Happy Birthday
By EE Reagan
The silhouette of a woman shuffled through the dimly lit residential streets past the point where the newer brick row-houses gave way to older single family homes and olde quaint shops. Dolores, the paper woman, paused shortly and scanned the sky. The cool night air and thick clouds portended rain, and she knew she did not have long to deliver the gift. Having been constructed of paper had its advantages, but sometimes the drawbacks outweighed them. Water, fire, wind, and sand, all needed to be avoided with great caution for the woman and her husband. Being caught out in the rain was not an option.
Deloros quickened her pace and traveled another few blocks before stopping under a crookedly hanging eave of the dilapidated saltbox butcher shop that sat across the street from her daughter's house. In her thin but sturdy hands, she clutched a small cage in which she'd placed an origami bird. The rain began to fall. Summoning her courage, Deloros left the safety of the eave and deftly dodged the rain as she made her way across the lane. Having crossed unscathed, she squeezed herself and the cage through the broken mortar at the base of the house.
The room before the paper woman was mostly dark, the only light coming from a flickering flame in an adjacent room whose doorway stood open. The woman wafted into the room, making sure to stay in the shadows, stopping next to a figure asleep on the floor. Deloros gently placed the cage on the floor and examined her beautiful daughter.
Her daughter, born of paper like her mother and father, had grown into a real woman of flesh and blood. So many nights Deloros lay awake agonizing over why her daughter was not like her. What was it that had caused her to change? A once happy and loving house now lay barren, stripped of its fruit. Her daughter, the light of her life, changed forever in what seemed like an instant, never to be what she was before. Standing next to her sleeping daughter now the memories rushed back, an unbridled confluence of sights, sounds, smells and emotions that caused Deloros to gasp and fall to the ground.
The girl awoke to the muffled sobbing of her mother. It was not a thing any normal person would have noticed, but Emily still had a sense for things of the world she had been ripped from. She'd never meant to change so much, she never noticed or felt the change. It wasn't until she looked at her reflection one day that she realized how different she was and how far she'd come from where she started.
"Mother," Emily spoke the word quietly so as not to awake her husband in the next room. Deloros looked up into her daughter's eyes. Those eyes, flesh and blood. So different and yet the same. The room was quiet again as they both sat entranced at the sight of each other.
Finally Deloros spoke smiling, "Happy Birthday," she said and lifted the birdcage to her daughter.
Emily took the gift in her hand. She did not need light to know how meticulously the origami bird had been crafted. It was perfect. Nobody alive had the skill to craft paper the way her parents did.
Deloros, who was painstakingly memorizing every detail in her daughter's reaction to relay the moment to her husband, whispered shakily, "Open it." She and her husband may have crafted the bird, but the final card to play was her daughters.
Emily's face became flush as she nodded. With shaky hands she slowly lifted the latch on the cage and reached inside. She ran her finger along the paper bird’s wing. The paper was thick and pulpy, but its bone white edges were sharp enough to cut the the girl's skin as she carefully withdrew the bird from the cage and placed it in her open palm.
Anticipation filled the tiny room, moist air hung thick and all was quiet but for Emily's shallow breathing. In one incredible instant of indescribable transformation the origami bird became flesh and blood in the palm of Emily's gentle hands. The girl drew the bird up to her lips and blew warm air through its brand new bone-white feathers. A gentle rustle of feathers and a cough, and hot blood began to course throughout the the birds body. Emily could feel the tiny creature’s feint breathing on her skin. She let go of all the pent up anxiety in one long sigh and smiled at her mother who stood transfixed. "Thank you," Emily said as she rose to her feet. The bird was safely nestled in Emily’s warm hands, and the girl began to softly sing to the it as she turned and walked into the lit room.
Deloros had to pull herself out of the spell she was under. She would never get used to seeing her daughter's skill at work. Now as she looked through the open doorway, where the lone flame still flickered, she saw her daughter's shadow silhouetted on the wall of the adjacent room. As Emily moved within the room her shadow seemed to grow smaller as if the woman was again becoming the little girl that Deloros had raised. Within that fleeting profile the paper woman finally saw what she had truly come for, and she wept before the vision of her daughter that she remembered best.
The Bird
By CN Reagan
Altair sat on the floor of his Father’s apartment, cross-legged and shaking, holding his mothers head in his fragile hands; he frantically tried to hold back the blood that was now soaking her beautiful red hair. The six years he had existed in this world of concrete, poverty, and violence, had not prepared him to be responsible for holding his Mother’s memories as they spilled through his fingers and out of her beautiful mind. The warm fluid of her life dripped through his grasp as tears filled his eyes. His Mother, ever comforting, lovingly tried to reassure him between broken breaths, desperately reaffirming to him, the beauty of the world. Through soft explanations of love and peaceful stillness, she spoke of forgiveness, the sunset, and how they would never truly be apart. Altair looked into the contracting irides of his Mother’s eyes as the deep core of her soul trembled and finally spoke no more. He grew angry, shouted for her to stay with him, to wake up, and be stronger; her silence was his only answer. Reluctantly, he laid her head upon his lap and wept, his bloody hands now held his own heavy head, as he fell asleep against her cooling skin. Altair dreamt of the stories his mother had told him, stories of meadows and flowers, of deer and creeks dancing across the soft green world; he imagined sitting in a warm breeze, accepting the gentle suggestions of the world as he sat encompassed, peaceful, part of something perfect. His world thus far had been so counter to these impressions.
Born on the six hundredth and twenty eighth floor of the world’s tallest building, a building called X-Seed, he’d never actually been outside. Alair had never felt the rough essential soil that supported the foundation of his home. His mother had promised to take him outside, to travel all the way to the bottom of X-Seed, to feel the life that emanated from the natural ground; not the hard artificial concrete world he had been born into. As Altair dreamt of the loamy soil beneath his feet, his Mother’s hand in his, her red hair blowing in the warm breeze, he knew, in his waking self, that moment was gone, yet he still had hope for a life outside; he yearned for a life without the steel cage, outside the massive super structure of the X-Seed.
Altair's dreams ended suddenly. Startled, rough hands gripped his shoulders and pulled him away from his pale still mother. The men that surrounded him were dressed in the faded red harnesses of the Pile-1 Gang. The Pile-1 controlled everything and everyone in X-Seed; the gang that had made sport of, and murdered his mother last night. They dragged him into an elevator and pressed the number eight hundred; the top floor of the X-Seed. Altair struggled hopelessly for freedom as they strapped and buckled him into a faded and bloody red climbing harness. Altair was terrified. His mother was gone, and now he travelled up the X-Seed, to the highest point; the point were the outside world met his structured internal existence.
The elevator doors opened, he heard the click of a carabiner, as a rope was secured to the back of his ill fitting harness. He felt a sudden thrust to his back. As he stumbled out of the elevator towards the end of the hall. A man loomed minaciously over Altair and presented a wry smirk. The man opened a door in front of Altair. Sunlight flooded the hall and Altair shielded his eyes from it’s radiance. A forcible nudge drove him forward, and he horrifically stumbled to the edge of the highest door in the X-Seed.
Eight hundred stories up, the vertigo was instant, but so was the warm breeze, it hit him instantly. Although terrified of the men behind him, Altair closed his eyes and felt the atmospheres suggestive natural currents. He slowly embraced the light one eye at a time and astonishingly saw children, hundreds of children, working with hammers and wrenches along the sides of the building; apparently, the X-Seed could not survive without constant maintenance. He slowly inched out of the dark stifled world behind him; the concrete cage of his life. Now, two and half miles above the soil of the Earth that he longed to feel against his palms, he saw, spread before him the expansive green meadows below. Atair looked down the seemingly incalculable distance of the X-Seed’s structure and gasped, his muscles tensed and hesitated.
The Pile-1 Gang laughed horribly behind him and threw him out the door. The worn harness, now secured around his meager frame, pulled tight as it stole the breath from his lungs. He hung for a moment in shock, taking in the vast world around him; never had he thought so many colors could exist. He inhaled the rich outside air. Altair finally extended his feet out against the vertical steel beams of the X-Seed as he righted himself. Several boys, dangling like so many spiders, came to his aid and silently steered him towards a broken solar panel. A boy thrust a wrench into Altair's hand with a stare that expressed urgency and direction. Altair grasped the wrench and knew his purpose. As Altair found the first loose bolt along the edge of the panel in front of him and brought the wrench in around it, he thought of the sense of freedom he felt, the beautiful world around him, the totality of his sudden actuality, and of his mother; Altair wept.