Radiant

The garden used to smell like lavender, indulgent milkweed and succulent coneflower, good, tilled earth and slick, glittering snail trails warming in the morning sun. The air would hum as erect irises seduced buzzing bees into their silky, nectar-flooded cups. I would lie between azaleas, marbling my feather scales with violet, fuchsia, and immortalizing green.

Back before the Storm, all humans were essentially color-blind, only able to see a reduced spectrum from three little optic cones to our sixteen. We found safety in stillness, concealed by the shifting iridescence of our wings, invisible to the eyes of men, like ghosts. I liked to flatten my body against the graffitied underpass, feeling the rush of wind from hurtling trains overwhelm the filigree of my antennae, standing proud before a thousand windows, and knowing they all saw nothing. Once in a great long while, one of us would make the mistake of flying at night, a winged humanoid silhouetted against the light-polluted sky, back when they called us ‘moth man’.

Now, the garden grows hunks of twisted industrial trash, black stems struggling to survive between the radioactive earth and a smog-filled sky. The acrid air reeks of gluttonous mold, mutated germinations in neon war paint, stripping iron from corroded steel. Everything tastes like rust, and the blanching breeze of dueling cyclones ruins the wind, and leeches all the joy from flight. Grounded, I drag my precious burden over bald fields, where the luscious colors of voluptuous blossoms will never bloom again.

Many of us endured the Storm. Our food was poisoned, but survivable, although the ingested radiation tainted the color of our skin. Once the remaining humans saw what we were and how many of us there were, they took to wearing special glasses to make our markings useless for disguise. Our tactics for remaining unseen became more sophisticated, using tools and structures to shield ourselves from prying eyes, but by now, the humans were seeking us out, hunting us down. Setting traps. And taking trophies.

As our numbers depleted, our little tribe had only three males to twenty-seven females. Successful copulation has a very high mortality rate, but as more and more of us were being picked off, we took a desperate measure to preserve ourselves. I don’t often think of that night, but I vividly recall the next morning, my brothers dead, myself and my sisters waiting, apprehensive, anxious to see who was going to be a mom.

I drag the eggs along in an insulated cooler, packed tightly with the soft wings of their absent mothers. So encumbered, I seek to disguise myself by wearing human clothing, hiding my wings in a long coat, suppressing my antennae beneath a hood, and even wearing those same glasses they all wear. When I look through them, I see my colors bleached, but I glow like a beacon in a world of endless grey. The eggs glow, too, and I tape the lid of the cooler shut.

I trudge over the shredded remnants of my home, carrying all that’s left of my family, disguised as my own enemy, and I have never felt so alone. It is a deadly introspection, wrapped up in my own mind with these shrouds dulling my senses. I am suddenly, violently reminded that things could always get worse.

“Hands up!” Three humans with weapons emerge from the wrecked concrete walls of a blasted building. I hear something behind me, and two humans are approaching from the warped chain link fence, also carrying weapons, trapping me in the middle, unable to run. I could fly if I got my wings free, but only if I abandoned the cooler.

One of the humans walks closer, pushing up his glasses. “You lost out here, friend? Awful lot of loot for someone traveling alone.”

I stay silent. We can say human words, but we never sound human doing it. I move closer to my precious cargo.

The human pointed. “Look, buddy, you’re glowing like a McDonald’s sign. We all know what’s in that case.”

“Neighborly thing would be to share,” another human growled.

Another human took a step forward. “Or lead us to the nest.”

As the radiation spread, most humans were getting sicker. Some of these had growths and tumors distorting their shapes, and it was likely their weaponry was falling into disrepair. Anyone with a valuable skill set had moved into the walled settlements, so these vagabonds were unlikely to be tactical geniuses. Although, they had fooled me once. I stood on top of my cooler and started to unbutton my coat.

One of the humans rushed up from behind, raising his arms to grab hold of me. He stumbled back screaming, gouts of blood gushing from slashed palms, his eyes now fastened to the blade of my knife.

Before the Storm, my kind did not fight. We used the patterns of our camouflage to hide, our swift wings to escape, with no treasure to covet, no keep to defend. Commerce meant nothing to us, nor did jealousy, so we lived in secret with one another and flew away from any threat. But now, the threats were too many, the air too thick, and there was no longer any place to hide. Not with a cooler to protect.

My knife swung wide to catch another human’s blade before it fell, and in another hand, a swinging bale hook kept the others at bay. A human pulled a gun from his belt, but the leader clapped a hand over the barrel, hissing, “We don’t have any more bullets, idiot!”

One of them grabbed the tail of my long coat, and I slashed through the fabric, feeling the wind in my scales. “Wings!” a human breathed. “Holy shit, it’s one of them!”

“Don’t let it get away!” My hook connected, dredging a deep ditch through a human hand, tearing through a cancerous lump with a sickening squish. I turned, knife first, and the steel sang as it crossed another, the blades sliding off each other with the echoing ring of the clash.

Something smacked into my leg, tethers tangling at my ankles, and I lost my footing, falling the short distance from the cooler to the ground. Electric pain lanced up my spine, igniting my skull as one of my wings was yanked backward, crumpled in a human fist. The man dropped his weapon and pulled from his pocket a plastic straw, shoving one end up his nostril and scraping my skin as he sucked in the powder from between my scales. 

Letting go, the man stumbled away from me, leaving me too bruised to fly. I kicked him, then whirled at the thunder of approaching steps, swiping and slashing at the oncoming foe. The big man stepped into my reach and grabbed first one arm, then the other, restraining my attack, but only for a moment. My kind have four arms.

Strangling the man in front of me, I freed my hands from his failing grip. The human who had grabbed me was on his knees, blood pouring from his nose, but the other three were around the cooler, trying to peel back the tape. I sliced through the throat of the man in my hands and let his body fall as I rounded to reclaim my chest.

“It’s wings! Dozens of wings!” a man cried. “We’re gonna be rich!” He looked up, sparkling eyes over a gap-toothed grin, but that smile dissolved in the blood on my face.

The hook arced overhand, thudding into his skull, and I used my foot to pull the spike free. His friend scooped up a fistful of my sisters' wings, pressed against his nose and mouth as he closed his eyes and breathed deep, not even resisting as I stabbed my knife into his eye. The blade stuck in the socket, no matter how I would twist. The last of them pointed the shaking gun at me, pulled the trigger. Clicked.

I took what I wanted and rolled the corpses away from my cooler, pushing down the now useless tape. The eggs were still intact, but my wings would never again dazzle with immaculate symmetry, another thing I didn’t know I loved ‘til it was lost.

The human with the plastic straw was still on his knees, swaying gently back and forth with the swirls and eddies of the toxic breeze. Through my cracked lenses, I could see his skin glowing with light. My light. Wide pupils looked up at me from a vague and slack-jawed face. “You’re so beautiful.”

Deep tracks followed me through the blood-stained sand as I dragged the cooler onward. “No, I’m not."