On the Island where I come from
the first signs of puberty happen at night. A boy wakes to feel a fire inside him, like an ache, a hunger, an indefinable wish, followed by the first prickling of wings. It hurts so much when the wings break through the flesh, each wing-bone a knife in the skin. (Picture it as the sharp beak of a baby bird pecking its shell. Only the shell is a skin full of nerve-endings.) Then there is the blood, the shame, the need to cover it up so no one will know. This, the boy learns, is how it feels to be a man. Nothing he does, says, or prays can ever make him feel safe from what he has become