The Anatomy of Wings Read Online Free Page A

aside but it had already parted in two waves. A corridor was opened up. Dad carried her through it. Danielle and I followed in the strange parade.
    “You'd want to get her checked out,” said the kiosk lady, who walked beside us.
    On the way home Beth lay on the backseat with the blanket rolled up for a pillow. Danielle and I sat in the luggage compartment behind her. The kiosk lady had given us bags of lollies and we ate them while we watched her. I lit a candy cigarette with myimaginary lighter and passed it down to her and she held it between her pale lips.
    “I'm sorry” was all she had to say.
    Mum sat Danielle and me down at the kitchen table and grilled us over what had happened. What had we seen? What were the series of events? When did it start? When did it finish? Nanna screeched into the driveway with her smelling salts. She yelled at Dad. She said we should have eaten our sandwiches as soon as we got there. She took the wet sandwiches out of the cooler and waved them in front of him as evidence. Dad told her to keep her big nose out of it. Beth, on the sofa, called out for them to be quiet.
    “What happened?” Mum pleaded in a soft voice.
    “She fainted,” Dad pleaded back.
    Nanna made a clicking noise with her tongue.
    “Her face was shining,” I said.
    “What?” shouted Mum.
    “Ping off,” said Dad.
    “What's she talking about?” asked Nanna.
    “She wouldn't bloody know,” said Dad.
    But I did know. I knew a lot more things than him. He didn't know, for instance, that sparrows were passerines, which meant they could sing, and that some swifts built their nests out of saliva and that Sirius was the next closest star to the sun. That was just for starters.
    I knew a butterfly wing couldn't repair itself once it was torn.
    This was a very important fact. A butterfly wing is built of veins and covered in scales made from a substance like dust.
    All through their sleeping stages butterflies dream of flying but when they first open their wings they need to wait. They must be patient. The wings are wet and they need time to dry. Butterfly wings are easily broken.
    There is no hope for a butterfly once this has happened.
    If you find a butterfly in a spiderweb with a broken wing there is no point in removing it however sad it might seem. If you remove it, it will only struggle on the ground and die some other kind of death. It will be carried away on the backs of bull ants to a bull ant feast and eaten alive.
    Beth was always rescuing winged insects from spiderwebs. She stood on chairs and rescued moths and climbed trees to save cicadas.
    “Here,” she said to them, “let me help you.”
    She used pencils and scissors and her own fingers to release the trapped things. She held them in her hand or on her fingertip until they flew away. If they couldn't, because they had stopped struggling and given up or the spider had already started wrappingthem up for later, it made her very sad. Even if you said to her don't worry, it probably didn't feel a thing.
    It couldn't be explained to her that at the very same moment a butterfly is struggling in a web, all over the world there are insects eating insects, hundreds of millions of spiders eating butterflies, lions eating gazelles, crocodiles eating cows, and countless worms turning inside of perfectly normal-looking fruit.
    Dad shooed me away with his hand.
    “Go play outside,” said Mum. “We're discussing something important.”
    After the lake everywhere Beth looked there was light. Dad, face bent over her, wore a halo. A tree was on fire with white cockatoos. The dam wall shone like a bride's skirt. The star-covered lake moved inside her. In the car our faces glowed. The sky pressed its bright face to the window.
    At home our mother noticed the stain on her shorts, and in the toilet even the blood on her underpants shone.
    “Do not be afraid,” whispered Nanna at the toilet door.
    She said the prayer for young girls who are menstruating.
    “I'm not