Fairy Tale 4 - The Man who could Fly but chose Not To

One day we heard the story from the man who could fly but chose not to.

“I have feathers, just like a bird,” he began.  “They fold into the backs of my arms, and my shoulders.  My arms become my wings.  It’s not like superman where I just stick my arms in front of me and fly, and it’s not like I’m an angel either, with wings coming out of my back.  My feathers sort of fold out from my skin.  It’s something I have to make a decision about, it’s not involuntary.  It feels a bit like going into a crouch, or flexing your shoulder muscles.  I decide I want to stretch out my feathers, and out they come.

When my arms are fully extended, the long feathers at the ends of my hands stretch out about 20 or 25cm beyond my fingers, so I reckon my wingspan is about 2.5 metres.  They’re big wings!  I mean, I’m a big bloke, so I suppose I need big wings.

It’s not easy getting into the air – I have to flap very hard, and I weigh about 80 kilos, so there’s a lot of work to do.  I remember reading once that the reason humans can’t possibly fly like birds is that birds have hollow bones, so they weigh very little compared to their size.  This particular article I remember reading reckoned that the muscle mass a human would need to pull its wings down would be gigantic, and you’d need a breastbone that sticks out about sixty or seventy centimetres to attach the muscle.

I suppose that may have been right in theory, but in practice I can assure you I’m just like a bloody great swan – I have to run pretty fast to get up some momentum, and I flap my wings as hard as I can, and if I run right and the wind’s good then, whoosh, off I go.

Well, I would go, except, as you know, I don’t.  I know, I know, I can see your face, and I know that pretty much everyone gets a bit upset about this.  Everyone thinks they want to fly.  It’s one of the oldest fantasies, isn’t it?  And people love it when they have flying dreams.  So they just assume that if you could fly you would? In fact a lot of people seem to think you should fly, like it’s some sort of moral obligation.  I’m not sure what that’s about, really.  I think people feel that way about a lot of things, don’t they?  Like they think if you’re clever you should go to university, or if you can run fast you should be an athlete, or if you’re good-looking you should be a model.

But it’s not as simple as that, is it?

I mean, I certainly used to fly.  I discovered I could do it when I was about 19.  Yes, weird, I know.  Like why wasn’t it something that I could do as a baby, or came on when I hit puberty?  I don’t know.  My theory is that it’s a bit like shoulder width and a deep voice, they’re the sorts of things that only come on in the latter part of adolescence, maybe I needed to be a bit older before the feathers developed, or maybe it took a bit longer before I could turn the weird tingling sensation on the back of my arms and across my shoulders into actual feathers actually coming out.

I don’t know.

Anyway, when it started it was like jesus fucking christ, there are feathers!  And the first time I managed to lift off the ground, well, it was unbelievable, I just whooped and hollered like a mad one.  Crazy it was.  And I flew everywhere, back and forth across the garden, back and forth across the forest, back and forth over the village.  It was amazing.

But it quickly started to become a problem.  People don’t always react well when they see a man flying you know.  Some, sure, they laugh or cheer as they’re pointing.  But some – well, some think it’s funny to throw stones or balls or anything that they think will knock you off course.  Remember them throwing burgers at that magician when he was hanging from a crane?  And some just react as if they’re jealous, they jeered and shouted horrid things at me, which was just depressing to be honest.  Sometimes they’d try to follow me, running along to see if they could get to me when I landed.  The first few times I didn’t realise what was happening and when I landed I was just harassed and they yelled at me and once or twice I was actually attacked, and escaping was pretty difficult – it’s not like I can take off like some sort of sparrow.  Like I said, think swan: I can’t get away quickly.

And that’s another thing.  The feathers themselves.  They don’t unfurl in an instant, they take, oh, I don’t know, two minutes, maybe three, sometimes even longer if it’s been a while since they were last unfurled.  And folding them back up again takes a similar amount of time.  It’s not a quick process.  If I’m in trouble – and, like I said, I started to find I was getting into trouble – then I can’t just fold my feathers up and get my arms back in a flash.  It takes a while.

So it started to get pretty dispiriting to be honest.

Also, it’s important you’re clear in your mind about what this is like.  I don’t have a shirt on, for example.  The feathers come out from my skin, so I can’t wear anything over them.  In fact I can’t wear anything on my top half, I have to strip off when I decide to unfold my feathers.  And the feathers are only for the wings, they don’t cover any other bit of me, they don’t keep me warm.  So it’s all hunky dory on a fine summer’s day, but it’s bloody freezing in winter and not much better in spring or autumn either to be honest.  The air temperature falls pretty quickly if you go too high, as well, so there’s that.

And once my wings are out, I don’t have arms any more.  Or hands.  I just have wings.  Which is pretty great if you just want to go for a fly, but what if you want to take something with you?  Or do your shoelaces up?  I couldn’t wear a backpack, obviously, and for a while I experimented with a sort of modified bum bag, I’d tie it around my waist with a spare shirt and such like in it, then unfold my feathers and stretch my wings out and fly off, then I’d land somewhere, oh, I don’t know, down by the river say, somewhere I could get a pint or something, and I’d have to stand there while my feathers folded back in, worrying in case I was seen or maybe there were some lads who’d hassle me, and that was just about ok in summer but if it was even remotely cold then I’d need more layers so my bum bag would get bigger and bigger and just to go for a wee flap I’d sometimes look as though I was going camping for a week.

It all just became an interminable hassle.  No fun at all.  Just the thought of going for a fly would make me nervous.  I’d just think about having to dress and undress, and getting cold, and probably being hassled somewhere on the flight, and just how knackering it is, and frankly I just had enough of it.  Why bother, I thought.  

So I stopped.  Years ago.

Sometimes, ever so occasionally, if it was warm and it was a nice night, sometimes I’d sneak out and undress and stretch out the feathers and flex my wings and maybe get up there for half an hour or an hour, just drift out and around for a while enjoying the view before coming back.  But even that, not so much these days.  Even that.  I just end up feeling… lonely.

So.  That’s me.  That’s why I don’t fly.  And, no, you can’t see them.”