The wings first appeared when I was ten.

My dad was always interested in birds and planes and pretty much anything that could fly. He would say that some day he would finish the work Leonardo Da Vinci had begun, and unlock the secrets of human flight. He was always telling me stories about flying. His favorite was the story of the Wright Brothers, and I thought they were awesome too, since apparently they were my 7-great-granduncles or something. (The wright brothers themselves didn't have any children) Eventually, the stories turned into lessons, how the fact that a bird's bones were hollow to allow it to fly, how different birds had different flight patterns. He'd give me lectures on air currents and friction and balance. He would show me diagrams on the muscles a bird had.

Of course he taught my sister, Cardinal, loads of stuff too. But with her he mostly focused on Identifying different kinds of birds, their abilities and behaviors, and their different calls. I thought it was all pretty useless.    

And on my tenth birthday, he disappeared.

He had gone on a plane ride to Kansas to celebrate the grand opening of a plane museum. He had apologized for not being home to celebrate my birthday. He had promised to spend a day with me Saturday, when he got back. I remember sitting at the window all of Saturday with the toy plane I got from him, waiting for him to come home.

The whole thing was on national news, with him being a famous scientist and all. The FBI searched for him for a year. Our money slowly ran dry. Eventually we moved out of our pent house and into a musty apartment on the seventh floor of nowhere. My bedroom could barely fit a bed in it. My mom got a 24-hour shift at the Dynacaries Medical Center.

It was ten days after dad had been declared missing. Me and my best friend were playing king of the hill on the monkey bars in the park. He had pushed me off from pretty up high, and I freaked out.

And the next thing I knew, I was lying in a pile of sharp brown feathers 10 feet away from where I should have fallen.

"Whoah, Sweet! Where did you get those?" Dylan had called, running over to me.

I stood up, and the feathers seemed to follow me. At first I thought a few were just stuck to my back from laying on them. Then I looked over my shoulder.

It looked like I had turned into some sort of angel. A pair of wings were connected to my shoulder blades. Feeling was slowly spreading throughout the wings as I became more and more aware of them. They had ripped up my shirt when they appeared. Mom wasn't going to be happy about that.

"I want to try them!" Dylan yanked on one of the wings.

"Ouch!" I yelped, full sense jolting into the wings. It felt like Dylan was ripping an arm off.

"Robin, Are those- are those real?" Dylan asked, stepping away like I was a purple polka-dotted platypus or something. I actually felt a lot like one.

I looked over my shoulder again, but they were still there. The wings were beutifull, each feather an array of different shaded browns tipped with dark red. The details were amazing, so unfortunatly amazing that I was certain they were real. I stretched them out to full size, the wing muscle diagram I had to memorize before flashing in my mind as I did. The wings extended a little farther than arm's length.

"They're real all right" I finally answered. My little ten-year-old mind had no idea what was going on.

Dylan gave an impressed whistle. "do you think they work?"

I flapped my wings. They moved a good amount of air, but besides that, nothing happened. Of course, most birds didn't just flap their wings and start flying. They leaped off a raised perch, or took off like a plane.

Dylan looked a bit dissapointed. "do they ever come off?"

"I hope so" I answered nervously. I couldn't walk around with a bunch of feathers sticking out of my back. My mom was scared of all of the powered people causing caos in Dynacaries. If she found out I was like them...

"I don't want you" I told the wings silently. "Go away"

One feather fell off from my wings. Before it could touch the ground it morphed into a bird and flitted away. The rest of the feathers followed, The birds flying away as if they didn't know they came from my back. my little sister could have recognised what birds they were, but I hoped she never found out about them. She would be scared of me.

"You are officially the weirdest person I know" Dylan announced.

I didn't know how to reply. I didn't know what to do. I noticed I was shaking.

"Hey man, Weirdest is good" Dylan said, trying to comfort me. "You could become one of those super heroes and-"

"No!" I blurted, stepping away. Of course every litte boy wants to be a super hero when he grows up. But those are just dreams. They don't really understand what it's like to have power. Having power means having responsibility. Having responsibility means following rules.

And if someone with power and responsibilty doesn't follow the rules, than bad things happen.

I could feel the pressure pressing on me even then, closing around me like a cage.

"I never want to see those wings again. Ever"