The kite string tugs an insistent beat against your palm, biting into the side of your index finger almost hard enough to draw blood. You smile as the kite's brisk dance begs and entices you to leap up from your seat and run, run with it!
The green and orange streamers of the paper dragon tangle and twine as sudden gusts send it in crazy somersaults, then drop it in a sagging plummet that brings it so far down you can see the jewel-yellow eyes clearly before it shoots skywards again with a force that hurts your wrist. You fight a brief tug-of-war to get the kite back under control, as a burst of wind through the trees at the edge of the park sends new spring leaves and dust flying. You glance back anxiously, but have to shut your eyes quickly against the teasing blast.
"Easy," you whisper coaxingly, adjusting your grip. Much harder, and you'll have to go in. The string seems to bite no matter which way you hold it. You could tie it to the arm of your chair, of course, but that would be cheating. It wouldn't be flying.
As if in answer to your urging, the wind sags back to a less exuberant, but still uncaged surge. The roaring in your ears subsides, so that you now can hear the laughter and banter of the other students taking advantage of the open lawn for a particularly wild Frisbee game on this gusty April afternoon. A sulfur-colored pale butterfly flickers past you along the edge of the sidewalk, wobbling on the precarious breeze.
You realize a moment too late that the last shout--for once--was directed your way, as a blue flat plastic disc whirls past your ear and almost clips the string. You turn to glare at the grinning young man jogging towards you in cutoffs and no shirt. He doesn't meet your eyes as he drops an offhanded, "Sorry."
"I'll get it," you say, just as he reaches you, and you lean down to retrieve the Frisbee and fling it at the young woman next in the game. The throw goes wide, but you have to smile as he spins, startled, to follow the course of it with his eyes, and the kite string does a subtle dip and flips off the baseball cap jammed backwards on his head. "Sorry," you echo apologetically, and give your kite a little tug in silent salute.
That's your trouble, Laura, you hear your mother's voice echoing in your head. You never give them a chance. It's not them, it's you. You'd have lots of friends if you didn't keep running away. Yeah, Mom. Running away. Good one.
You don't run. You fly.
The wind's direction has shifted slightly, so you loop the string a few times under your arm-rest and work on turning your seat to a better angle. The dragon jiggles and dances and almost falls while you're adjusting the wheelchair, but you catch him with a quick downward swoop on the string and a sharp strong pull that makes him rear up like a bucking horse before settling back to plow lazy long horizontal arcs back and forth across the sky.
"Gotcha," you growl at the distant rippling speck of paper, hanger wire, streamers. "Behave."
You tease him into a few stunts, daring him low to skim the ground before pulling him up at the last second. The pyramid kites are easier to make, but unstable forms have the most freedom, the most power. And catch the most attention. Not as much as in grade school, of course, but there's still some kids who come to gawk at the girl who can fly but not walk.
The Frisbee game has broken up now; they can't handle your wind. The young woman strides away swinging hands with Mr. Cutoffs, dislodging his hat playfully with the flick of a thumb. You watch with old envy as he stoops to pick it up, snaps the back of her bikini top, and pelts off laughing. Envy, bone-ache: they're both the same tired cold feeling lodged chiefly behind the left knee, but really everywhere, if you stop remembering not to think about it.
Your thoughts are cut short abruptly by a rippling, crackling sound followed by a sudden <>smack<, the familiar and dreaded report of a kite slamming into earth. The kite string goes limp in your hands as you give another yank, not enough, and too late. The dragon wraps around a bench two hundred yards away and starts flapping furiously against the lawn.
You swear quietly and succinctly. You'll never get him aloft again on your own, and it's just your luck that the only people left in the park are a few joggers who all conveniently happen to be on the far side of the grassy park. One of them swerves behind the bench where your kite's been marooned to avoid tripping over the string. She doesn't look at him as she flies past. A few stubborn pulls only draw him tighter; he's as trapped as you are.
Knowing he'll probably be too tangled to be salvageable by the time you reach him, you doggedly start reeling in the slack, wheeling a few feet closer on the nearest paved path, and reeling a bit more. The wind is cold on the back of your neck-- still not properly spring.
A body suddenly interposes itself between you and your goal, stepping not from behind or from either side, but rather, to all appearances, springing up directly out of the path in front of you. Or perhaps down from above. You're not sure; you had just glanced down to unhitch a loose loop of cord that had snagged itself around your knuckles. You bristle at the young woman's unabashed stare for about five seconds. Then you start staring right back.
She's wearing only a pale yellow caftan, but her slender limbs, bared, lack almost all color, as do her thin lips and stringy white hair. Her eyes are huge and round and a pearly gray. Her nose is narrow, her face perfectly oval and rather plain-featured, her collarbones framing the neck of her loose garment like the upper supports of an artist's easel. But none of these things matter. What matters is the chalky lemon-yellow double pair of wings spread behind her like stiff sails, rowing slowly and bending a little with each gust of wind. She puts a finger to her mouth and licks it, watching you warily.
"Excuse me," you say, with pardonable sharpness.
She says nothing. You glance around, and notice a decided lack of joggers, rollerbladers, or any other witnesses to this improbable moment. Just the butterfly girl, the late afternoon sun slanting across the park, and the fickle wind.
You notice a flower behind her ear. Somehow that strikes you as utterly hilarious, a butterfly wearing a flower, and you begin to tremble with laughter in spite of yourself. Noticing your scrutiny, she plucks it from its place with light fingertips and licks out the cup of the blossom with a thin yellow tongue. Then she offers it to you gravely. The honey is sweet with drowsy summer afternoons spent in fields and on paths that are hard, hard going, while frail flecks of clouds scurry by overhead, and blackbirds shoot past in sudden dark arcs with red and yellow wing-feather flashes punctuating their loud "chack-chack".
Her fingers brush your forehead like feathertips before she retrieves the flower and sets it behind her other ear. Finally, she breaks the silence, her voice delicate and faint to suit her figure.
"Why are you sitting there? It's getting cold. Time to go in." She takes your hand, nearly pulling you out of your chair. For someone who's almost all air, she's damned strong. Like kites.
Twisting your hand out of her thin long fingers, you mutter, "Can't walk."
She stops and looks at you quizzically with those opalescent eyes, fluttering slightly. "Walk?"
You cough.
"My wings are broken."
She stares at you again, and then her gaze stirs and darts towards your back, hovering there hesitantly. Her forehead puzzles in confusion as if unsure which parts are you and which are chair. Profound pity twists her features into a well-meaning, delicate smile. "Oh." she says gently. "Oh, I'm so sorry."
Wonderful. Even butterfly people do that.
"Look," you say, suddenly less intrigued by this daydream or hallucination or whatever the hell it is. "Could you just go untangle my kite?" You point down the length of the gossamer thread tethered to the dragon thrashing against the bench some twenty yards distant.
She follows your imperious gesture. "Oh!" Her thin reedy brows rise in consternation. "You broke them! It's no good now, no good at all. Stupid pupa! Why were you out in such a tumbling wind?"
"That's the best time," you retort. "Why were you out here?"
She flutters abashedly and steps to one side, hands fumbling, and doesn't reply.
Keenly aware that she could be away in a moment, you continue, "I made the wings, since I have none."
That catches her. She turns skittishly to look back at the tattered kite still gamely contending with its anchor.
After a moment's silence, you add, "But now they're stuck."
The woman shivers violently as the whistling wind sends the remaining nylon cord swinging like a long jump-rope. "Spider," she whispers. "Spider."
The kite's tail and streamers begin to wrap not just around one another, but around the string itself, and you have to let out some slack so the kite won't shred itself on the taut line. "No spider," you say tiredly. "Come on. It's going to rip itself to pieces while we're sitting here. I spent a week making it."
The prospect of watching the kite's death throes sends a tremor of repugnance through the butterfly's frame, and she takes a cautious step to one side, putting distance between herself and the cord. Then, foot by foot, she approaches the bench with wings twitching.
She covers the last five yards or so in a light hop that skims over the grass, and then she grabs for the string right below where the tail's now caught. Agitatedly, she loops a short span of line around one of the thin flat metal back supports of the bench's frame, and begins to whip the string back and forth, like a carpenter with a sawblade.
"Hey, what are you doing!"
She ignores you. Maybe it's just the grass, but there seems to be a green stain on the white thread where she holds it in narrow translucent fingers.
Finally the string snaps, and the severed length flutters loose from the reel in your lap.
The woman yanks the kite free in a violent motion, leaving part of the tail and ribbons tangled with the bench's legs. "Fly fast, fly far, fly free!" she gasps, backpedaling from the spot with rapid ground-curving skips.
The unstrung dragon wheels up gladly overhead, green against the first golds and pinks of sunset. It hovers for a split second, dips once, and then flies off tumbling end-over-end into the distance. You have your eye on it as it goes and goes, dwindling to a bird's eye speck over the horizon until it finally melds with sky.
When you finally draw your gaze back to earth, neck aching from the angle and the c