My little sister was born with wings, or at least the beginnings of such. Little nubs on her sharp shoulder blades. When they reached any size, when a little tuft of white feathers blossomed out, Ma always cut them off. I held Morphia down while she clipped them off with the cow dehorners. Morphia cried and carried on, but Ma said it didn’t hurt, no more than snipping off a fingernail did, and if she didn’t cut them off, Morphia would fly away like Pa had.

Fact was, Ma had lost Pa to the winds, and she was bound and determined not to lose Morphia too. “Should’ve never let that bird-man in my bed, Henry,” she told me more times than I could count.

Folks in town said the bird-people had died out more than a hundred years ago—if there ever had been such beings, and they weren’t just made-up things like vampires and werewolves and such. And Preacher Conroy said they were unholy creatures, and if one did show up they’d burn it like they had that strange cow-fish that’d flopped out of the river last year. But they’d never seen Pa sail down out of the sky, his big white wings flapping against the wind, like Ma and I had.

They’d never seen Morphia’s bumps either. Ma kept her hidden away in the cellar, and only let her out in the pitch-black night. Ma told people, any who cared enough to ask, that Morphia was an albino and couldn’t tolerate the sunshine. She looked it, with her milky skin and white, cornsilk hair. But her eyes were a dark wonder—no whites; they were as black as the soot coating the inside of the chimney.

It had been years since Pa had come to see us, way back when Morphia was still in Ma’s swollen belly. I had just turned seven the night he lifted up off the back porch and flew north toward the Red Dirt Mountains. Ma and me had watched him wing out over the flatlands and sail over the Celeste River, growing smaller and smaller till he was no more than a speck against the rust-colored slopes of the mountains. Then nothing.

I had looked up at Ma. “Why can’t we go with him?”

Ma put her arm around my shoulder, and hugged me to her side. “We can’t live up in them mountains, Henry,” she said. “They’re so steep, they’re like walls. Only birds can live in a place like that.”

“I want to be like Pa. I want to be a bird.”

“Well, you’re not, and I’m not. We have to stay on the ground where God put us.”

Pa flew away that morning and we ain’t seen him since.

Almost six years ago. Seventy-one months. Seventy-three full moons—adding in the blue ones—each and every one of them counted off in X’s painted in Ma’s blood on the whitewashed wall of the kitchen. Each reddish-brown smear was a mark of her madness.

And now, as I stirred the pot of plopping cornmeal mush I’d fixed for supper, I watched Ma rummaging in the cabinet, muttering to herself. And when she came up with the butcher knife, I knew that tonight the moon would ride fat and yellow across the sky.

Ma went to her wall of marks and rolled up the sleeve of the baggy calico dress she’d worn night and day for over a week. She drew the blade across her forearm next to last month’s just-healed slash. Blood plop-plopped onto the floor. She made her X, then stepped over to the window and stared out into the dusk.

I put the pot of mush on the table next to the flickering candle, and got a handful of rags out of the cabinet drawer. And as I had seventy-three times before, I took the knife out of her hand and wrapped up her arm, then wiped up the tacky red splotches dotting the wood-plank floor. What would come up, that is; the old, dry wood sucked up the blood like a hungry leech.

“Come on, Ma, it’s time to eat.” I put my arm around her bony shoulders, and eased her gently over to the table and down into a chair. Then I went after my sister.

I took down the lantern that hung on a nail by the back door, lit the wick, then crossed the room and removed the board that braced the cellar door. It swung open with a squeaky breath. A song without words, the notes high and clear and as sweet as thick molasses, skipped up the stairs and spilled out into the kitchen.

“Henry!” It was Ma’s voice. “Henry!”

I turned around.

Ma rocked back and forth in her chair, her eyes big and anxious and wild. “You be careful. Don’t let her get away.”

I didn’t know why she fretted so; Morphia had never so much as stepped foot out of the yard. Didn’t seem to have any interest in it. “I won’t, Ma.”

Holding the lantern high, I went down the steps. Lit only by a small window set high on the wall, it was darker in the small cellar than it was outside in the twilight. Ma wouldn’t let Morphia have a lantern or candle; she was afraid that Morphia might accidentally burn down the house. Fact was, if it had anything to do with Morphia, Ma feared it. But I knew she couldn’t help what she felt; she had too much craziness rattling around in her head.

Morphia sat on the side of her narrow bed, hands folded in her lap, head cocked to one side, eyes closed. Singing. Singing like a bird. That’s about all she did anymore, day and night. Fact was, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard her speak real words. Been more than a year, I thought. She just sang.

I spoke softly, not wanting to startle her: “Suppertime, sis.”

Morphia opened up those black wells. She smiled, a little happy trill escaping her lips, and came up off the bed and danced across the dirt floor to where I stood at the foot of the stairs. She was always more than ready to get out of the cellar.

I gripped her arm as we climbed the steps so she wouldn’t run ahead and upset Ma. “Easy now.” I didn’t want her to fall, either. She’d taken a tumble down the stairs a year or so ago and had broken her arm. It’d been a bad break, a jagged, hollow bone sticking out of her pale skin, and I’d had to set it because Ma wouldn’t take her to the doctor. She didn’t want anyone to get a good look at Morphia. “They’ll burn her, Henry,” she’d said. And I’d known she spoke true.

Now, Morphia made an impatient clucking noise, and moved a step ahead of me. Then two, stretching out my arm. Fact was, though she was only six years old, her legs were longer than mine. Thin, scaly things. But she moved on them as gracefully as the night ptoons that high-stepped through the silty shallows of the Celeste River after dark, stalking the glowing mud worms.

Morphia pulled me through the doorway and into the kitchen. I felt the excitement drain out of her, wither and die and shrivel up like a sun-blistered tomato, when she saw Ma sitting at the table. Ma had that effect on Morphia: took the life right out of her.

“Go on, sit down,” I said, and gave her a little push toward the table.

As Morphia was baby-stepping toward the table, I held up the lantern to blow out the flame, and I saw them poking out against the gray dress covering her back: the start of wings. My stomach turned over.

I sat down at the table, but couldn’t eat. Morphia bent her head and dug right in. She was always hungry.

Ma looked up from her untouched bowl. Her eyes fell on Morphia, and the jitteriness stilled. Her cracked lips turned up in a little smile. Love beamed big and bright on her face, making her look almost normal, almost not crazy.

Morphia slurped her mush.

Ma watched Morphia and I watched Ma, praying that she wouldn’t see, wouldn’t notice...

Ma’s eyes narrowed. She stood up, her chair scraping over the boards. Finally, Morphia looked up, and she must’ve saw what was in Ma’s eyes, because she squeaked and jerked backwards. Her chair toppled over and she spilled onto the floor.

“Get her, Henry,” Ma said.

And though I felt sick to my soul at what was to come, I did as I was told, reached down and grabbed Morphia by the foot as she crawled by.

She kicked and squawked, but I held tight, went down on my knees beside her, and pulled her to me. I gathered her thrashing body in my arms. “I’m sorry, sis,” I said. “But it’s for your own good.” Empty words to someone who’d never heard the Sunday sermons warning of darkness and evil and demons with wings, who’d never seen the fires eating anything and everything the preacher said was unnatural.

“Get her up here,” Ma said.

I struggled to my feet, bringing Morphia with me. She fought me every inch of the way, little high-pitched peeps sprinkled in with her ragged breaths, as I turned her, exposing her back. A strong smell of wet feathers and sweat clogged my throat. And when Ma ripped away Morphia’s dress, I saw why: a fine white down covered her back.

Ma sucked in a hissing breath of air. “Oh, dear Lord, it’s spreading.” She peeled the gray material down over Morphia’s shoulders, then her arms. More white down.

And I remembered...

Pa’s arms reaching down for me, arms sprouting the same pale fuzz.

“Hold tight, Henry.” Ma’s voice pulled me back to the stuffy kitchen, back to the big pliers-looking thing in her hands, back to my sister wriggling in my arms.

I hugged Morphia tighter, her scrawny arms that were trapped between us digging into my ribs. Ma pulled apart the handles of the dehorners. The steel blades separated.

I closed my eyes.

Morphia writhed against me, her shrill chirps ringing in my ears. Then every muscle in her body right down to her toes went board-straight. She shrieked. And there was another voice, this one no more human than hers, joining hers, howling like a snake-bit dog.

“Hush up, Henry,” Ma said.

And it was me. I was the thing crying out its pain.

Morphia’s screech lifted higher. She jerked and twitched. Then her body relaxed, loosened into a bag of sharp elbows and bony ribs.

“It’s over,” I whispered against her hair. But she didn’t hear me; she’d passed out.

I felt a warm wetness spreading over my arms, opened my eyes, and looked down Morphia’s back. Gouts of blood pumped from the two places where the start of wings had been. Before when Ma had clipped them off, there’d been only trickles; this was a flood.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” Ma wailed. She dropped the dehorners, tore at her hair. “Oh my God, I’ve killed her!”

Blood ran in a thick river down Morphia’s back. I was scared. I didn’t know what to do. And Ma, she fell down on her knees and put her head on the floor, and started banging her forehead against the boards.

Blood was beginning to form a pool at my feet. “Ma.” And it kept on coming, spreading outward. “Ma!”

She didn’t look up. She’d gone away.

I swooped up Morphia and carried her over to Ma’s bed. I eased her down upon the mattress and turned her onto her side. Blood continued to flow. So much of it. The thin sheet beneath her shoulders turned sloppy red. I had to stop it. But how? How did you—

Cobwebs. I remembered now. Ma had used cobwebs on my foot that time I’d sliced it open on a piece of glass.

I grabbed the broom propped in the corner beside the wood-box and raced around the room, sweeping the ceiling, twirling the gauzy webs around the cornhusks. Then I stripped off the sticky gray stuff and packed it against the bony knobs on Morphia’s shoulder blades. And I noticed...the bumps were different. Fact was, they weren’t soft like ear-bones anymore; they were hard like regular bones. And a brownish-red circle of marrow dotted the center of each. Morphia’s wings had set.

The cobwebs did the trick, stopped the bleeding. But Morphia had lost so much blood that she was as weak as a newborn kitten. She slept for most of a week, only rousing now and then to eat a little. I stayed close by, even slept on the floor beside her bed, afraid if I turned my back she might slip away—and not like Pa had to the sky, but to the land where the dead walked.

And while I watched after Morphia, Ma wandered the flatlands, crying and wailing and cursing Pa.

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