings.

They are tawny, mottled things, three and a half feet long and with a wingspan of a little over seven feet, a bit too big for me. At the place where they connected to her back, little wires and metallic plates gleam, and these I focus on most. They are the only part of the wings not familiar to me, buried as they were in the muscle and sinew of her back. The Mortician has scrubbed them clean of bodily fluids, though I search them thoroughly. No part of my mother remains on the wings, and yet she is heavy on them like a scent.

Of course, her scent to has been scrubbed clean, too.

“You know,” says the mortician, handing them to me in a blue zippered bag, “You could get a good price for those.”

“I know,” I say, and I do. I heard the offers my mother got, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty, higher. And I watched as she shook her head and rejected lawyer after lawyer, even as the numbers they spoke called to mind the houses we could live in and the meals we could eat and the shiney new shoes we could buy. But my mother kept her wings, and we stayed in a series of ramshackle little homes and lived off of canned food and I could have poked pencil-leads through the worn rubber of my souls.

Things stabled out a bit before she died, but even so, she had nothing to leave me but these.

I suppose I should be grateful--there are people who would pay good money to be left a pair of wings in a will, knowing they might die long before the seller. My mother could have kept them her entire life and still been able to eat well and own a winter coat. But she left them for me, the one person who had nothing to offer for them.

Not even gratitude.

They say Sultans used to give white elephants to men they wanted to ruin; the gift couldn’t be turned down or killed and yet was too expensive to keep. I am sure my mother had some romantic notion in her head when she left her wings to me. If I bothered to look through her journals I am sure I would find pages of poetry about legacies and metaphors and dreams and wings. I am sure she never thought about how much it would cost to have them installed, or the time I would need to take off work for the procedure, or that I would need to re-buy half my wardrobe to accommodate them, and that it would take weeks to learn how to keep them folded, let alone how to fly.

I pop the wings into the trunk of my car and try to forget them there while I go about my life. I plan my mothers funeral, a small and cheap affair. I go to and from work, eat underwhelming food, spend some time with my friends and feel guilty when I leave early. I don’t sleep as much as I would like. I sometimes think with guilt of the wings, and I search the internet for buyers, and then I think of the way my mother would stubbornly shake her head at every suit-and-tie man who came to our door, and I close the webpage.

Her dying wish was for me to have them. Maybe she thought with more nostalgia than I did of the times I was small enough for her to carry with ease, and she would bring me to school high above the rooftops and the tiny moving figures that other people became from her vantage point. When I think of those times, I mostly remember the wind whistling sharp and cold, and the too-hard grip of her arm around my stomach. Every time we landed I was so caught up in gratitude for the return of solid ground beneath my feet that I barely felt her kiss my forehead or noticed the awe of other students.

Maybe my mother wanted me to get from them what she did. Maybe flying really was spectacular, freeing. But you cannot eat freedom.

Eventually, a respectful length of time after my mother’s obituary was published in our local newspaper, I receive a letter from a lawyer working on behalf of a businessman. He offers me his condolences, and then eighty-thousand dollars. I balk at the number--but then, most of those poor enough to accept smaller sums have likely already sold. According to the internet, his offer is not far from the going rate.

I meet the lawyer in a stuffy office and he slides me a check. I hand him the bulky wings, still in the blue bag.

“Crazy, how long she held onto ’em,” he says, once he’s inspected them.

I shrug.

“Most folks they did the first experiments on were druggies, you know? Sold the wings the minute they were offered enough for their next fix. Guess your mom got clean?”

“Something like that,” I say. Of course, most of her sobriety was the result of depleted funds, not any genuine desire. She loved the high of flying more than the other kinds, at least. I suppose that was something to be glad of.

“Well, good for her.” I nod and smile.

We shake hands and he gets on the phone with his client, and as he zips the bag up I have one last glimpse of a white-brown feather. For a moment, I find myself thinking back to that feeling of the wind in my face, my mother’s mouth next to my ear as she points to all the familiar buildings below, and we play a game of guessing which is which. Her wingbeats made a comforting sound, and her arms around me are the closest thing to a hug I have received from her.

That night, I deposit the check in my bank account. I don’t feel much richer, though I am, and I am already running through a mental list of bills. Still, I force myself to stop at a nice restaurant, and I pay for a meal and an appetizer and a drink and dessert. The number on the receipt makes me balk, but I have never been so full.