His Plumage A Fortress

HIS PLUMAGE A FORTRESS

by Lark Morgan Lu

Content warnings: Off-page transphobia

Ryker wanted to give humanity one last autumn before going feathered. He told David this as the latter ordered bubble tea at a hole-in-the-wall in Flushing, Queens. David hoped he could still convince his older brother to stay.

"Nothing for you again today, huh?" David offered even though he knew Ryker had shed his need for food, just as he had shed his need for most anything else. He wanted only for his chest binder, and his winter plans would relieve him of that, too. "My twenty-fifth's next year, you know. Maybe you can stay until then." A similar tactic got Ryker to stay the year prior, before he was banned from seeing his young nephews and nieces. Those aunts and uncles said they feared he would disseminate his shame on their children the same way he had shamed his own parents.

Ryker smiled in a way that, had he more ego, would be condescending. He spoke less and less now, resembling the immortal family friend they both knew as Aunt Linda back in the home country. She smiled as often as she declined to converse. It was she who taught Ryker the harmonious ways. She knew him before he knew himself. 

"When you're a bird, no one cares where you shit. When you're a man, it's a daily fight with the whole world." Ryker proclaimed once David finished his drink: honeydew with lychee jelly. So that was it, then. Their days together were numbered.

David threw his cup atop an overflowing trash bin. The weather was cold enough to see his breath but not cold enough to hide the smell of fish and overripe fruit emanating from an abundance of supermarkets. "No one cares here, either." But that wasn't true. Especially not here, in the community that raised them. After all, David was the last blood relative Ryker could call family. 

Ryker smiled again and the brothers wandered from Roosevelt Avenue to Kissena Boulevard, with Ryker accepting every neon flyer thrust his way. English lessons. Spa coupons. Phone repair. David elbowed through people going home, people going to work, and students going anywhere their parents wouldn’t see. Ryker was a lotus drifting on a windswept pond.

"When will you come back?"

"Once the environment is more suitable." His answer was just audible above the screech of buses.

•••

On the night autumn succumbed to winter, David heard a pecking at his balcony window. He threw on a coat and slid open the door. A crane perched on the railing, monochrome save for a crown of red. This was a form divine and imperishable, as if from a story Aunt Linda would tell.

Now, Ryker needed nothing to feel the handsome man he had always been. No one could claim him to be anything else, for crane society discerned men and women only by the tone of their song and the steps they chose in dance. 

Ryker looked at him with a bright, enlightened gaze. David put a smile on his face and reached out to run his fingers through the glossy feathers on his brother's neck. "Off to Jiangsu, I suppose? The wetlands there are protected for migrating cranes."

Ryker laid his beak against David's shoulder, preened his hair, and then turned heavensward. David watched him leave long after his tears turned to frostbite. 

Lifted by a nourishing wind, Ryker soared towards the horizon. The shape of his beating wings broke the boundary of sea and sky.