Tide of Shadows and Other Stories by Aidan Moher Read Free Book Online

since. I’d not heard her voice in the darkness as the man in the glasses worked on my wings.
    "She left," he said. He looked tired.
    "Where?"
    He laughed, a quick bark with little humour in it. "Be damned if I know."
    The man took off his glasses and rubbed his bloodshot eyes with the heel of his hand. Where my father's hands had been rough and callused from hard work in our yard, this man's were soft, the fingers long and delicate. I missed my father's hands.
    "Is she coming back?"
    It took him a few moments to answer. "I don't know," he said. "I don't think so. I hope so."
    "Why did she leave?"
    This time, he didn't answer me. Together we watched the stream as the sun fled to wherever it is she goes after dark and night enveloped the garden.
    "Let's go home," I said. The person who had given me the note was not coming to meet me that day, not with the man sitting next to me.
    Freedom would have to wait for another day.

    On the eighth day, there was a little boy waiting for me by the stream.
    He had dusty blue eyes and a quiet soul. He wore nothing but a thin paper medical gown, the kind that does up in the back with a string, and his hair was all mussed up. He looked like a boy I could be friends with, in a different life.
    Without a word, the boy handed me a key. Then he vanished. He didn't duck behind a tree or run around a corner; he didn't poof up into a cloud of smoke; he just disappeared. He was there, then he wasn’t. Is that any stranger, though, than having metal wings sprouting from your back? It wasn't for me to say.
    So, instead of dwelling on it, I looked at the key. It was not a flat plastic card like most keys, but an archaic piece of metal, knobby on one end, with staccato teeth at the other. It was a key like the ones in   the old fairy tales my father read to me as a child. Tied to the knob was a brown paper tag, on which was written:
    Use this when the time comes
    I had no idea when the “right time” would be, but I did have a very good idea of which keyhole it belonged to.

    On the ninth day, I used the key.
    On closer inspection, the key was made from the same metal as my wings, and a single word carved onto the shaft between the knob and the teeth. A name, actually.
    Sarah.
    It was not a key to somewhere but to someone. To me.
    Over the past several days, items had started to appear in my room. A delicate doll with a ghostly white face and a pretty pink dress; a quilt on my bed to replace the thin white sheet; a silk flower in a vase on the small desk. Small offerings of peace from the man with the glasses to his little angel of Tao Hua Yuan. To Sarah. No matter his effort, though, I felt no twinge of regret when I left that small room for the last time and went to the garden, key in hand.
    An old man sat on a bench. He smiled at me but soon left, shuffling away with a ratty paper book in one hand—a relic even older than he was, I'd guess. Birds chirped, the stream gurgled, and the ever-present breeze sang its song accompanied by the susurrus of leaves blown idly about.
    I slid the key into the wing’s small keyhole.  
    I turn it, and the wings stirred to life. Metal screeched and steam surged from the exhaust vents, jetting away from my body. Soon the wings settled into the low rumble of a well-running engine.
    "Ancient technology," said the man. Memories of a dream, overheard while drugged. "But tested and proven." The woman had said nothing, but I remembered hearing the clip-clop of her shoes as she left my small room.
    Whether from my dream or some trick of science, I knew how to use the wings as though I were born with them. I stretched them out eight feet on either side of me. They dwarfed me with their immensity. I launched into the air and flew—lifted towards the heaven by that ancient technology. Lifted towards freedom.
    My wings weren't all-powerful as in my dream. Instead, they huffed and wheezed, pulling me skyward with beleaguered strokes. But they worked, and freedom was