On a day that felt like summer but was not, we all gathered in our circle for the first time.

Our lives were but streams of pain and loneliness punctuated by brief moments of wonder, and studded throughout by a persistent hope that merely ensured we fell even harder after each disappointment.  Many times I wondered why I had not been an abortion.  I concluded that it must be out of pure vanity or boredom that people chose to procreate.

There were 12 of us today, but by the end of the month there would be only four.  The room was much too drafty; every so often a scream would echo down the halls, followed by the concerned patter of thick-soled nurse’s shoes.  They told us to meet here at the hospital.  We came under the guise of being psychiatric out-patients.  What we were doing was so secret that even the hospital director knew nothing other than our cover story.

It was in late July that Marion, my social worker, came to visit me at my last foster home.  She said I had been chosen for a special program, that I would be compensated for my time, and given a small studio apartment.  Since I was turning 18 and had no plans to go to university or college, she told me I should give it serious thought.  I gave it all of 30 seconds – living alone was a rare luxury from which I had never supped.

My studio apartment was in a post-industrial, post-railway part of town.  Having never visited this place and knowing nothing of its history, you might have been fooled into thinking it was quaint.  It bore the ghost tracks of hobos, criss-crossing the air like ethereal scars.  It held a black shadow where a century ago a man was bludgeoned to death for a few coins.  Its mice and cockroaches had more freedom and were better fed than its people.

Part of my inheritance was the ability to detect lies while never being able to tell one myself.  When I rang the number Marion had given me and spoke to Cassandra for the first time, I knew this was more than a “special program”.  Cassandra was like me, and my mother before me.  She also knew that I knew.  There was no use hiding anything from each other.  Tiny white balls of energy crackled through the phone line.  “I’ll keep this brief, darling.  You know why we reached out to you.  I want to make sure, though, that you are not going to tell anyone.  It sounds stupid, I know, but it’s a very common mistake some of us make, unfortunately.  You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”  She paused for only a second and before I could reply, “Because that can get you into a lot of trouble.  You know people like us fall in love for the first time and we want to tell a boy everything.  But this you must guard with your life even if you think you love a person, even if you think you can trust a person.  Can you do that for me?  For us?”

“Yes.  I have no one to tell anyway,” I replied.  “But you know that.  You know all about me.”

“Good.  A car will pick you up tomorrow at 9am.”  And with that our brief conversation was ended by the crash of the receiver meeting its cradle.

In the old days our spirits took the shape of birds.  Those of us who were morose and old before our time chose cormorants.  Those of us who were playful chose swallows, and those of us who thought ourselves grand chose hawks.  We were a real circle back then.  We were so numerous we circled the world.  We held not hands but each other, in our minds like tiny flames in the dark.

Then the bad ones started to appear.

They realized that they could have more power and, maybe one day, all of the power if they tortured and killed the others.  The circle broke; it was no longer safe.  We went into hiding, terrified of our own kind.

My own mother, once she realized that I was like her, could not resist syphoning my powers.  At first she was totally unaware of what she was doing, but when she realized, it was too late because she’d already had a taste.  And then one day, just in time, a moment of perfect lucidity allowed her to save my life by taking her own.

I met Cassandra the next day.  She was a brittle peroxide blonde with fidgety coral-tipped fingers and not at all how I saw her in my mind.  I was later to learn that she used a masking technique when speaking to people like us.  It was one of many that we would be taught in the circle.

“Do you know why you were chosen?” she asked me, as soon as I took a seat on the sofa. “Yes, because I am broken and cannot fly.”

She looked down at the blotter on her desk then looked back up at me.  “You are very powerful, so many natural gifts.  Things that cannot be taught.  That is why we chose you.”

I let her smile for a few seconds and lean back slightly into her chair, satisfied with herself.  “My powers make me powerless.  I am broken inside and will never be whole.  I have no direction, therefore flight is meaningless.  How then could I refuse your offer?”

The little one with the mousy brown, halfway blonde hair and the eyes too round and too seeking of approval.  Cold as watery blue ice.  She is going to be a problem, I thought that first day we all held hands.  I sectioned off part of my mind so that I was still part of the circle and engaged in the lesson, but also inside of her head trying to find out why she seemed so off.  It wasn’t like back in foster care, when you just knew someone was going to steal from you or try to climb into your bed at midnight.  This was different and somehow worse.

Inside her head it smelt of soap and felt damp.  There were 80s pop songs playing.  It looked clean but maybe a little too clean, like she was going to great lengths to hide something.  I walked through womb-coloured red, no contours or textures, just this colour.  Chlorinated water misted my cheeks.  I tasted the salt of so many fast food dinners eaten alone and felt a chorus of children’s mocking hit my ear drums like hands on a bongo.  I put my arms out to find the edges of things and felt my hands scraping against a cold tiled surface.  Suddenly I saw everything in cinematic quality.  I was at the bottom of an impossibly, comically even, deep pool.  I looked up and a man in a bathrobe stood looking down at me from the edge.  “Good to see you today,” he said, like he’d spent weeks rehearsing simple greetings in a mirror.  He was tall and thin with stooped shoulders and a heavy ball of hair that made his head look oversized and clumsy.  He fumbled with the belt of his bathrobe, finally undoing it and letting the robe fall.  Something that might have been a penis but was not lay limp between his thighs.  “We’ll all be good friends soon.  It’s what she wants.  I have to do what she says and she wanted me to say that to you.  I’m very sick, I would die without her, you know.  Oh, you’re looking at it.  It’s a shame, isn’t it?  I could have been normal, maybe, were it not for this.  Anyway, everybody needs love and we most of all.  We’ll all be good friends soon, you’ll see.”  I pictured a meat cleaver slamming down on a silver cord spun of pure energy.  It took several slams but I finally severed the cord and got out.

By the end of the week we had lost our first two members.  Cassandra didn’t make a big deal out of it.  “The stress is simply too much for a lot of us, you know,” was all she offered to us.  As the circle got smaller the energy I felt in that drafty room became more powerful.  This could only be possible of course if a bad one was part of our group.  It seemed unlikely that they would be able to deceive Cassandra but obviously someone had.

We learned to detect people’s weaknesses.  To see them from a distance as colours and up close as intricate moving parts.  “Some people have weaknesses within weaknesses, like a Matryoshka.  They reveal the decoy weakness to you so that you will trust them.  But they keep their true weakness hidden at their core.  This is how a lot of the bad ones lure us in.  The energy-syphoning is so subtle with the very powerful ones that we often don’t detect it until we are too weak.”  I looked around the circle as Cassandra spoke and saw her staring at me.  Her name was Stevie and she offered me a well-practiced smile while the hard blue pebbles she called eyes stared back as cold and empty as ever.

Around this time I stopped sleeping.  I awoke as many as eight times in the night confused, heart pounding, a metallic taste in my mouth.  The sleep I got in-between came stingily in thin sheets that only left me more exhausted.  I began to age, the delicate skin around my eyes began to sag and crepe.  My still baby fat filled cheeks drooped into a frown.

“Cassandra, you must know what’s happening,” I said in the doorway of the room one morning while she set up the chairs for the circle.

“Of course I know!  You think I sleep or eat or think of anything else?” she snapped back before collapsing onto one of the chairs in tears.

I put my hand on her shoulder.  “I’m not scared, you know.”

Her false eyelashes struggled like drowning spiders in the twin rivers of eyeliner that now streaked her cheeks.  “I know you aren’t, darling”.

I’ve always held myself to a higher standard.  It was the only thing that kept me going in foster care.  That night as I lay across my bed looking at the waxing moon shine though my window, I imagined two blue pebbles, cold as ice.  “Stevie,” I called in my mind.

“Oh I knew you would come to us.  I just knew it!” she said like a desperate child who’s finally been invited to play.

“Stevie, will you renounce your path?  Will you do penance for those you’ve harmed?” I asked.

“Well, I was hoping we’d talk about something fun, but you are kind of boring, aren’t you?  No, I won’t stop.  The hole I’m trying to fill is too big. And you know what it just feels really, really good.”

“Stevie, understand this, I don’t want your power or the power that you stole.  And for this reason I am going to end you with my hands.”

I used one of the methods we learned in the circle to find her apartment.  I imagined a red string leading me through a wood.  The entire time I did this I was simultaneously masking at the rate of one mask per second.  She opened the door in his bathrobe and I slammed the cleaver down as hard as I could until nothing remained but my hate for her as hard and perfect as a diamond.

_____

The blue jay surveyed the forest.  She perched on top of a dead white cedar, sprung from the forest floor like a broken femur.  At first unsure of the wind, finally satisfied, she took flight.

– D. E. La Valle 

Author’s Note: “Things That Must Fly” tells the story of an emotionally damaged young woman with a unique gift that will either destroy her, or offer her some semblance of a future life. Like a Mondrian painting, it is deliberately sparse, a white background punctuated by bright veins of emotionally charged dialogue and observations. She is doing the best she can with an unwanted inheritance whilst trying to navigate a world that was not made for her.