4.23

"Hope is strong; Justice and Truth their winged child have found." The Revolt of Islam, Percy Shelley.
[I want to write like that]

The wings were stiff and ungainly at first, their muscles having only recently been grown and stitched together. The tiny sutures limited the extreme movement the laboratory claimed to achieve, but I could still feel the raw power in them. The whispery hair that covered the inside and leading edges of the wings hadn't fully acclimated to my nervous system yet, and I could keenly feel every breath in the room. The wingtips were so sensitive and raw that I gasped when they brushed against the ground, and I took to holding my monstrous appendages directly out behind me. And my bones--oh, my bones. They had been siphoned to reduce weight. I had been shaved, my muscles stripped, my intestine reduced, half my liver, a kidney, and my teeth removed to save weight. It was all gristle anyway, but the marrow I missed. The weekly injections of white blood cells from my still-functioning marrow hurt badly enough that I blacked out several times. But I can't argue with results.

I could fly. And not a somber, scientific glide but real, sustained, beautiful flight. I ruled the skies: the biggest bird earth has seen since Incubus.

Why did they do this to me? Why invest the time, effort, and money? Why steal from the mouths of babies? The aim was always simple and obvious: to make a better alternative. To show the future. To eliminate the past. To sate America's love for blood.
I had become a tool of the government in a scheme so broad that I was the brush stroke, and the brush seeming God.

Only the brush will know if I am to succeed or fall.