Borrowed Wings  

by Jennifer Shelby 

            Darina discovered the wings of a luna moth in a scattered pile of leaf litter. At first she thought they must be the wings of some poor, dismembered fairy. After some research she knew better, but she couldn’t shake the feeling they were connected, somehow, to the Wee Folk.

            That summer Darina found wings everywhere. There were butterfly wings in parking lots, in ditches, and along the streets where she rode her bike; each one a grim memorial to a fragile being embedded in a grill or smeared across a windshield. She tucked them into paperbacks and pedalled them home, safe inside their literary sarcophagi.

            She captured her collection within the sticky pages of an old-fashioned photo album. She labelled them with slips of paper, recording the date, the place she found them, and each wing’s Latin name. She kept the pages on a bookshelf that sat above her bed and showed them to no one. They became Darina’s dark and special secret.

            One night in autumn she awoke to a flurry of half-broken fairies ransacking her bedroom. They wailed as they searched frantically for her collection of wings. Darina calmed the fairies with soft words and a lullaby. She bade them hold still while she worked with a bottle of glue, a sewing needle, and a thread of spider silk. One by one the fairies flitted off into the darkness, whole again on borrowed wings.

END