There was a girl whose mother was a bird. Her mother’s mother was one, too, and her mother before that. In her mother’s stories, they were all glossy black birds, with feathers as long as your forearm and talons as sharp and wicked as knives.
“A single stroke of their wings could send you tumbling,” her mother explained, tapping the girl’s nose playfully. “We used to play in the starlight all night, and when we got thirsty we would drink from the sweet mountain springs.”
“Did you have flying races?”
“Of course. Your grandma was very competitive, so she always won.”
“How fast could you fly?”
“Faster than the fastest thing you can imagine.”
“Faster than papa’s car on the big road?”
“That’s for sure.”
“Not faster than grandma, though,” said the girl.
The woman laughed, the sound like a string of silver bells, until the girl gazed curiously at her and said, “You don’t look like a bird. Although—”
“I am not a bird anymore.” The woman stood up and sighed, signaling the end of storytime. “What would you like for dinner?”
As the girl watched her mother whistling softly, fluttering around the kitchen, feet barely alighting on the tiles before moving again, she whispered to herself what she had been about to say. “Although, I can still tell you are a bird.”
She loved that about her mother, that she was always dancing and singing. It made the time they spent together special, because her mother never danced when someone else was there, not even her father.
Their meal was quiet, like it always was. The girl sat unmoving and ate dutifully, until her father stood and began collecting the plates, clinking together like glass shards swept by a dusty broom. These days, her mother liked to sit on the porch swing in the evenings. Watching her rock back and forth in the last wisps of daylight, the girl was sure she could see, on her mother’s back, a pair of black-feathered wings.