Once upon a time there was a boy with beautiful white wings that split the sun into rainbows. When he was born, the doctors and nurses marveled at the delicate wings that unfurled from his back.
“It’s not a child, it’s an angel,” one of the nurses whispered as a kaleidoscope of colors danced across her face.
“No,” the boy’s mother said, admiring her child, swaddled in soft wings instead of a blanket, “He’s just my son.”
The mother loved her son more than anything in the entire world. She pressed her lips to his dark hair and promised him that she would always protect him--for she knew what the world did to beautiful things, especially when it did not understand them.
The mother was smart and world-wise. She saw what lurked beneath the awe and wonder in the doctors’ and nurses’ eyes. She knew the fear that crept around in the dark recesses of their brains, the fear that insisted that that which is different must be made normal or gotten rid of. She knew that fear like an old friend; it stalked her in her dreams until she woke up with her heart in her throat and the sheets clenched between her fists as the scars that marked her shoulder blades burned.
She vowed that what happened to her would not happen to her son. As she made this promise to the new life in her arms, an icy gust blew the window open and swirled around the room, caressing the boy and his wings. The sharp wind blew through the mother’s hair, making a promise of its own. Sixteen years, it crooned, sixteen years.
The mother clutched her child to her chest and marched to the window, slamming it shut.
The boy grew up normal, despite the wings that made some whisper angel just as others whispered devil. He went to school and learned to play and read and write like all the other children. His mother longed to keep him at home forever where she could protect him and keep his heart, which as light and delicate as his wings, from ever being broken, but she knew doing so would stifle the beauty in him just as much as the world could. All the while though, as she watched her son play with the other children, she heard the whispering in the back of her mind: Sixteen years, sixteen years.
The boy first felt the sting of a world that was hostile towards what it did not understand when he was demonstrating for his classmates how he could use his wings to jump high enough to retrieve the stray playground balls that were kicked onto the roof of the school. As he glided down from fetching one, he saw a teacher storming across the playground towards them. She pulled the other children away from him, hiding them behind her back as if the boy meant to hurt them.
“Never do that again,” she said.
“Why?” the boy asked, head tilted to the side, trying to understand the c***tail of anger and fear he saw in the teacher’s eyes.
“You just stay away from them! They don’t need your influence!” the teacher yelled, voice wavering, as the boy’s wings squeezed together and tried to hide themselves behind his back. He lowered his head and left to sit under a tree in the farthest corner of the field, his wings hugging him as he felt an ache in his chest and confusion in his head. It was after this moment that the boy took notice of the looks the parents of the other children gave him, some faces devout with shining eyes, others twisted in stiff masks as they turned their children away. It was then that he began to carry the weight of his wings.
As he became older, his wings grew more magnificent, all while growing more and more heavy. When he was ten, he noticed that when he looked into many of his friends’ eyes, he saw only his wings reflected in them. When he was twelve, a man fell prostrate in front of him on the street, his reverence making the boy’s face flame as he urged the man to stand. At fourteen, a rock struck him in the back of the head as he walked to school, knocking him to the ground.
The mother’s hands shook with rage as she held her son’s head in her lap, listening to him cry as she cleaned the ugly gash. She felt hot fire in her stomach and fists and a desire to strike down anyone who had ever caused her sweet boy, her son who couldn’t stop crying when their dog died, but insisted on digging its grave with his own two hands anyway, her son who held the door open for everyone behind him, her son who painted his favorite things, the sky, birds, and his mother, on all the walls of their house, any sort of pain.
Beneath the rage, she felt a chill deep in her bones. Sixteen years, sixteen years.
When the boy was fifteen, he made a friend who saw him for who he really was, not just his wings. This new friend, this boy with unruly black hair and a scar that pulled one side of his face into a permanent state of melancholy, stood by the boy, yelling at those who couldn’t stop staring and those who flinched at the sight of his wings alike.When the boy with the wings held hands with the boy with the scar, his wings felt as light as the day he was born and his smile reached his eyes again.
The mother watched the two boys, heads bent close together over books and art, and smiled, feeling the vice around her heart loosen. She stopped waking up in the middle of the night to the whispers of sixteen years. She told the boy with the scar he was welcome at their home anytime, no matter how early or late, because she saw how he made her son feel and she also saw how he jerked at every loud noise and dreaded to go home. The mother was world-wise and no stranger to the hurt she saw in his eyes.
On her son’s sixteenth birthday, the mother spent all day cooking a feast for three and a great tiered cake decorated with birds and all the colors of the sky. The boy’s eyes welled up with tears when he saw all his mother had made for him illuminated by the soft yellow light of their kitchen. He hugged her and bent to kiss her head and said that the cake was more beautiful than any of those in the finest bakeries of Paris. 
After they had all eaten their fill and the mother had presented her son with new paints and brushes, the boy and his friend sat on the porch, gazing up at the stars as their intertwined hands took on a new meaning. They leaned into one another, finding stars more beautiful than any in the night sky in each other’s eyes, until their lips touched and the very earth shook. There on the porch, the two boys found warmth against the biting cold of the night in each other’s arms.
Months rolled by and as hard as the mother tried to ignore it, she heard the whispers of sixteen years all around her, in the rattle of the leaves, in the wind through the house’s eaves. She watched her son and the boy with the scar fall in love, blissfully unaware of the world around them. Every night she squeezed her eyes shut and hoped that her son and his love wouldn’t share the same fate as her. Every night she wished, and every night the foreboding she felt in her lungs and throat wouldn’t go away.
Then one day when the two boys were kissing under the shade of a tree, the screaming of tires and slamming of a truck door startled them out of their dream. They looked up to see the boy with the scar’s father--a man with hatred where his heart should have been and hands always clenched, either into fists or around a bottle--storming towards them. The two sprang up, the boy’s wings spreading to try to hide his love. The boy with the wings didn’t consider himself to be brave, but he stood straight and told the man to leave. The man did not like to be told what to do and was afraid of the boy’s wings; from a young age he had learned that everything beautiful in life hid a wicked edge.
The man shoved past the boy and hauled his son into the truck, yelling at him,
“God himself thought Lucifer beautiful before he fell,” ignoring his son’s cries and pleads. The boy tried to rush the man, never one for violence but swinging at him nevertheless. The man turned and knocked the boy to the ground, one of his wings breaking with a sharp crack. The boy cried out as the man shoved his son in the truck and drove away. The pain from his broken wing made the boy fall into darkness, and he laid on the ground until it grew cold and the earth swallowed up the sun. Blood ran down white feathers, dripping steadily onto the dirt.
  When the sky was completely black, illuminated by nothing but the stars, the boy woke and stumbled to his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain erupting from his wing, before running to the boy with the scar’s house as fast as he could. When he arrived, he saw nothing but an empty house with dark windows. His love was gone as if he had never been there.
The boy felt despair bloom in his heart and his wings had never felt heavier, like they were concrete blocks pulling him down, down, down through the cold waters of a black ocean. The boy fell to his knees in the street and screamed his pain at the sky, screamed a pain so raw and jagged that it woke the entire town and made tears run down their faces. The boy’s mother startled from the light sleep she had fallen into as she waited for her son to return. She knew what had happened as soon as she woke. She ran out of the house with no shoes and nothing but her nightgown, praying that she could get to her son fast enough, that it wasn’t too late. Her nightgown billowed out behind her, as white against the dark of the night as her wings had once been.
In front of the house, the boy knelt with his forehead pressed against the ground as sobs wracked his body. He had never hated his wings more than he did then for costing him the love of his life, the boy who had held his hand tightly when people stared and whispered on the street, the boy who had made him laugh until his stomach felt like it would split open, the boy whose eyes he had seen stars in and felt the earth shake when he kissed. The boy raised his hands to his wings and gripped a fistful of feathers, choking on his pain as he ripped them from his wings.
His fists clenched around the bloody feathers as he looked up at the cold, indifferent stars he had once thought beautiful, wishing and wishing that things could be different, that he could fall asleep and wake up in a life where he was just a boy and the boy with the scar was still by his side.
But wishing does not make something true, no matter how much one’s heart and soul longs for it to be so.
The boy with the wings was tired of being the boy with the wings. He let the bloody feathers fall from his hands before reaching up to his wings and ripping out another handful. He was tired of carrying this gift on his shoulders.
As the boy reached his hands up to tear another clump of feathers out, he heard a voice call out his name, burning a hole through the darkness around him. The boy looked up through his tears to see his mother running towards him. For a moment he thought there were white wings flowing out from her shoulders, but when he blinked the tears out of his eyes, he realized it was just her nightgown.
The mother fell to her knees in front of her son, gently holding his shoulder.
“Don’t do this to yourself, please,” she begged, brushing his hair back from his forehead.
“I’m so tired, I just want to be done. All these wings have ever done is hurt me, and now because of them I’ve lost him for good,” the boy choked as his mother intertwined one of her hands with his, ignoring the blood on it.
“Look at me,” the mother said, moving her hand on his shoulder to his cheek. Her heart stalled in her chest when she saw the blank look in his eyes.
“Listen to me my son. I know what it feels like to be marked as different, to have people stare, to feel the weight of their worship and hate. I know how much it hurts when you lose everything. But don’t do this to yourself. Yes, your wings mark you as different, but you are different, my son. And that is good. I know your wings have cost you so much at such a young age, but don’t cut them off. They are what will allow you to fly.”
“I don’t want to fly. I just want him back,” the boy whispered.
“If you do this, you’ll regret it forever. I know. I was born with wings like yours, and they cost me someone very dear to my heart. So I grabbed a pair of kitchen shears and cut them off. It was almost as painful as losing my love, but neither was as painful as the hollowness that sat in my chest after, until you were born, my son. I love you more than anything in the entire world,  and it kills me to see you in pain and your pain will only get worse if you do this, if you let everyone who stares, everyone who doesn’t understand, that fear that is the most base part of humanity, win. Please my son, don’t do this. Come home,” the mother pleaded, searching his eyes. The boy looked down at his hands, covered in blood and pieces of downy feather.
“It hurts so much,” he said before sagging forward into his mother’s arms. She held him close, careful of his broken wings, rocking him back and forth as she pressed kisses to his forehead and whispered,
“ I know, my son. I know.”