Read Online The Girl With Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rossetti - Free Book Online

had
that
happened?—and down to the legs. At that point he pulled his gaze back up to my face. “Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”
    “No! And I—I’m strong! How’s that possible? I’m light, I can run!”
    This time his gaze wavered all the way down to my feet. “Yeah,” he repeated, turning his face away. “Didn’t you know?”
    “How could I? I never left my bedroom! And I always wanted to look like my friends!”
    A hint of amusement came to his voice. “What do
they
look like?” he said, keeping pace with me effortlessly.
    I ran faster. The blood was pounding now, but I didn’t want to stop, not yet. “They—ah.”
    “They’re fat and lazy?” he guessed, beginning to grin.
    “No! But they favor—more womanly forms, you know. They always say I’m too skinny,” I said. I concentrated on my flying feet. I wasn’t thinking about whether or not it was proper to tell him this. “A girl ought to be plump.”
    “I bet
they’re
plump,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “No wonder they say so, then.”
    My legs carried me up a hill. I was amazed they could still move, but move they did, and it wasn’t even difficult. Then I hurtled down the other side, the heather billowing all around me, like the sea shocked by a storm. “They say I look like a boy,” I panted.
    “
That
you do not,” he said, with another sideways glance.
    “I know!” I said gleefully. “I look like a horse!”
    He braked. “What?”
    I went on for a while longer, shooting alone, a comet over the grassy world, and then finally, when my head was so light it was dizzying and I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, I threw myself into a heap of hazy purple heather. I rolled over. The sky swam above me. My entire body had become a pair of lungs, heaving, but my breaths were luxurious, enjoying the fresh, impossible, unbaked air.
    Sangris approached my head. I saw his face—a black cat’s again—upside down. “Did you just say you look like a horse?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Why?” he said, his tone baffled.
    “Because I do. The way a horse looks when it runs.”
    “Oh. I think you mean ‘graceful.’”
    “No.”
    “Agile?”
    “No.”
    “Glossy?” he said, obviously scraping the bottom of the barrel.
    “I was thinking more a baby horse. Long legs, bony body, you know, but at least it’s fast and it can run. My friends can’t run. I didn’t know I could.” I grabbed at the plants all around me, holding on to them in fistfuls, to make sure they were real. I would never take grass for granted again. Breezes, like currents of water, slid lights over the heather as I lay there.
    “Your body isn’t bony,” Sangris said blankly. “It’s as soft and slenderly curved as the throat of a swan.”
    What?
    I stared at him for a full minute.
    “Um,” he said.
    I continued to stare.
    “Never mind,” he said.
    “Did you prepare that phrase in advance?” I was genuinely curious. “Do you sit awake at night and write secret odes to the bodies of girls you’ve just met? Or was that stolen from somewhere? How many times have you used it?”
    “I can’t help it if I’m eloquent,” he said. He studied one of his paws, grooming it.
    “It sounded rehearsed,” I said.
    “Why would I rehearse? How could I have known that you were going to call yourself bony? Like you said, I’ve just met you.” He fussed over the paw, licking it with a small red tongue tip. “You’re the one who brought up the subject. It just so happens that I thought of the phrase a little while ago. I resent your accusation of plagiarism,” he added virtuously.
    “Were you in a particularly poetic mood when you thought of it?” I said, beginning to smirk. I felt as though I should have been embarrassed, and it was probably coarse of me to keep asking questions, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease him. And besides, those concerns were far away, sitting with my parents in the distant oasis.
    “I wouldn’t call it poetic, no. Not