Foolish

Barbara Westwood Diehl

 

When Margaret outgrew her baby wings, her mother gave her a pair fashioned from gray pigeon feathers. There was never a shortage of pigeons, and when she inevitably lost a feather here and there, on the swings or sledding down the hill behind the elementary school, it could easily be replaced. And gray blended in. No one noticed a gray feather in the wood chips under a sliding board or in slushy snow. No one noticed gray feathers twined with dry oak leaves in November wind. But some of Margaret’s friends had show-off wings. Bluebird, goldfinch, or cardinal wings. They were easy to spot when the girls tried to hide in the climbing trees. Foolish mothers. She had heard her mother whisper this to another mother over the fence, and it was true. Boys would stop and stare. They would raise their bows and arrows, their slingshots, their rocks. Later, their fists. Wings should be inconspicuous, like a wood chip, a shush of snow under boots, a whisper over the fence. Foolish.

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Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her stories and poems appear in a variety of journals, including Potomac Review (Best of the 50), SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Superstition Review, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Ghost Parachute, among others.