Archaeopteryx

You were my father's vision. You were his obsession. Upon your brittle back he wished to ride, to take to the skies and learn what it is to live freely. Perhaps he was running from his past, from himself, or maybe he was simply looking for a way to live with everything that the world had become in all it's tragic splendor. You wouldn't give your wings up freely, so he stole them from you. A thief in the night, tinkering deep into the time of slumber, of dreams, of terrifying, supernatural simulations of reality. Just before the muddy ink begins to draw away from the eastern horizon, that is when my father felt the most sane. The most real. Morning would find him pale, blankly gazing upon the day ahead as if it were a sheet of vellum covered over in untranslatable symbols. I would watch him walk the dirt streets of our town. Even to me it was apparent that he was a foreigner, that he had found no home in the place which he lived, that his heart would always dwell in some far distant land. I was shocked when he came to me. I stood there as he talked at me, giving me the news that he had chosen me to join him on his grand adventure. I was stunned, barely listening as he gave description of the paradisaical bliss which he supposed to exist somewhere other than here. I watched his face, as he spoke, watched his features transform into that which I had always prayed to see. Loving kindness radiated from his eyes, his cheeks were ruddy, somehow, filled with a strange vigor which displaced his normal ghoulish countenance. It was as if, by merely thinking of escape, of taking wing in crystalline skies, of bathing in the amber glow of our star, he was becoming healed. How could I say no? He had toiled deep into every night, had forsaken sleep to create for me a set of wings, duplicates of his own, except for being slightly smaller. How could I abjure such a gift?