By Jessy Wallach, TIWP Student

Sabrina’s mother and all her aunts and uncles agree that her grandmother could fly. They swear to it, not with the mischievous glance they give each other when talking about the Switch Witch or Santa Claus, but with solemn sincerity. It’s true, she could fly.

When Sabrina stares at pictures of the woman, with her hard face and dark eyes, she searches the shadows in the back of the frame for an odd shift in the light or a stray feather, any hint of a wing. She imagines her grandmother turning and twisting in the sky on brown, feathered wings, eagle-like and free. Things were different back in those days, her mother tells her. Back then their people could still fly.

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Eleven-year-old Sabrina looks in the mirror for her own wings. She contorts her body so she can see the reflection of her back. When this doesn’t work, she runs her fingers over her shoulder blades, feeling for some sort of protruding bump or bone—any hint of her dark-eyed, eagle-winged grandmother.

Always, her back is smooth, and she shrugs her shirt back on and stamps down the voices inside her that urge her to look again.

Always, the next time she’s in the house alone, she checks again.

Her grandmother lived in a time before buildings were so big–too big for women with bird wings who longed to feel their feet lift off from these gum-spotted sidewalks, who longed to hear their wings beating behind them and know they beat to no one’s command but their own. Who longed to soar so high above the world that they reached somewhere no one had ever been before and feel cool, untouched air in their lungs, and see the stars spread out before them. Sabrina’s grandmother had lived in a time when you could always see the stars.

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In high school, Sabrina uses a wet rag to fix wings to her wrist. Hold it there and count for thirty seconds. In class, she wraps her hand around her wrists and feels the wings beat to the rhythm of her pulse, until, much too soon, the temporary tattoo peels off, and her wings are gone. 

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When she’s older, Sabrina gets wings tattooed on her back, from her still smooth shoulder blades down to her hips. No, not angel wings, she tells the tattoo artist who sloppily tries to flirt with her; my grandmother’s wings.

She wants to design a better world, and so she goes to college to study engineering. But everyone else is there to make buildings taller. Only she can hear the stars whispering to be left alone.

She switches majors first to math and then to English. At one lecture, she meets a girl who asks her about the wings on her back and who doesn’t laugh when Sabrina rambles on about grandmothers and stars’ pleas and crowds that trample out every sound but their own. 

The girl drives her out of the city to a place where they can see the whole night sky. Here, it seems that time does not rush by like it does in the rest of the world.

The girl traces the wings on Sabrina’s back and smiles. She lifts her shirt and shows Sabrina wings of her own. That night is the first time Sabrina truly feels as if she is flying. 

After college, Sabrina struggles to find a job that doesn’t feel suffocating. She shares a cramped apartment with the girl. Together they meet other people who are trying to run back through time and feel too solid with both feet on the ground. They seek each other out in quiet parks or empty museum gardens or dark tattoo parlors. But none of them are happy in the city so full of noise and smoke and dead birds trampled on street corners. 

When the girl leaves, Sabrina cries in bed, clutching her grandmother’s picture to her chest. She wishes more than anything to fly out of her body and away from her now sparse apartment. In fact, she wants to fly away from the entire city and from the girl with the matching wings who taught her how to see the stars, until there is only her and the sky and the cool wind in her ears.

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Six months later, she leaves the city for good and gets a degree in conservation at a small-town community college. After graduation, she finds a job as a park ranger and moves again. Surrounded by trees and wildlife, she feels freer than she has in years. She’s especially good at identifying the birds who live in the park, often using no more than a fleeting call or a stray feather. When she sees them flying high above the forest, she thinks of her grandmother. She wonders if she too once flew here.

One day, her phone refuses to turn on. Instead of driving two towns over to get it fixed, Sabrina throws it in the trash. It feels good. 

The next week, she leaves her computer and speaker out on the curb. 

In her free time, she instead explores the park off-trail until she stumbles across a small abandoned cabin. Its roof is half caved-in and the walls are covered in spiderwebs, dirt, and dust. She guesses it is older than the park it sits in.

Over the course of several weeks, Sabrina cleans and repairs the cabin. She rebuilds the roof and expels a colony of mice nesting in the chimney. At last, she packs up everything she might need and moves in. She sets her great-grandmother’s picture on the empty mantle and falls asleep to the singing of crickets and soft hooting of owls. 

From then on, Sabrina does not show up to work. She spends her days improving the cabin or hiking or fishing in the nearby lake. Each night, she sits on her porch and watches the sun disappear behind the distant purple mountains, unsure how she ever sacrificed this for a night-time routine of sleepless hours scrolling through her phone. Now, nature alone decides when she wakes and when she goes to sleep.

Of course, there are things she misses. Her friends, for one. Her parents, that final episode of her favorite television show that she never got to see, washing machines, and warm showers. She could hike back into civilization and reclaim those things any time she wished to. She never does. She has everything she’s been missing right here. One day, Sabrina is sitting on the roof of the cabin, fixing the cracks before the next rain falls, when she sees two golden eagles twisting and soaring above the trees, the only two creatures in the endless cornflower sky. Their majestic wings beat to the same silent rhythm she has felt within her for as long as she can remember. She feels a peace inside her that she has never felt before, as if she’s found something for which she’s spent her whole life searching. As she watches the eagles glide and swoop above her she feels, if only for a second, that she too has wings that are finally unfurling and stretching up towards the endless blue sky. Sabrina thinks of her grandmother, thinks: finally, I am home.