Every morning, they would bundle him up and send Tori off to his new school. Every afternoon, his parents asked about his day at school, and his answer was uniformly bland and noncommittal. After several months, the mother was called in for a conference. The older woman greeted her at the bus and they sat on a blanket in the middle of the grassy central area. They both wore sweaters since the seasons had changed. A thermos of tea sat between them as children flew above them in the thin cold air.

The older woman was comfortable with silence, seeing it as a more refined form of communication. The mother vaguely understood this but her nervous energy forced her to speak. “How is he doing? You’re not going to kick him out, are you?”

The older woman smiled. “He’s fine. He won’t fly yet, but I imagine that very soon he will. It takes a long time to undo the damage.”

“But he was born to fly! He must!”

She held the worried mother’s hand for comfort. “They worked very hard at taking it out of him. He’s almost there.”

“Don’t you think that…” She stopped, afraid to bring out the question she had held in her heart for so long. A gentle squeeze of her hand brought it tumbling out. “Wouldn’t it be better for all of us if he was encouraged to fly? It seems like a positive thing, a great skill and a gift.”

The older woman spoke directly to her, but her eyes never came down from the sky. “Are you familiar with the story of Daedalus?”

The mother struggled to remember what she had learned many years ago for a test in a subject she had deemed superfluous. “I don’t remember it well enough, I’m afraid.”

The woman nodded. She fell into a rhythm and tone that used to be her daily routine when she spent her days in a classroom. She began her career as a teacher, but her love for children had driven her far afield. “Daedalus was a remarkably talented craftsman in Athens. He designed and built the labyrinth, an inescapable and inexplicable maze, for King Minos of Crete to imprison the Minotaur. Daedalus gave Ariadne a ball of string to help Theseus, the enemy of King Minos, escape the labyrinth. As a punishment, King Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus in the labyrinth, without any string, of course.”

The mother smiled. “You tell it well.”

The woman rewarded her with one of her abundant smiles. “Thank you. I used to teach it. The final exam was a play the class performed in front of the school, acting out several of the Greek myths. It was followed by a Bacchanalian feast with the kids getting drunk on soda pop.”

“Anyway, one year, after the play, one of my students, a very special young woman named Ann, asked me a question.” Her eyes misted over with memory, taking her away for a few moments before bringing her back. “The story of Daedalus goes on to tell how Icarus fashioned two pairs of wings from wax and feathers, for him and his son to escape. He warned his son not to fly too high or too low. Too high and the sun would melt the wax. Too low and the feathers would become damp and heavy from the sea. Icarus ignored his father’s warning and flew too high, melting his wings and falling to his death.”

The mother nodded. “Now I remember.”

The older woman nodded. “Ann asked me about the story. I explained that it was an archetype, raising up deep notions from our subconscious. She asked if I thought the story of Daedalus described every father’s fear of his son exceeding him, achieving more, flying higher, and living on after the father’s death. The fear of raising an unworthy son, one who flies too close to water is also implied, but the greater fear is the son flying higher because that is an existential threat to the father.”

The mother sipped her tea, enjoying herself immensely. “That is an astounding observation for a young person to make. I hope you gave her an ‘A’.”

She was rewarded with another smile. “I did better than that. After she graduated college, I hired her. We founded this school together.”

The mother was shocked. “I would love to meet her. Where is she?”

“That might be impossible.” She pointed up to the sky, and the mother saw that one of the winged forms was larger than the others. “I remember when the first few children were born. A lot of time and money went into designing programs to mainstream the winged children. Psychologists met with the first children, helping them cope with their feelings of inferiority and feeling like outsiders. As more children were born with wings, there was a different reaction. There were conspiracy theories about government experiments, big corporations polluting the environment, gene-splicing gone wild. Strangely enough, as the numbers grew, the reaction became more hostile. The winged children were seen as a burden on the educational system and a threat to society.”

The mother struggled but wasn’t quite following. “Is that why you opened your school, to relieve some of that burden?”

The older woman shook her head. “Ann explained to me what should have been obvious from the very beginning. It is so remarkable that no one ever noticed it. I suppose we are blind to any threat that is too great for us to cope with.”

“My son is a threat?”

She nodded. “The worst kind. There are now more children with wings than children without. But since the system is being run by flightless adults, winged children are marginalized and treated like freaks. I think the teachers know the truth but too afraid to admit it.”

She pointed at the children flying in the cloudless sky. “This isn’t a mutation. It’s evolution at work. Evolution is based on naturally occurring genetic mutations. In this case, it wasn’t random. Ann explained it to me. The human spirit has needs. The ground has become overcrowded and boring.”

The mother began to smile as understanding grew. “So the human genes have responded by providing us with wings?”

The woman nodded. The group flying over them had begun an intricate dance in the air.  The mother began to ask but was silenced by the remarkable sight she had to struggle to understand. It dawned on her gradually because she refused to believe what she was seeing. The intricate dance that had seemed random at first was taking on shape and form, creating a pattern. In the center, the children flew in pairs, following a rising spiral. It seemed confused and random, but then she saw it for what it was intended to be. It was a double helix, the model of our genetic make-up, the pattern of life and creation. The helix rose to a zenith before falling back on itself, a torus gradually rising as it collapsed in upon itself to form a mystifying Mobius band which slowly ascended higher into the sky.

***

This short story will appear in my soon-to-be-published collection of short stories titles “Dolphins on the Moon”, which can be pre-ordered on my Indiegogo crowd-funding campaign. Friend me on Facebook or send me an e-mail at adameliyahu@yahoo.com to get updates and free stories.