She's standing at the pickup counter at the coffeeshop, relaxed, looking at her phone. Just another face in a busy morning crowd. But something about this woman draws your gaze.
Your grandma - crazy old lady she was - said to you once that you had a gift of perception. Of seeing hidden things most folks miss. You dismissed her at the time, but some days, you catch glimpses.
Shapes in the sodium-lit night, flitting lights in the park, great-winged shadows between the skyscrapers. And sometimes you find your eye drawn to people. People who seem different, like this girl.
She's got a regal air to her, but also a wildness. A pride written across her face. Her hair is a messy mop, and yet you can easily picture it on a warrior queen of old. Her eyes are the brightest brown you've ever seen - almost golden. As her order arrives - good lord, that is a very large frappe - you notice her movements seem... restrained. As if she was moving through a corridor decorated with a hundred fragile hanging dishes - careful, all too aware of her own strength.
She catches you looking, and glances back. But she doesn't look annoyed or bothered, just bemused. Her gaze is peircing, her pupils oddly narrow. She flashes a sharp little smile from the corner of her mouth. Then she mouths something, wordlessly. You aren't the best lip reader, but you swear she's saying - You're like me, too.
She grabs her frappe, turns for the door. She gives another wry glance at you on your way out. Then she points her hand up above her forehead, and traces a sweeping motion, upwards and backwards. Tracing a shape, growing upwards from her head - like... horns.
You think about that little encounter the rest of the day. And that night, in your apartment, you catch a sight of yourself in the mirror.
And you realize how much she reminded you of yourself. You are kinda pretty in a sort of wild way, if you squint. Your eyes always had an almost red tint to them, your teeth were always a bit sharper...
You cock your head a bit to the side. Hmm. Horns? Why would she make a little hand signal for horns? What's the importance of that?
You close your eyes, try to picture yourself with horns, get your head into whatever weird metaphor she was trying to communicate at you. A shape comes to you, shockingly quick and natural. Branching in twain, thin, like gnarled yet relatively simple antlers.
And then, you open your eyes -
and they're there.
The horns you had pictured in your head... they're on your head, now. They're real. You frantically reach at it, poke it with a finger. No mistake about it. That's actual real physical horns, sprouting from your head. And yet... you don't feel panicked. They don't feel alien, but just... like a part of you that was always there, just that you simply haven't seen before. Without thinking, you make a quizzical little chittering noise.
You hear an odd roar-screech noise across the city. And you know, deep within, that there are great wings unfurled across the sky above you.
And you start to feel a sense of belonging that you've never felt before. You turn around, glance out your bedroom window.
And you know, in the very deepest part of your heart, that soon you'll spread your wings, too.
