Either the drug will work or it won’t. They’re not going to tell me.

The researcher rolls a fresh sheet of paper over the surgical table. Face down through the hole, I drop both arms onto the armrests and spread my shoulders adequately. This hasn’t been done to me since I was a kid.

The researcher warns that though my wings are only vestigial, sometimes nerves press close to the subcutaneous calcium deposits and become agitated. There will likely be sensation.

I say, “This isn’t my first time.”

“But you clearly haven’t been taking care of them,” says the researcher. “You’ve got hairline fractures all over. That’ll make it harder to get a clean cut.”

She’s warning me about pain. Once her back skin rips to shove out five feet of bone—bone that was supposed to have been filtered out by the evolutionary sieve hundreds of thousands of years ago—she can tell me about pain.

It will be easier for both of us if she just gets on with it. 

The bone saw buzzes alive. My wings are hollow, but the joints and metacarpi are brittle, like trying to cut a terracotta pot in half without leaving sharp edges. The researcher fights the shape of me. She accidentally slices the flesh on my shoulder. The stirring inside is far worse, a deep throb. I can’t tell if it’s real or in my head. It should be like a haircut, a removal of the already-dead, but it’s more like amputation.

Strong hands hold me down as I thrash.

Someone fits a towel between my teeth. When my screams pierce through, they stick a needle in my forearm.

*

“I’m Mike,” says my roommate from his side of the hotel room. Shirt off with a stripe of gauze wrapped around his lower back, he’s already been clipped. Probably a tail.

They’ve put us up in the Hilton next to the hospital for the duration of our trial. In the hallway, I run into endless strangers, parents and spouses of patients who traveled for non-experimental treatments. Treatments worth showing up for.

I squirm on my stomach despite myself. The strips of raw skin near my shoulders swell as they reach for the bone that used to be there.

Mike says, “Want me to change your bandages, or do you want them to do it?”

I taste phantom fibers of the towel that was shoved in my mouth. Throat dry and scratchy, I nod.

Mike’s smile is stained teeth.  

He sits down on the edge of my bed and peels hygienic cotton out of its plastic. His fingernails are painted red. No antiseptic. I’m grateful to be spared the sting, no matter what it could mean down the road. Mike holds the pin for the gauze between his teeth, urges me into a sitting position, and wraps me up. The pin barely nicks skin as it slides through the layers.

He couldn’t be so efficient without practice. But a regular medic wouldn’t be participating in a drug trial, he’d be conducting it. Now that I’m upright and it seems indignant to remain mute, I ask Mike, “Was someone in your family like us?”

He shakes his head. “I’ve just met others.”

Others: he says it casually. Like it’s normal. I’m the only freak in my own life. I want to be jealous of him, but I’m almost relieved.

“Something I’m missing?” I ask.

“This isn’t my first trial.” I enjoy Mike’s breath on my neck, the life of it. But blood is seeping down low through his bandages. “Either they keep giving me placebos, or…”

Or people like us can’t be changed.

*

After the first infusion, I bruise from elbow to armpit. I’m offered numbing cream but decline. It has been a long time since any pain surpassed the ripping of my back muscles under the weight of my wing bones. I’ll take the change of pace.

The assistant who has me for observation rests his elbows on the counter beside the cup of wooden tongue depressors. He tells me I remind him of his kid. 

“Not like you,” he explains, “but she had a hole in her heart. Left atrium. The first eight years of her life, I was worried to death. An experimental treatment closed it from a dime to the size of a pinhole. That’s the reason I’m here now.”

He means to say that the medical miracle inspired him to become a research assistant, but what it sounds like is that someone else’s heart problem almost killed him. Nobody’s problem ever killed someone else, no matter how much they claimed to love them.

It starts.

I convulse at the first push of regrowth. Scream. The effort of writhing and yelling is nauseating. Even having shorn the exterior, vestigial calcium lurks in my shoulders, and the buildup has to come out. It’s coming out. It’s owning me. 

The assistant doesn’t panic. He puts a hand on me. I take his palm, ready to make him comfort me whether he wants to or not. My grip turns his fingers white. He pushes my forehead back with his other hand until I lay flat on the table and extracts himself from me once I’m limp.

I cry. The rips in my flesh are messier than the usual growth spurts because it’s starting fresh, puncturing skin that’s barely begun to heal—and because I have a witness. I hide my face in my hands, but my volume is turned up. The hiding is real and not real. I try to make it look like I want to endure alone without actually keeping my suffering to myself. If I get small and pitiful, maybe I could be more like the assistant’s daughter. Make him care enough to help. Pain makes me prey, ready to use tricks to spare myself.

I don’t know when he gets on the table, or how my head ends up on his knee. He pets my hair. I’m heavy with the knowledge that the affection isn’t for me. But I have to take what I can. The last time I screamed, they got tired of the noise and stuck me with anesthetic. No one even bothered to lie that it was going to be okay.

I shout at the ceiling tiles as my wings push through, because the pain is as alive as I am.

*

At my suggestion, Mike pries the long mirror off the inside of the hotel room armoire. We prop it up opposite the sink mirror. They reflect off each other, and when we stand in the middle, we see our bandages.

He unwraps his first. Dark blood crusts the tip of his tail where it’s broken the skin at the base of his spine.

“Is that a normal amount of growth for you after two days, or did the drugs work at all?” I ask.

“Maybe less?” I watch three of him swivel in sync, reality and two copies. “I don’t know. I should take my own measurements to keep track.”

“No, you shouldn’t. Drive you crazy.” There’s a reason the researchers jot their notes in silence, our results becoming their secret. I unpin my bandages. Sticky with dried pus, I wince as the skin pulls.

There’s nothing underneath but that. “Where’s my growth?” I spin, then turn my back to Mike when I find nothing in the mirrors. “Do you see anything?”

He whistles low. “Shit, I guess you got the good stuff. Wouldn’t hurt you to slip me some.”

“I had a whole episode,” I say. “Bad. I was sure the bend of the wing came in.”

He touches the sprout of his tail. It has to sting. “Sometimes pain is just pain, honey. Tell me you were smart enough to steal your tube of numbing cream.”

When I tell Mike I never used it in the first place, he gets the same look the research assistant had, like he’s imagining my baby pictures.

*

I call my sister. After Dad passed from a heart attack and Mom remarried in my high school years, Sophie became the one to check in on me. Dad told us growing up that everyone needs one person to have their back: one couch to sleep on, one ride to pick you up when you’re caught in the rain. 

Our last call, Sophie revealed she’s expecting. I’m not the baby anymore.

She asks if I’m feeling better. I tell her I don’t know. 

“You don’t know? How could you not know?”

“They haven’t told me if I’m better.”

“I’m asking how you feel.”

The drug may be just saline, a placebo. My wingless back aches. None of it makes sense. 

“I met someone I like,” I tell her.

“Someone the same as you?”

“He has a tail.”

“Oh. Then I hope he gets the treatment he needs, too.” Sophie says, “Just tell me when you need your plane ticket home, okay?”

“You’re not picking me up?”

“Am I supposed to?”

“I guess I thought—I might not be well.”

“I didn’t realize,” Sophie says. “I can’t. I’m … I have different procedures to get through, and not all of them are scheduled yet. I have to keep my calendar open.”

“You already booked the ultrasound.”

“I did. That’s in a few weeks.”

I don’t say it, but I want to: that she’s the one who e-mailed me the application for this study in the first place. Insisted in her subject line, and the body of the message, that this could change my life. It could change my life, by smoothing the wrinkle out of my sister’s voice every time we speak. 

“What else is there to do?” I ask. “Is it more pictures of the baby?”

“It’s genetic testing.”

There’s been no question of the child’s father; no reason for a paternity test. She uses the same voice as when I asked her if the tooth fairy was real, and she lied to let me believe a few years more. “Soph.”

Sophie breathes over the phone. “It’s to check for genetic regressions.”

Genetic regressions. The polite jargon for vestigial growth that doctors write in their research, until they actually meet one of us and see our wounds are anything but polite. “God, just say it.”

She wants to know if the baby will be like me. 

For a moment I see a world where I take her child to Disneyland and we both know our wings won’t fit on the teacup ride, so we choose It’s a Small World without anyone feeling blamed. The fantasy turns to smoke and dissipates.

“No one knows where the disease comes from.” Sophie’s voice pitches higher. “Why not check?”

When Sophie was fourteen, she had a friend over. I stayed in my room because my wings were pushing through. I thought I’d turned my CD player up loud enough to cover the sound of my sobbing, until through the door I heard Sophie tell her friend, “No, don’t worry about it. My sister’s always like that.”

People worried or they didn’t, wanted to fix me or gave up, but no one held my hand.

I ask, “If the results are positive? Will you abort it?”

“Hold on. I didn’t say that.”

She doesn’t answer yes or no. She asks if I’d prefer a direct flight or can handle a layover. 

*

In group therapy, Mike tells us he was offered surgery.

“It would fully remove the calcium deposits in my spine,” he explains to the counselor and group, though his eyes linger a little longer on me, on the bruise blooming over my shoulder from the prior day’s drug infusion. “I’d be paralyzed waist down, but I’d never grow a tail again.”

The group congratulates him with scattered applause. They’re strangers, our hotel rooms disconnected and hospital visits staggered. And they’re clapping for Mike like they know what’s best for him.

I follow him back to our room. The door slams behind me. “Is there a national morphine shortage I don’t know about?”

Mike sits down on his bed and scoffs. “You of all people aren’t going to lecture me about shooting up and getting along. You wouldn’t even use the numbing cream.”

I dig my heels into the carpet to stay standing tall, though my legs want to quit. Leaning against the wall will aggravate my wounds. “You just don’t want to look like a freak anymore.”

“Excuse me?” 

“I said, can you actually not handle the pain? Or do you just want people to see you differently, look at you and feel bad for the guy in the wheelchair, instead of disgusted by the lump on your back?”

Mike’s hands land on his hips, akimbo, and his fingers curl past the edges of his bandages. His laugh is dark. Nothing like I’ve heard from him before. “Remind me: how much bone have you grown since they put you on those drugs? Still nothing, huh?”

“That doesn’t mean I haven’t been living with this for—”

“This is my eighth trial. Don’t fucking tell me what you’ve lived with.”

I stagger. His admission turns me from unstable to empty. I take a seat on the bed across from him.

“You show up, the drugs work on you, first try,” Mike whispers. “This is all I’ve done for six years.”

“All you’ve done?”

“I can’t work, and I can’t keep a man. These drug trials house and feed me. Until the government decides whether vestigial growth is ADA, at least being paralyzed will make it illegal to fire me for fainting on the job. And men—men don’t leave me because I’m disfigured. Men leave because they get sick of how I’m too exhausted to get out of bed. We don’t go dancing. We don’t fuck. What’s left of me?”

I clasp my hands together so my knuckles turn white. “If you have this surgery, nothing. Nothing will be left of you.”

“Did you even hear me?” Mike drags his feet to the bathroom and shuts the door. I listen to him piss through the thin hotel walls. The door stays shut for a while after the flush. He reappears in the doorway and settles by my feet in the space between our beds. Closer than I would have expected.

“There’s no waitlist,” he says. “It’s an experimental procedure. They already screened me, and I could be in and out in two days.”

Mike presents a clean separation between life before his drug trials and life during. The only line I draw is the difference of living at home versus a hotel. Even before I was a lab rat, I was something to be fixed. If not by drugs, then by tongue clicks, murmurs that I deserved better. “What were they like? The men you had?”

He wraps his fingers around my ankle. Leans in, presses a kiss to the flat bone of my shin. He’s warmer than I expected from a man so pale. “They loved me. They never understood me.”

Paralysis is better understood. Not by me. By everyone who isn’t like us. 

Mike is so far from my wings, all the way down at my feet.

“Kiss me again,” I say, and he does.

*

The surgical lamp warms a circle onto my back. Peeling my bandages away, the research assistant says, “It’s an aggressive infection. You’ve been changing these wraps every night?”

“Yes.” I leave out how Mike and I have been skipping the disinfectant, wanting to spare each other pain. I didn’t know I had an infection—but the assistant can see it, so it’s real. The assistant criticizes my negligence. But how was I supposed to differentiate between the discomfort of being fixed and the discomfort I make myself?

The assistant rubs me down with antibacterial soap. The scrape of the towel, the water on raw flesh, make me shudder.

Newly bandaged, he sits me up. I’m directable by my forearms because he can’t touch my back. He crosses his legs on his stool. I wonder if he sees his daughter after he leaves the hospital.

“What will happen to me?” I ask.

“I’m going to keep you overnight for observation. Make sure it doesn’t turn into a fever. I can’t give you antibiotics less than eighteen hours before your next infusion, but we’ll check in afterward.” He pauses. “We don’t want to slow down with you. You’re one of our first successes. My supervisors know your name.”

I hunch. Small daggers are piercing my shoulders from the inside. “Why am I a success?”

He looks over his glasses. “You haven’t grown an inch of vestigial bone since treatment began. Almost none of our other patients can say that.”

“Are the other successful patients in pain, too? When does that part go away?”

He smiles, unexpectedly bright. “When you let it. Your bone isn’t growing. There’s nothing to be afraid of. But neurologically, when a brain is used to being in pain, it continues in its loop until you retrain it.”

I curl a finger against my ribs through the fabric of my shirt, and there’s my heartbeat. Real, on a loop of its own. I know what I feel. I didn’t collapse in the shower, elbows on the tile, dry heaving, because of pain that was all in my head. “You don’t understand.”

“Phantom limb pain is well documented,” he offers. “This isn’t so different.”

It’s far different, because something is still at work inside my body. I can sense it. That ancient problems won’t be solved by modern drugs. 

He takes my hand, and I jerk back. He looks hurt. I want to tell him to fuck off, but I save it. I’m the one who signed up to be misunderstood.

“I think I should start antibiotics,” I say. Better than being left in the hospital with the night shift, no Mike, a sister who may or may not pick up if I call.

The assistant shakes his head. “I’m afraid we can’t do that.”

“You won’t treat me? I don’t want to stay.”

“Of course, you’re free to go. In that case, we won’t be able to accommodate you at the Hilton anymore.”

I don’t have a way home.

I tell the assistant never mind. 

*

I’m hot all over when I go to bed, starched sheets kicked down past my feet. The hand I press against my forehead burns. No nurse has visited for hours. I want out of my hospital gown. Out of my skin.

I start to float. 

I float out of the observation room. My feet don’t touch the ground. 

Down the hall, screaming leads me to a woman giving birth. She sees me crack the door. Her jaw goes slack, quiet for a moment. She’s not Sophie. I blink, and the baby’s gone. It is Sophie.

I follow the orange flare of emergency generator lights to a wing of the hospital I’ve never visited before. No lab equipment. Gurneys and stainless steel, fully surgical. People in scrubs stare. I look down at my feet, where my toes barely skate the linoleum, to make sure I’m wearing shoes. 

I peek through the round windows of surgical suites as I get close. When I see Mike’s head, I slip inside. He’s face-down. Surgeons surround him. The surgeons sliced through layers of fat and muscle to reach Mike’s spine, the trickiness of it, the promise.

I clear a bit of counter for myself and perch to watch the rest of the operation. I’m embarrassed Mike can’t see me because I am seeing an intimate amount of him. His excess calcium producers are cut out, bloody lumps tossed in a biohazard bag. They sew him up with a long zipper-like stitch.

The surgeons clean their tools and leave. As the door shuts, Mike sits up. He shouldn’t be able to do that, should be paralyzed. We both ignore the blood trickling down the small of his back.

I float over to kneel at his bedside. The weight of me settles softly. 

Mike says, eyes misty, “You have wings.”

I’ve always had wings. 

I look to my left and right, and there they are, broad as my arms and downed in brown and white feathers.

He reaches out, runs a hand along the top ridge of my wings. He strokes a feather between forefinger and thumb. I shiver. I feel my wings, not as a weight on my back, but as an extension of myself.

“I flew here,” I say. “I didn’t want you to be alone for this.”

He wipes his eyes, and there’s blood on his fingers. It leaves behind a diluted red streak. He makes room for me on the hospital bed. I sit, and my left wing wraps partway around him.

“Did you tell them you could fly?” he asks. “Did you tell them?”

One of my feathers dislodges and starts to fall. I scoop it up and give it to Mike.