My father began his nighttime story. “Once upon a time, kids, there was a hero named Broken Wing. He was a shapeshifter. And he flew across the skies as a bird, saving every broken thing he saw. The adventurous, too-ambitious cat that fell off a cliff and lay in a heap next to the river, Broken Wing carried him to safety. The snake that was caught underneath a rock, Broken Wing lifted the rock off her. The boy who found his way to the edge of a bridge, no longer wanting life, Broken Wing embraced him. Yet, he did all this with only one wing – one arm, half a self – always in pain.”
“We knooowwwwww daaad…” I whined. “Shhh… just listen. This is new.” He coughed into his fist then continued. “Instead of allowing this weakness to hinder his goals, he found a way to fly through the air. Always drifting, yes, but still going in the right direction: of good, of empathy, and of always helping others, no matter who they were. It was his mission given to him at birth. Broken Wing did not care that the cat he carried to safety would have killed him if not so injured. He did not care that the snake did bite him after he lifted the rock. He cared about others more than he cared about himself. So much so, that when he could not help those suffering (when he was not enough) he scorned himself. Even though he tried to embrace the boy, to keep him from falling, that child pushed out of Broken Wing’s grasp. The boy fell through where the hero thought his own arm should have been. It was incidents like these that made the hero doubt himself, driving him to act better at his mind’s expense.
“So, while Broken Wing has saved many, many more than he has lost, the few who have failed to survive haunt him. They consume him with guilt and self-effacement. He thought he would never fail if he was just a bit better at flying, or shapeshifting. He thought if he just pushed a bit harder, he would stop drifting, and stay level – balanced. But, no matter how hard he tried, he could not improve his ability. And so, the very idea that he was not complete began to corrode his psyche to the point where he blamed his disability for his failures. He blamed the flaw he thought was so bad only because of misguided introspection. “He would not, under any – any –” my father screamed (sadness stained his cheeks, seen from dim light leaking beneath our door and from moonlight streaming through the slit between our fuzzy, furry, soft curtains; I fidgeted, uncomfortable with the weight of repetition: I didn’t want to hear the same story tonight, again, bathed in the same light; so far there was nothing new) “circumstances allow his weakness to hinder his goals; yet no matter what he did, he could not save everyone. His ambition was in space, yet he could only fly to the atmosphere, swiveling at best. His outrageous standards caused his self-perception to plummet; he thought he would never properly fulfill his found purpose. To the world’s dismay, from their flat screens they saw their adored hero begin to crumble; he did everything so-nearly perfect: he smiled, he was as gracious and kind as he could be, he saved thousands, but in his words and actions, they saw him hate himself. His fans sat at home teary-eyed around their tables talking about what could be causing him such suffering. But, they knew not how to fix him, just that the man would never stop trying to better himself for the sake of others. He, under no circumstances, could think goodly of himself, could do anything for himself. Tragically, his suffering became a greater weakness than his missing limb; and though he did so much, he thought he was never enough.
“How strange glory is, that one can search their whole lives for it and never realize it doesn’t exist. For-” He paused, smiled, shook his head (a piece of stray hair dangled, ruggedly), and realized the thought was unfinished, for the better.
“One day, Broken Wing realized that there was something wrong; he became self-aware of his self-imposed impediment. But, he could not stop himself from suffering all alone – he was humble enough to understand that. So, to attempt and find some solace, he went to an old friend: a talking polar bear.”
“Jimmy!” Katie excitedly screamed from the bed a few feet to the left of mine. I smiled and chuckled too, not able to stop the breathless laughter leaking from my tea kettle lips. In between us, my dad put his hands to both our heads and, once more, smiled.
“Yes, Jimmy…” He returned to his upright stance (hands on his hips) before he continued (I could hear the soft and shallow inhalation of his breath, and it made my eyes flutter). “It had been years since our hero had seen his old companion who had fought against the Demons with him,” dad poked us when he said demons, and we giggled. “Broken Wing had expected to be instantly filled with joy upon seeing his friend, yet upon breaching the borders of the polar bear’s domain, he landed not on lush snow piled high, but on a field of brown, dead grass. Soon, Jimmy found Broken Wing, and they began their conversation. Our hero could not talk of his troubles, however, as a great remorse consumed him, causing a seeping guilt to spread and infiltrate every pore in his body. Instead, he tried to ask his friend about where the snow had gone, but the bear only simpered lightly and blinked slowly before looking away. Jimmy knew his time had passed: gray stained his fur and the charcoal in his eyes blazed not with passion, but with a crackling, tranquil calm. It touched Broken Wing’s soul, and the bear’s deep gaze spread stillness to the man. And so Broken Wing sat cross-legged, finally allowing himself to take something (albeit this something was simply advice) from someone else for the first time in his adult life. Jimmy sorrowfully understood what his advice would do to Broken Wing, so when the bear directed the bird to go back to his abandoned parents’ nest – the abode hidden away in the back of society; the place Broken Wing had left and never returned to, as returning forced him to recall the memory he had stored away deep in his soul – lingering in the creases of Jimmy’s ancient eyes rested sagging ivy skin.”
“We finally get to learn about the memory!” Katie interrupted.
“Stop ruining the immersion!” I whined.
“Calm down kids, let me continue.” He paused, contemplatively stared upward, sparkling, and then continued. “There is no better place to cure an ailment than to go back to where it was formed, and Broken Wing’s old friend knew that. Broken Wing himself, didn’t. So, when the man abruptly left his friend, a nostalgic reminder of his past bubbling inside him, he flew for miles and miles until he could fly no more, then walked for days and days until he could walk no more, in an endless loop, until finally, he knew he had to return, despite his a(d)version.
“Within a day, Broken Wing stood outside the abandoned, creaky, old, decaying, plastic, straw home he once fed in. There, he stood, his eyes of a raven’s, surveying the house’s fissured wooden front door and peeling paint. The cobalt moonlight, blue, was cascading, white, through, heavenly, the clouds, a waterfall.
“The door creaked open, and light leaked into the home the man lived in as a chick, and he became reduced to a child once more. He looked up, and through the clouds the silhouette of the moon bled, dripping down from the plaster of the sky to the cement of the earth, forming, on the ground, a crackling portal, out of which emerged an invisible presence. And then a phantom stepped out through old, forgotten doors. Her face was soft and white and her eyes were the color of the sea, yet her hair was fiery – an unfinished, iron net, still molten hot and fluid from the depths of a rocky forge, Hephaestus’s, sizzling from the permanent divide in temperature between itself and the cool air. ‘Hello, sister, you look a ghost.’ Broken Wing’s veracity glew. She only turned. The hero followed, gaze on the swooping of her hair, the pain (still unknown to him why he must face it) too great to bear.
“While the house looked terribly dilapidated on the outside, the inside was even worse: empty, bare of any life. NOTHING–” my father shouted this very loudly, louder than he screamed “any,” and Katie and I jumped, “was left without a crust of char or ash. Cobwebs seemed to be built into the very walls of the house. The dinner table they once ate at lay in two on the ground. Parts of the floor were missing — they revealed dirt, where minuscule bugs crawled. The insides of the walls were seen through holes. And this was just the foyer. With each step closer to the center of their home, the ash grew heavier, char blacker, and his sister farther and farther ahead; until there were no more walls, his sister was gone from sight, and he found himself in an open plane, not of our known world.
“It was different… here. Embers joined ash in an emphatic air (it rained orange and gray in a storm of renewal) that stung Broken Wing's eyes, and tingling bites of heat popped on his skin erratically. The floor, walls, and ceiling were completely black, and when he turned around, his ancient home was nowhere to be seen. Soon, he realized he was not in a structure. He was in a void. The ground he was standing on melted away, and he was floating in complete darkness; it was unnatural for such a being to experience that which God bred us to forget. And so he was rendered immobile, trapped in a great fear. He knew this place. It was the place of his tragedy.
“After he felt physical need start to slip away from him, Broken Wing realized that he could not keep track of time, or the space he had been travelling. He could not sense anything. He was a ball of tender emotion and thought. He did not know how to go on, why this was happening to him, or what it was he was feeling (and for what reason), but he knew that he had to move. His limbs still remained locked in place. All he could do was pray and have hope; otherwise, everything was out of his control. That was when there was a shift in the absolute black, a dim, glowing thing so far away. He was pulled through the nothingness to the light, growing closer and closer, until he saw it fully. Here a body lay – the body of a bird. It was white hot. It was Fire Bird (his sister’s pseudonym).” I almost thought then, to scream out, ‘We know!’ But something within me felt no need to. “Even though his body was paralyzed, the void… well… had other plans. It wrapped its thick tendrils of peril around him and forced his legs to walk to the beacon – a change combatting the invariance of the void. Soon, his soul left his body, and he regained control. For his soul, unbound by the physical, could move in this place. He had transcended the material, but his body had died. He was no longer a man.
“Around the burning skin of the bird was a circle of energy, an absolute white; around the energy’s primordial ring, growing flowers. Not knowing what to do, Broken Wing reached his hand out to touch the bird, only to be met with invisible, sharp, hot pain. Like he stuck his fingers in lava – no, not his fingers – the thought of them. It was then that his sister reappeared, tears staining her evanescing cheeks. She tried to touch him, but her spirit passed through his. They could feel each other’s pain – the pain of no longer having skin, muscle, and bone. She said, ‘Before you save those who were destined to fall, you must learn how to fly.’ At this–”
“Dad! That is sooooo cringy.” My words were met with a glare from both him and my sister. Otherwise, I was ignored. Why then did I interrupt?
“At this, Broken Wing realized all his anguish was for naught, and so he forced himself to change, to escape the negativity of his own mind. He realized more than I will ever comprehend. In that instant, after who knows how long surrounded by black, he grew. His aura transmuted itself into a pair of wings, a lone pair of wings. And so he flew: he flew past the void, past his own green and brown world, past the cage that was a single reality (though many have tried to argue there are multiple realities, reality is, in fact, at most multitudinous), until he joined the very foundation of the universe, and became the very thing – the very glowing thing – he could observe fully.” Father paused, letting us brew in silence, before drumming his hands on his thighs and shuffling his feet.
“I’ll continue with the story tomorrow. Goodnight kids.” Katie and I were both too tired to say anything back to him, as we were already entering the realm of sleep. My eyelids struggled to stay open, but I forced them to widen just long enough for me to see an avalanche of light – in my memory it was so bright it turned everything white for a brief second – stream in from the door, and then the back of my father exit our room. The door closed, and the light once streaming in from under it disappeared – was sucked back to its source like a retreating tide. That was the last time I ever saw him.
Here is where the story becomes difficult to tell. I could be complex about it, or simple. I chose to be simple. I am currently sighing, for the information of whoever is listening to this… Huhhh. Okay… I guess I just have to say this.
The next day, before we awoke, my dad had fallen off a crane, hit with an unexpected aneurism or stroke (the doctor’s guess; his head was too concave for them to make an accurate diagnosis). He was a construction worker who always took the morning by storm, who always worked so, so hard. That night was the last time we ever saw him, as on top of that crane, even though he didn’t want to, he fell. Never to arise again. I was eight when the incident happened, and ever since then, until the world erupted, I was an empty husk, a being removed from the helm of my ship. Looking back now, I wish I had always imagined Broken Wing and his Fire Bird by my side, instead of letting anxiety and depression cling on to me – letting external understandings of the unique problems of my soul stop me from seeing life for its glory. I wish I was a more idealistic child, who realized that Broken Wing was a symbol of following dreams, so I could tell myself that even though my father died, I knew he had been guided. But I only knew who Broken Wing was, I only knew his journey – I never did know what to make of it. However, now, surrounded by the particles of my own destruction, I realize the meaning behind the story my father told Katie and me. There is no light and dark, but an infinity of colors, and the purpose of life is to choose what hue – what shade – guides you.
Follow me on Social Media to hear updates about my writing and other adventures!