Four Wings

It was Anna's fault. She asked "What would happen if a bird tried to fly away from itself... surely it would need two sets of wings."

Anna is ancient. So the birds in the boneyards heard. They made great haste in growing the second pair.

Their dead sleep broken, engines of feathers shook in the grass. An argument erupted, as it always does whenever the poetics of flight are in question. They talk in coffee shops about the annihilation of the dialectic, how two becomes four... and so on... and so forth. Finally, they decided it was all Anna's doing.

She used to run through feilds waving nothing but a white sheet in her arms. When her arms fell off, the cloth grew bones. No one could claim she was hiding behind it.