Curiosity, Nature, and Transformation Theme Analysis

All the way round the house it had been the same. Just see it in your mind’s eye. Just imagine what could be done. All the way round I kept thinking of the old man, Ernie Myers, that had lived here on his own for years. He’d been dead nearly a week before they found him under the table in the kitchen.

I dreamed that the baby was in the blackbird’s nest in Mina’s garden. The blackbird fed her on flies and spiders and she got stronger and stronger until she flew out of the tree and over the rooftops and onto the garage roof.

I reached across his back and felt something beneath his other shoulder as well. Like thin arms, folded up. Springy and flexible.

[…]

“Who are you?” I said.

The blackbird sang and sang.

“They say that shoulder blades are where your wings were, when you were an angel,” she said. “They say they’re where your wings will grow again one day.”

“It’s just a story, though,” I said. “A fairy tale for little kids. Isn’t it?”

“Who knows? But maybe one day we all had wings and one day we’ll all have wings again.”

“D’you think the baby had wings?”

“Oh I’m sure that she had wings. Just take one look at her. Sometimes I think she’s never quite left Heaven and never quite made it all the way here to Earth.”

“Sometimes they’ll attack intruders. But they saw you were with me. They knew you were okay.”

She pointed to the back wall, a gaping hole where some plaster and bricks had fallen in.

“That’s the nest,” she said. “There’s chicks in there. Don’t go near. They’ll defend them to the death.”

“This is from a pigeon, we believe,” she said. She snapped the bone and it splintered. She showed me that it wasn’t solid inside, but was a mesh of needle-thin, bony struts.

“The presence of air cavities within the bone is known as pneumatization,” she said. “Feel it.”

I rested the bone on my palm. I looked at the spaces inside, felt the splinters.

“This too is the result of evolution,” she said. “The bone is light but strong. It is adapted so that the bird can fly. Over millions of years, the bird has developed an anatomy that enables it to fly. As you know from the skeleton drawings you did the other day, we have not.”

I was with the baby. We were tucked up together in the blackbird’s nest. Her body was covered in feathers and she was soft and warm. The blackbird was on the house roof, flapping its wings, squawking. Dr. MacNabola and Dr. Death were beneath us in the garden. They had a table filled with knives and scissors and saws. Dr. Death had a great syringe in his fist.

“Bring her down!” he yelled. “We’ll make her good as new!”

The baby squeaked and squealed in fright. She stood at the edge of the nest, flapping her wings, trying for the first time to fly. I saw the great bare patches on her skin: She didn’t have enough feathers yet, her wings weren’t strong enough yet.

She unfastened the buttons on his jacket. She began to pull his jacket down over his shoulders.

“No,” he squeaked.

“Trust me,” she whispered.

He didn’t move. She slid the sleeves down over his arms, took the jacket right off him. We saw what both of us had dreamed we might see. Beneath his jacket were wings that grew out through rips in his shirt. When they were released, the wings began to unfurl from his shoulder blades.

“But the [archaeopteryx] was a heavy, bony thing. Look at the clumsy, leaden tail. It was capable of nothing but short, sudden flights. From tree to tree, stone to stone. It couldn’t rise and spiral and dance like birds can now.”

[…]

I thought of the baby in my lap, of Skellig slung between Mina and me. I thought of his wings and the baby’s fluttering heart.

“There’s no end to evolution,” said Mina.

She shuffled closer to me.

“We have to be ready to move forward,” she said. “Maybe this is not how we are meant to be forever.”

I felt Skellig and Mina’s hearts beating along with my own. […] All I knew were the hands in mine, the faces turning through the light and the dark, and for a moment I saw ghostly wings at Mina’s back, I felt the feathers and delicate bones rising from my own shoulders, and I was lifted from the floor with Skellig and Mina.

“This is how they start their life outside the nest,” [Mina] said. “They can’t fly. Their parents still have to feed them. But they’re nearly all alone. All they can do is walk and hide in the shadows and wait for their food.”

[…]

“First day out,” whispered Mina. “Think Whisper’s had at least one of them already.”

[Mrs. McKee] talked about the way spring made the world burst into life after months of apparent death. She told us about the goddess called Persephone, who was forced to spend half a year in the darkness deep underground. Winter happened when she was trapped inside the earth. […] Spring came when she was released and made her slow way up to the world again.

[…]

“An old myth,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “But maybe it’s a myth that’s nearly true. Look around you, Michael. Fledglings and blooms and bright sunshine. Maybe what we see around us is the whole world welcoming Persephone home.”

I closed my eyes. I wanted to imagine nothing. The baby was dead. Skellig was gone. The world that was left was ugly, cold, terrifying. The blackbirds squawked and squawked while Mrs. Dando told Mina’s mother about what a great footballer I was, about how I loved having a crazy time with the other boys.

Then the owls flew back in and came to us. They laid something on the floor in front of us. A dead mouse, a tiny dead baby bird. Blood was still trickling through the ripped fur, through the young feathers. […]

“Savages,” I whispered.

“Killers,” said Mina. “Extraordinary presents, eh?”

“They think we’re something like them,” I said.

“Perhaps we are,” said Mina.