I love flying.  I always have.  Looking down and feeling simultaneously terrified and safe while watching the clouds drift past like waves is enough to send anyone into a euphoric stupor.  Feeling like you’re on the tide of understanding, the precipice of peace, watching the world beneath you deal with its problems of sense and practicality while you soar on the wings of unexplored destiny.  It was from this cornerstone that I contrived my connection to flying.

     When I was younger, my grandpa and I would make aerial conquests spanning the stretch of the United States.  We’d fly over the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon, the Appalachian Mountains.  Nothing was out of reach from my grandpa’s Cessna 182.  As a child, I would peer through the tiny windows and gape at the cars, no larger than my thumbnail, as they bustled down freeways, rambled through country roads, and pushed through plots of land that had spread open like a quilt.  The sunny sky would begin to fade, and I can distinctly remember the dark, enigmatic atmosphere as it enveloped the plane, the city lights blazing far below.  I can even recall the subtle rumble of thunder as we tore through the sky on those drizzly summer nights. 
     My grandpa was an elusive, independent man.  A World War II veteran, he had acquired a hard edge about him, yet he responded to my blunt, inarticulate questions with a soft, comforting tone.  He had also acquired a habit of responding to my questions with questions of his own.  He never gave a straight answer to anything, and I had recognized his methodology as his way of razzing my childish tendencies.  Being an obstreperous 9-year-old, you can imagine how vexed I became by his indirect teasing.  While my grandpa may have beat around the bush in most conversations we held, there was one question he always answered with a sort of gruff reverence.

     “Grandpa?” I’d start, “When did you know you wanted to be a pilot?”  He’d sit in the c***pit, using one weathered hand to rub his thin, grey moustache, his other hand placed firmly on the controls. 

     “Well, Helen,” he’d begin in his rugged tone, “it was the summer o’ 1943.  I had just returned from my firs’ year o’ college at the University of Rochester, and let me tell you, one year was more than enough fo’ my 18-year-ol’ self.  I had returned home from college in the summer season an’ was tired enough to sleep fo’ the rest o’ the year.  Eight hours into my slumber, I awoke to the sound of turbines roarin’ outside the ol’ family farmhouse.  My mother, your Great-Grandmother Adelia, was hollerin’ for my brother Willy to turn off his d--- biplane engine, as it was wreckin’ her poor peonies.  As luck would have it, my brother was back from aviation school at the Aviation Cadet Training Program in Sunnyvale, California and had stopped by to say hullo and grab a cup of coffee.  As soon as I laid eyes on his new Waco 10 model biplane, I knew that my destiny wasn’t to be settled at some preppy university.  I knew I belonged in the clouds.  So when Willy got on that biplane to fly back to California, you betta’ believe tha’ I sat right there in his passenger seat to begin my trainin’ as a pilot.”

     “Is that where you met Grandma?” I’d ask, already knowing the answer.

     “You betcha kiddo.  Durin’ the following winter o’ 1949, my friend Frank, well, he had a sister named Iris, your Grandma Iris, an’ she’d traveled all the way out to California to visit Frankie.  As soon as I laid my eyes on the woman, I fell in love with her and the rest is, as they say, hist’ry.”  My grandpa would then look at me with his kind, gray eyes and smile.  He’d always tousle my curly hair and continue, “One day, Helen, you’ll figure out yo’ own destiny.  Whether it’s up in the clouds with me o’ down below is fo’ you to figure out.” Then he’d chuckle, reflecting on our conversation and probably recalling memories of Grandma Iris, who had passed several years prior.  As Grandpa would ponder, I would turn to the window to watch the clouds drift past, smiling in the reflection of the c***pit window.

     Grandpa died in the spring of 1993.  He passed peacefully in his sleep on a chilly Saturday morning.  Having shown no signs of illness, he left us with no explanation as to why he passed at such a young age.  He was 72 when he left us.  When he left me.  Grandpa’s death marked the end of my days in the sky.  I was never able to go up in an airplane after he passed, and I haven’t since.  I knew I would never have the chance to share my destiny with Grandpa, the one person in my life who saw me as a soul more than a person.  He would never have the chance to watch me grow, to experience life with me, to see what I would do.  Which is probably for the better.

     Eight years after my grandfather’s passing, I celebrated my seventeenth birthday.  For eight years I had pacified memories of my grandfather, focusing my energy on school and swim team.  I was actually pretty successful too, often making The Augusta Chronicle for my five-year state championship winning streak in backstroke and my consistent 4.3 GPA.  My mom always said that if I kept it up, I could end up at Brown University, her proud alma mater.  All signs were pointed towards my bright future, and I knew that celebrating my seventeenth birthday was just another milestone toward my successes ahead.  So as you can imagine, when I turned seventeen, I wasn’t expecting anything significant to change.  Unfortunately for me, destiny, karma, fate, whatever you want to call it, had decided otherwise. 

     It was a subtle change at first, much like the feeling you get when you come down with a cold.  But it was there.  Something had awoken within me, something that hadn’t surfaced since my days in the Cessna 182.  It started with sleeping habits.  I would awaken in the middle of the night, my unbalanced body dangling over the edge of the staircase.  Other nights I would wake on the roof outside my window, arms and legs sprawled out on the roof tiles, face to the sky.  There was one night in particular where I ended up in a tree a block away from my house.  I had somehow managed to climb 30 feet in the air without waking myself up, and, even more surprisingly, without falling.  Curiously, every time I would awaken, it was always the same: my face would be pivoted upwards, locked toward the sky.

     To pacify my clearly rattled subconscious, I tried to find outlets in which I could control these developing habits.  At 3:00, after school would let out, I would bike to the Maine Aviation Historical Society and fork over $15, spending hours in their ancient, rickety flight simulator.  I would ask the lady at the box office if they gave discounts, but according to her, the discounts only covered children and retired vets.  After indulging in this pattern for about a month, the society banned me, since I would become so engrossed in the simulator, I wouldn’t hear the whining children outside who were waiting to have a go. Those parents were not happy with me, I can tell you that.  I knew at that point that informing my mother of these events and my curious sleeping habits would only worry her; she always ended up with the late shifts at the local urgency care center and would come home either sleep-deprived, drunk, or more often than naught, both. 

     I noticed, unfortunately, that after my trips to the museum came to a close, my sleeping habits drifted back to their unusual state.  Sleep-deprived myself and suffering from a drooping grade point average, it was no surprise that when I was biking home from school on a cool Thursday afternoon, I came to a halt when I passed a dead robin off to the right of the path.  Hopping off my bike, I bent over, gingerly picking up the dead carcass and placing it in my bike basket, not even considering the consequences of bringing a dead bird into the house. When I got home, I closed the door of my room for privacy and switched on my desk lamp, placing the bird in direct view of the light.  After seconds of inspection, I realized that the right wing was broken in two places, the bones as fragile as twigs.  I found an X-Acto knife in one of my drawers and spent the next couple hours carefully dissecting the bird. 

     It wasn’t until I brought home a dead crow a couple weeks later that my mom began to consider having me “see someone.”  Before her afternoon shift, she had gone into my room to look for a pair of scissors, when she discovered the shoebox I had been using to store the dead bird carcasses from the past couple weeks.  I hadn’t thought anything of it, since the more birds I collected, the less frequently I sleepwalked.  My mom didn’t seem to understand when I tried to explain.  She kept interrupting me with her tirade of insults and shouts of, “Why can’t you be more like your father?”  I smelled alcohol on her breath.

     One fall day after the school bell rang, I was getting ready to mount my bike to head home, when my mom pulled up in front.  I squinted quizzically as she hollered, “Put your bike in the back and get in.”  Confused as to why she was skipping her afternoon shift, I shoved my bike in the bed of the Chevy Silverado and slid in.  My mom wouldn’t tell me where we were going, but I knew by her beads of sweat and creased brow that she was intending to take me to a therapist.  She dropped me off outside the counseling center, nearly fourteen miles outside Augusta.  The center consisted of a small apartment in the middle of a dinky strip mall.  My mom handed me a $100 bill, saying, “Give it to the therapist.  I’m gonna run some errands, so I’ll be back at six.”  With the sputtering sound of the engine and a puff of dust, she drove off.

     I stood outside the clinic, gazing up at the Community Counseling Center sign.  The white paint was peeling from the damp wood; the wooden knots had risen like canker sores.  I could tell the place was probably infested with termites or God knows what.  As I started toward the door, I glanced down the row of assorted shops and hardware outlets, my eyes catching sight of an odd little shop at the end of the strip mall.  An old store with steel fixings and a painted sign that read: Aunt Marie’s Special Findings Co.  Intrigued and not at all interested in spending an hour talking about repressed feelings with a complete stranger, I shoved the money in my pocket and ventured towards the shop.

     I pushed open the rusting door, a bell sounding somewhere above me.  Instinctively, I glanced up.  Above me was the largest assortment of mounted animal heads I have ever seen in my entire life.  Moose, geese, and pig heads littered the walls (and I’m fairly certain there were were several human heads somewhere).  Aside from the hundreds of candles littering the store, the place was pitch-black.  It was as if someone shrouded the room with a musty blanket, but fortunately I was able to see due to the sheer number of candles.  The room smelled like cinnamon and formaldehyde, and I covered my nose so as not to inhale too much at once.  As I walked carefully over the ornate rugs, I nearly jumped through my skin as I saw two sapphire eyes gleam at me from behind a curtain in the back.  As I looked more intently, I discovered it was a cat, and exhaled deeply, realizing how strung out my nerves were.

     “You looking for something in particular?”

     I jumped, caught off guard and nervous by the oddity of the shop.  A small, hunched woman stepped into view from who knows where, holding a vial and peering from behind her oversized spectacles.

     “I said, you looking for something in particular?” she repeated again, her jaw veering to the left. 

     “N-no, ma’am, just browsing,” I stammered, twitching nervously and glancing down at my shoes, which I happened to notice, were covered slightly with cat feces. 

     “No need to be nervous sweets,” the lady cackled, “My name is Esma, and you just holler if you find something you like.  I’ll be in the back giving Pepper a cat bath.”  She picked up her scrawny tabby cat and ambled back behind the curtain, leaving me to peruse through the findings of the shop.  As thoughts of leaving the shop began to cross my mind, something within me whispered stay. 

     I wandered around the room, peering at shelves of exotic sculptures, Egyptian plates, and vials labeled with scraggly handwriting.  As I stood on my tip-toes to peer at the findings, I pulled out an iridescent vial labeled “June Bug Wings” and another: “Persephone’s toenails.”  I turned to another shelf, picking up a disgustingly reddish vial that read, “Transmuted Skin.”  As my eyes shifted through the shapes and oddities on the shelves, my attention focused on a curiously alluring emerald green vial in the back.  I picked up the emerald green tube, pulled out the cork, and was about to smell the concoction, when Esma’s voice hollered, “I wouldn’t do that, guppie, last man who took a whiff of that recipe never woke up.”  I quickly put the stop in the tube in placed it back on the shelf.

     As I stepped across the room closer to the curtain, I noticed a normal-looking bottle of baby blue lotion sitting on a shelf amongst more vials and bottles of findings.  “What’s this doing here?” I thought.  I picked up the bottle, which felt surprisingly heavy for its light appearance.  There was no label on it.  I walked over to the curtain.  “Excuse me?” I sputtered.

     “Yes, girl, what is it?”  The old lady appeared from behind the curtain, her apron covered in an array of colorful stains, which, I noticed, was covering her dark shawl and even darker dress.  “Ah, you’ve found the ointment.  I was wondering where I put that stuff, guess my eyes aren’t what they used to be, eh?”

     “What is this stuff?” I asked, holding the bottle to what little light there was left in the shop.

     Esma walked closer, snatching the bottle from my fingers and adjusting her glasses.  “Oh yes,” she murmured.  “This is some powerful stuff, my girl.  It’s special ointment.”

     “Special ointment?  How so?” I asked.

     Esma peered up at me from her large glasses, “Special as in there ain’t none like it in any store I’ve been to, and I’ve been to ‘em all!  Heh!”  Esma chuckled, handing me the bottle and turning back to the curtain.  I laughed nervously, not sure if she was trying to be funny.

     “Ms. Esma?” I stammered, following her.

     “What?  Can’t you see that I’m trying to give this d--- cat a bath?” she snapped, soap foaming over the large metal basin sitting on a stubby wooden table.  The cat’s meows echoed throughout the musty store.

     “What does the ointment do?” I asked loudly, speaking above the horrendous hissing and yowling.

     “It’s a sorta body modification ointment.  I haven’t tried it myself, since I don’t have any issues with how my body looks, but if there’s some imperfection you want fixed or healed, then you rub it on.  That’s all I know.”  As Esma talked, she continued to scrub Pepper rather vigorously.  Somehow, throughout the course of the conversation, his tabby colors had started to turn a rich brown color.  Seconds later, she placed her hands on her hips, leaned back and stated, “There, all done.  My God, that cat is a handful.”  Pepper leaped out of the tub and sat on the table, now a beautiful mahogany color.  “I always thought brown suited him best, don’t you?”

     “I’ll take the ointment,” I said, “How much do you want for it?”

     Esma replied, “Oh hon, you sure that’s the one you want?  You didn’t look around all that much.”

     I glanced at my watch.  “I’m sure.  It’s almost six, my mom will be by any minute to pick me up.”

     The old lady shrugged, drying her hands with a towel lying on the table.  “Alrighty, here, I’ll ring you up at the counter.”  She waved me over to a bar on the other side of the store that was laden with an enormous cash register.  Esma’s head barely made it above the register, but that didn’t seem to faze her.  “That’ll be eight ninety-five, and it’s gonna be final sale, that alright?”

     “That’s fine,” I replied, handing over the hundred-dollar bill.  “This is all I have, but you can keep the change.”

     “Oh sweets, I really couldn’t do that,” she gasped, gazing up at me with her bulging eyes. 
     “No it’s fine!  My mom wanted me to get rid of it anyway,” I said, thinking, “And this way, she won’t question why I didn’t pay the therapist.”

     “Well thank you, dearie, and I hope your ointment works out for you.  Receipt in the bag okay?”

     “That’s fine, thank you,” I replied, Esma handing me my purchase.  As I started to walk out of the dimly lit store, Esma called after me.

     “Hon, wait.  I forgot to warn you of something about that lotion.”

     “Yes?”  I wheeled around, facing the old lady who suddenly seemed a whole lot younger.

     “That ointment is some finicky stuff.  I’ve heard it has a mind of it’s own, so use it sparingly.  I wouldn’t abuse it, because you never know what it might do in return.”  Esma then spun around, walked back to her curtain, and was gone.  I stepped to the door, eager to discover what lay inside the packet.

     The car ride home was more pleasant than I thought it would be.  My mom asked me how the session went and I pulled out some phrases I had learned in my psychology class.  I explained to her how I was repressing feelings from my grandpa’s death and that my subconscious was affecting my sleepwalking habits.  Typical therapy lingo.  My mom seemed to buy it, considering she didn’t ask any more questions the remainder of the ride home. 

     Upon pulling up to the house, I flew out of the car and sped up to my room, shutting the door and thereby closed myself off from the rest of the world.  I tore open the brown paper bag and pulled out the bottle.  There it sat: unlabeled and untainted.  Sensibly, I wanted to test the ointment on something first before I tried it on myself.  I opened my closet and pulled out the bird box.  I discovered that my mother had thrown most of the carcasses out, but there was one left - the robin with the broken wing.  I stretched the robin’s right wing out, and, using a cotton swab, gingerly rubbed the silky blue lotion over the broken bones.  The result was almost instantaneous.  I turned from the bird for a second to gather some more lotion on the swab, and when I turned back, the bird’s wing had straightened out from its previous crumpled shape. 

     Overjoyed, I placed the dead bird back in the shoebox, incredulous at the miracle I had stumbled upon.  Maybe this was what my sleepwalking tendencies had been trying to tell me!  Perhaps the universe had led me to this ointment to help heal my past in preparation for the future.  I could fix my slightly crooked nose, or oh!  I could repair my toe that had broken several years’ prior in a brutal soccer game.  Maybe, and this was a stretch, I could lather some on my chest to help cure my heart that had never healed from Grandpa’s passing.  Too overwhelmed to decide which course of action to take, I decided to wait until the following day to choose what part of my body to test this miracle lotion on.  There was no need to rush things.  After all, I had been waiting for years for something like this to come along.  I placed the baby blue bottle on my nightstand and slid into bed, my destiny as bright as the golden clouds I had seen from my grandpa’s plane when I was a kid.  With that as my last thought, I drifted off to sleep.

     What must have been a couple hours later, I bolted upright to a horrendous sickening feeling spreading from my gut to my back.  It was a hot feeling, a burning sensation slowly creeping over my back and radiating into the cold of night.  I suddenly convulsed as I experienced the most excruciating pain I had felt in my entire life.  Chainsaws dug into my back, twisting and knotting, ripping my bones and making my blood churn.  I grimaced in agony, clutching at my back.  I grasped frantically, almost trying to push the pain back in.  Gasping and thrashing, I fell out of bed, stumbled to my mirror and turned my lamp on.  I turned with my back to the mirror, straining to see what was happening, and almost vomited.  Two huge lumps protruded from my upper back, stretching the skin, which had turned a sickening blue color.  Several veins had burst and blood had begun to stream down my skin.  Tears began to sting my eyes as I fell on my knees, facing the now half-used bottle of baby blue ointment that was dripping down the wooden legs of my nightstand.  I had sleepwalked again.

     Suddenly, with a loud pop, a giant bloody appendage protruded from the upper region of my shoulder blades.  I arched my back in pain and shrieked, my fingers digging into the carpet.  I glanced up through the hot tears and saw a wing.  A freaking wing.  I gasped, wheezing from pain and shock.  “No, no,” I thought, “This isn’t what I wanted, this isn’t-,” before I could finish my thought, the wing must’ve instinctively realized it’s potential, and with a burst, I shot into the wall opposite from my bed.  I hit my head on the closet corner and crumpled to the ground.  My vision blurred as I glanced at my back, now completely soaked with blood.  “I need-a rag-I need to stop-the blood,” I thought, incredulous at the fluttering thing protruding from my backside.  The second bump next to the first wing was beginning to pulse and churn.  I cried out, instinctively pressing the bump down into my back, but the result was twice as painful.  I gritted my teeth and cried in agony as the second wing started to emerge just like the first one.  I lay there, a panting heap in the corner of my room.  Suddenly, I heard footsteps at my door, and thought, “Thank God it’s locked.”

     “Helen?  Honey, open the door.  Helen, what’s going on, are you hurt?  Open the door!  Helen!” my mom sounded more frantic with my lack of a response.  She began shouting and banging, “Helen?  Open the door! Honey!”  I knew I couldn’t stay in the house.  Instinctively, I looked to my open window and knew somehow that if I could get out, everything would be alright.  Using my remaining strength, I gathered myself off the floor and gingerly took a couple steps, only to crumple to the floor again.

     Knowing I could never make it to the window, I dragged my aching body to my closet.  I pushed aside my shoes as my wings vibrated around me like children waiting to take their first steps.  I shut the closet door and sat in complete silence, shutting myself off from the world as I heard my mother break open the bedroom door and scream at the mixture of blood and feathers seeping into the carpet.