The young man danced atop the rusted, wingless husk to a song of his own making accompanied only by the beatings of his heart.
His feet clanged and clattered against the metal, the roof and frame creaking our a warning beneath his weight. But he was high above and far away lost in dreams and memories and did not listen.
He had come here many times as a boy in the days of grass and wings. Before scavengers had wrenched and torn everything of use or value from the metal carcass.
Before the Blight had descended from the cloud-choked skies and taken everything from the fields but dirt and rock.
There had been stories then–tall tales of man-made birds that soared through clear skies and of gleaming cities forged from tall cut-glass–given truth by the old men and women who claimed to have seen such things with their own eyes.
And by the wreck and ruin of the aeroplane.
***
The dance ended slowly until only stillness and sadness remained. And the cold, bitting wind as it howled across the plain.
This was not a place for song or music or memory.
The boy had dreamed of wings once, of taking flight in that old, rusted metal bird and soaring far, far away. The man dreamt only of a fully belly and a fire hot enough to warm him down to the bone.
He had been far beyond the horizon to places where the sea met the shore and where a thousand shards of glass and steel scrapped the sky in vain. Their jagged, shattered edges as empty as his childish dreams of flight.
He knew the truth at last. Wings would never save him.
There was nowhere else to fly.
Antonio Urias 
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