Aile’s Life

From the moment of her birth, Aile was a sweet and precocious little girl. She had striking midnight hair and brown eyes. Other children always took to her immediately, as if they’d been old friends, and adults were not far behind. She had a taste for sugary treats and dishes with Szechuan peppers. Aile was an average student, with perhaps a touch more talent for gymnastics than her peers. She liked feeding birds in the park and collecting their dropped feathers, making shadow puppets with her fingers, and playing hopscotch on the board she imagined within the black and white checkerboard tile pattern outside the Molyneaux apartment.

All things told, Aile was a fairly normal little girl in her early life, even if she had a tendency to stare off into space and daydream, and to be a bit more melancholy than other children her age.

Approximately eight years before “aurora day”, scientists believed, the universe from which les volants came had already begun to affect Aile’s Earth in some still-unknown way. Approximately eight years before “aurora day”, Jean (Papa) and Adeline (Maman) Molyneaux were pregnant and preparing for a new baby. Only a few months later, they learned the baby was a girl, and, on a whim, chose her somewhat unusual name, Aile. Papa and Maman were a little unusual, themselves, at the time; it was not for another several years after Aile’s birth that they began feeling a need to be that most wretched of things, “responsible”, and began a systematic program of becoming more respectable.

Jean began inviting colleagues for dinner parties, for which Adeline cooked half the day; Aile was pressed into service as a kitchen assistant, and then took a mad dash to her room to freshen up and change into nicer clothes before the guests began to arrive. Entrées were served over small talk, and everything proceeded from there. Wine was served, tongues loosened, and if Aile had a lucky day, there were crêpes for dessert rather than fruit and yogurt.

Her parents tried to draw her into the conversation here and there, in safe places; for as everyone who has had children knows, they have a tendency to say some strange and embarrassing things sometimes. Aile tended to be a good, if quiet, conversationalist at these parties, exactly what Papa and Maman desired from her; but on a fey evening, she was likely to say things that were even stranger and more embarrassing than the indiscretions of her peers.

“Did you know,” she’d ask the wife of one visitor, “that fairies don’t actually use their wings to fly? To think–it’s just pixie dust! They don’t really need them at all.” She sounded scandalized.

“I learned just the other day,” she said to another visitor as he was complimenting Adeline’s cooking, “that an egg is actually a baby bird that could have been. Can you imagine it? To get that close, and then oop! Into the omelet with you.” Her eyes were pained.

To Aile, her observations were earnest, and she couldn’t understand why she upset other people. But she learned to discern which statements caused awkwardness, and which did not. The former were consigned increasingly to her own mind, and her melancholy increased little by little as she learned that no one understood her preoccupations, not even the other children. She had been in more than one fist fight with boys who were tossing pebbles at pigeons.

Then, near her eighth birthday, the very foundation of Aile’s understanding of the world changed. For most, the change was one of upset, of comfortable ways being knocked down and the general arising of chaos. For Aile, the change was all of the jumbled puzzle pieces in her mind finally falling into a coherent picture, of so many things making sense suddenly. The change was an immense peace and yet an immense burden. One of the first winged visitors had landed near her home, and Aile ran out to greet her, ignoring the general panic indoors. Holding the bird-woman’s warm hand and looking up into her eyes, Aile’s life entered a whole new epoch.