Daila Dossett had wings she'd wear on some days. Those were usually her good days. I'd visit her in the summer and feel the doors wheeze shut behind me and the outside air yield to the ceaseless vinegar of the nursing home. Limp scraps of paper hung down from a corkboard in the hallway, announcing Meatloaf Tuesday, Square Dancin' Sunday. On the days Daila wore her wings she didn't seem to belong in that place at all.
The wings consisted of a wire frame with a thin, gossamer fabric stretched over it. Roundish pixie wings. I never found out where she got that fabric; perhaps she had cut it from an old dress. Whatever it was, it had the same mystifying colour that you see coming from the eyes of a fly. It shone and changed from vermilion to emerald when it tilted this way and that in the light.
On those days, the days when she waited for me with the wings on, Daila would greet me with a cordial kiss. I would lean down to the good side of her face to return the kiss, smelling powder and a memory of lilac. Her smile was lopsided and beautiful; she had an air of sharpness to her on those days.
Some of the others would look at her sitting up proudly in her wings, and they would shake their heads slightly or cast their eyes down. Daila was not affected by this; she told me she had made the wings for special occasions and some people just didn't understand. But if I asked her about the wings she would grow quiet and dense, lost in a memory or vision, and a nurse would wheel her back to her room.
She had loved chocolate milkshakes when she was young, the real kind made with malt and big scoops of beige ice cream. Sometimes I would bring them for her, and I brought her one the last time I saw her wear the wings. I told her I was sorry that it wasn't the real kind; I'd been in a hurry and picked up a shake from McDonalds. She drank it, one half of her face grimacing, and patted my wrist, saying it was just fine.
After that visit she seemed to retreat, and the wings vanished. Daila was leaving me. As she faded, I looked in her closet and under her bed, thinking that if I could get the wings for her, if she could wear them, she might improve.
But I just couldn't find those wings.
And then one day she wasn't there at all. Her belongings, diminished by her absence, fit into two cardboard boxes. I rooted through the boxes for the wings, but they were not inside. I carried the boxes, one at a time, out of the back door and to my car. As I lowered the second box into the trunk, a movement caught my eye. I looked over at a huge garbage bin that loomed in the shadow of the building. There, hanging over the open lid of the dumpster, were Daila's wings. One sawed random arcs in the breeze, as if it were waving at me. The other hung limp and lifeless, pointing toward the ground.
Its spine was broken, and the breeze could not lift it.
Sean Gupton Emergency physician Minneapolis, Minn.