in preparation for flight. Her primary wings are at the tips of her fingertips. Her daughter squeals with delight, her son clings to her tightly, wary of the women staring at them.
She relaxes her muscles, folds her wings closer to her body and wraps them around her children, cocooning them. She lowers her head and huddles with them – it is just the three of them, wrapped in white warm feathery delight. Her daughter giggles. She looks at her son and he smiles shyly, surrendering to this miracle. Safety. The elusive treasure.
She slowly opens her wings again, to their full grand span, and she lifts her chin in the air, feeling like an eagle on top of the highest mountain. Proud, reclaimed.
The women still block the path, too shocked to move.
The woman smiles. Her mother once told her, the only way to the end is to go through. Her mother was wrong; she can always rise above.
‘Hold on tight, my babies.’
She feels their trusting grips tighten around her hands; they cannot be torn apart.
Her wingspan is enormous.
Those little hands gripping hers are all the motivation she needs. Everything was always for them. Always has been, always will be. A better life. A happy life. A safe life. Everything they are entitled to.
She closes her eyes, breathes in, feels her power.
Taking her children with her, she lifts upwards to the sky, and she soars.
She sits on the bench in the park every weekday at lunchtime, the same bench, the same park, beside the lake. The wooden bench is cold beneath her. She curses, stands, pulls her coat down lower over her rear end and sits again, the padding protecting her a little more. She unwraps her ham-and-cheese baguette and spreads the tinfoil open over her lap. A squished tomato oozes beneath the bread, causing it to become soggy. This tips her over the edge.
‘Fucking shitty motherfucking tomato.’
She could tolerate her intolerable colleagues at work. She could tolerate the disgusting man on the bus beside her this morning who picked his nose for the entire trip and rolled his snot on the balls of his fingers as if she couldn’t see him. But the tomato. The fucking tomato is the icing on the cake. She’d only wanted cheese and ham and this unwanted addition has turned her bread to mush, leaving the cheese squished and stuck to the bread as though it’s all one gooey substance.
‘Bastard tomato,’ she grumbles, throwing the entire baguette on the ground. The ducks can have it.
Every lunch hour she visits the city park. Her office is nearby. Stocks, trading, asshole colleagues. This bench is the quietest, it is set away from everybody else. She comes here to feed the ducks and as she does she mumbles about the people who piss her off. She vents her frustrations over her fuckwit boss, her delusional colleagues, the turbulent stock markets. Feeding the ducks is her punchbag.
Most of her colleagues go to the gym on their lunch breaks, run off their issues for forty-five minutes and return to their desks cocksure and smelling of active shower gel and deodorant, and throbbing with testosterone. She prefers the fresh air, the peace, no matter what the weather. She needs to grumble and rant, and with every piece of bread she throws, a problem is eliminated and a little of the frustration ebbs away. Only, she’s not too sure it works – sometimes she finds herself getting worked up into a seething frenzy as her head fills with all the things she should have said – valid points and arguments she should have made back in the office.
She stares at the lump of soggy bread roll she has thrown on the ground. A few ducks fight over it, peck at it, but ultimately it falls well short of the all-out battle she’d thought it would spawn, which only goes to prove how unappetizing the baguette is.
‘You should have broken it up into pieces,’ a male voice interrupts her thoughts. She looks up and around with surprise. There’s nobody there.
‘Who said that?’
‘Me.’
Her eyes fall upon a mallard, standing away from the other ducks that are pecking at the bread roll, and each other.
‘Hi,’ it says. ‘I’m guessing by the look on your face that you can hear me.’
Her mouth falls open. She’s speechless.
He laughs. ‘Okay, nice talking,’ he says, then waddles off towards the lake.
‘Wait! Come back!’ She snaps out of her shock. ‘I’ll give you some bread!’
‘Nah, thanks,’ he says, but he waddles towards her. ‘You shouldn’t feed ducks bread, you know. Aside from the fact that uneaten bread causes changes to the chemical and bacteriological content of the water, which in turn increases the risks of avian disease, it’s bad nutrition. The recommended food for ducks is defrosted frozen peas, corn or oats. That kind of thing.’
She stares at him, completely lost for words.
‘Don’t be offended, it’s sweet of you, all right, but white bread is the worst, it has no nutritional value whatsoever. Ever heard of angel wing?’
She shakes her head.
‘Didn’t think so. It’s caused by an imbalance of nutrients in a duck’s diet. It causes a deformity in ducks’ wings, can hamper our flight or stop us altogether, which is, you know, crappy.’
‘Gosh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.’
‘That’s okay.’ He studies her. He can’t help himself. ‘Mind if I sit with you?’
‘Sure.’
He flies up to the bench. ‘Work getting you down again?’
‘How did you know?’
‘You’re here every day. Fucking Colin. Fucking Peter. Fucking world markets. Fucking Slimming World. Bastard tomatoes.’
‘You hear all that?’
‘Hear it? We feel it. Every time we hear you coming, we armour up. You fire those pieces of bread at us like grenades.’
‘Sorry,’ she replies, biting her lip.
‘That’s okay. We figure it does you some good, even if it takes a duck eye out here and there.’
‘Thanks for understanding.’
‘We’re all human, after all,’ he says.
She looks at him, baffled.
‘That was a little bit of bird humour for you,’ he chuckles. ‘But seriously, everybody needs to have a place where they can let loose. Where they feel safe.’ He has a faraway look.
She studies him. ‘Do you?’
‘Yeah sure, there’s this great river
