Kira and the Winged One |Lesbian Story|

5.

"I'm Kira. What's your name?" I asked. There was no answer. The girl made a low noise in her throat and she leaned away from the wall like she was going to be sick. I put my hand over her shoulder to steady her. I felt something there, under her thick matted hair. She retched. I tried not to panic. I reached across her back and felt something beneath her other shoulder as well. It was dark and I couldn't see very well, but I knew that it wasn't her bones. It was like thin arms, folded up. I nearly took my hands back. The girl retched but she wasn't sick. She leaned back against the wall, and I took my hand away.

"Who are you?" I said. The bluejay sang and sang. There was no answer from her. I needed to learn how to make her talk. "I wouldn't tell anybody. You can trust me."

She lifted her hand and looked at it in the beam from the flashlight.

"Call me whatever you want," she said.

"What's on your back?" I said.

"The rest of me," she said.

I tried to slip my hand beneath her shoulders, to part her hair and see what I had felt there.

"No," she squeaked. "No more. Go."

"I'm going," I said, holding my hands up. "I will keep guard of the others from coming near this cave. I will cover it as best as I could and bring you more food, is that alright?"

She licked her berries-smeared lips.

"More food," she said. "And less talk."

"Yes, yes." I nodded and left her, backed away toward the entrance, went out into the moonlight. The bluejay flew away over the trees, squawking. I tiptoed into the camp. Inside the tent, I spent a moment looking at India who was sleeping soundly. She stirred and turned around.

"Hello," she croaked sleepily.

I pulled my blanket over my head and went to sleep. Then I dreamed I was sleeping in twigs and leaves and feathers, just like a nest.

~*~

A week later, Dad bent over with his head in the fridge.

"Where are all the fruits and cheese?" he yelled up the stairs. I stiffened like a blinking board. I had stolen them for my next bird-watching trip. I heard Mom laugh when I got down.

"You should get that fat off first," she said.

"I remember I just bought some expensive gouda and a bag of craisins, too," he said. "Where are they? Kira?"

I kissed the baby and ran outside to catch the bus to school.

That morning, we had biology with Mr. Abramov. He showed us a poster of our ancestors, of the endless shape-changing Homo Sapiens that had led to us today. There were monkeys and apes, the long line of apelike creatures in between, then us. It showed how we began to stand straighter, how we lost most of our hair, how we began to use tools, how we began to cook with fire, how our jaws began to shrink and lose the canines, and how our heads changed shape to hold our enlarged brains. Fayina whispered it was all a bunch of garbage. There was no way that monkeys could turn into men. Her dad was a pastor and a creationist, so we didn't bother to argue with her.

I put my hand up and asked Mr. Abramov if we'd keep on changing shape and he said, "Guess what? Evolution probably doesn't stop there. Maybe we are still evolving every day and forever."

"So you think we're going to grow gangly tall and having big balloon heads in the future?" Mikail asked.

"Who knows? If we don't keep changing, we can't survive," he said.

We had a hands-on activity drawing the skeleton of both ape and man. I remembered what India said about drawing and paying close attention. I looked really closely at the poster. I put my hand up and said, "Why do we have shoulder blades, Mr. Abramov?"

"Oh, nice question." He crinkled his face up. He reached behind his back and felt his shoulder blades and smiled. "So presumably it is an evolutionary bone structure to allow movements. Shoulder blades are also called Scapula, or wing bone."

After class, Mikail hunched his shoulders up and ducked his head down and stuck his chin out. He lurched through the corridor, grunting and running at the girls.

Fayina started screaming.

"Stop it, you pig!" she said. Mikail just laughed.

"I'm not a pig. I'm an apeman!" And he ran like that at her again.

It was a cozy afternoon. Some easy math, then Miss. Klementina reading us another story, this time about Odyssey and his men trapped in the cave with the one-eyed monster Polyphemus. The class nearly fell asleep as she told us how they had escaped by pretending to be a sheep.

In the yard when I did PE with the others, I realized how tired I was with dreaming so much during the night. The coach kept asking what was the matter with me. I was playing lousy.

~*~

Mr. Shirokani came up to me again when I was standing by myself at the edge of the lake.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"Nothing."

"How's the little one doing?"

"Fine."

He kept looking at me. I looked down at the ground.

"You can talk to me, Kira," he said nicely enough. I didn't want to talk to him, but it felt rude if I was closed up all the time.

"Sometimes I think he stops breathing," I said. "Then I look at him and he's fine."

"Your little brother will be fine," he said. "You'll see. Babies so often bring worry with them into the world, but you'll be wrestling with him before you know it."

He patted me on the shoulder. For a moment, I wondered about telling him about the girl in the cave. Then I saw India looking so I shrugged the thought off and turned away.

I took my skeleton drawing with me. I kept looking at it as I was sitting under the same tree.

"What's that?" India asked.

"Picture of what we used to be like long ago," I said.

"Not bad," she said. Then she dropped down beside me and started going on about how she'd seen a monkey in a circus and cried. They'd trained it to make tea but it was nothing funny about it. I could see she was so worked up while she talked.

"There's a girl in the cave," I said. She shut up and looked at me.

"What?"

"Nothing," I said with a shrug.

"Oh," she said again, "and there was the loveliest girl on the trapeze. You could swear she could nearly fly like a bird."