They are all honored for this choice, as much as the soarers and flutterers themselves-for without contrasts, how does one appreciate the different forms that joy can take? (Some are invisible.) And those who follow faiths which forbid the emulation of beasts, or those who simply do not want wings, need not wear them. Adults who refuse to give up their childhood joys wear wings, too, though theirs tend to be more abstractly constructed.
It’s only a few feet, though it feels like the height of the sky.īut this is no awkward dystopia, where all are forced to conform. Those who cannot run instead ride special drones, belted and barred and double-checked for safety, which gently bounce them into the air. Thus adorned, children who can run through the streets do so, leaping off curbs and making whooshing sounds as they pretend to fly. Some few have been carefully glued together from dozens of butterflies’ discarded wings-but only those butterflies that died naturally, of course. This is a city where numberless aspirations can be fulfilled.) Some wings are organza stitched onto school backpacks some are quilted cotton stuffed with dried flowers and clipped to jacket shoulders. (Not all aunties are actually aunties, but in Um-Helat, anyone can earn auntie-hood. At the Day’s dawning, the children of the city come forth, most wearing wings made for them by parents and kind old aunties. This places it within the migratory path of several species of butterfly and hummingbird as they travel north to south and back again. Um-Helat sits at the confluence of three rivers and an ocean. Even the monorail cars trail stylized flamingo feathers from their rooftops, although these are made of featherglass, too, since real flamingos do not fly at the speed of sound.
It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass-made for this day, and flown on no other!-waft and buzz on the wind. It has little to do with birds-a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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