My First Private Lesson, Part 3

We dance a bit. Then Grisha pulls the chair out from under me.

“You’re off balance,” he says.

I thought I was pretty OK. Mostly.

“… because you’re falling backward,” he finishes.

I did not feel that at all! As he speaks, I review our dance in my head. Certainly not!

“…wings..” he is saying.

Ah. The wing thing.

Since my first follower’s class, Nina has been hammering away at my wings.

I have wings. I picked them up in Hawaii.

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Years ago, Michigan went to Hawaii. He wrote: This place is great! Come and see! I went. Soon, an emergency called him away. Soon my money ran out. I ate fruit hanging from the trees, littering the roadsides.

The sunlight was so thick with honey you could eat it. And it would sustain you.

Every day was once in a lifetime, thick with myth and jungle, volcanoes blowing and steaming, the whole cosmic ocean allowing to exist for this moment, this tiny, tiny island.

I failed to notice I was starving.

When I got home, I was a skeleton. Every time she walked by me, my grandmother would rub my shoulder blades.

“Angel wings,” she’d say.

She was senile, but she understood. I had been to paradise. I was a banished angel.

When I am old and lying on my back in a nursing home, staring at the ceiling, I will remember the taste of rose-apples found by the side of the road and will be transported to heaven.

So I have these wings. Skin and bone, souvenirs of the time I wasn’t quite of this world.

“…like this. Yes,” Grisha says, adjusting my arms.

Yes. I am lifting my wings.