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The Last Aviator

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Nature's aviators, even the smallest, are perhaps not so very different from those in the human world...

 

The aviator lay quite still upon the ground, so still in fact that the meaning of her posture could not be mistaken. The wings which had kept her aloft for so long were as motionless as her body, which had curled in upon itself, as if adopting the classic crash position. The impact had made her a prisoner of gravity, entombing her in a dungeon she would never escape from. It was plain that her plunge from the sky had been as decisive and as irreversible as the one suffered by Icarus himself. One wing lay half raised to the sun, like a flag abandoned on a battlefield.  Her lonely death was out of keeping with all that had gone before for she had lived the life of the many rather than the one. Or perhaps it might have been fairer to say that she had lived for the many, for her role had often been that of the lone scout, hunting out provisions for her kinsmen.....

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In another age she might have flown on, at least until the motor that powered her wings had nothing left to give, the spring wound down, its energies depleted, her meagre store of days exhausted by what passed in her world for old age. Eventually her wings simply collapsed like sails without a mast, unable any longer to hold the wind.  

There may have been some last filament of consciousness left in her body like a stray signal trapped in a wireless set. So perhaps she heard the words that marked her passing.

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"Oh, dear it looks like Mr Bumble has taken a tumble."

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"Is he dead? " 

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"Looks that way."  

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"Make sure, will ya. One of those things stung me once. Stamp him out."

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"Pleasure." 

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But even then, when the boot had done its worst, there was something left behind, no more than the most tenuous of oscillations and perhaps not even that, as what remained of the wings, now disjoined from their owner’s body, rose on the wind, spiralling upwards like sycamore seeds climbing an invisible stairwell. In that moment the essence of her wings might have dispersed like smoke upon the breeze but the Earth wouldn’t let her go. Just as the wind had carried her wings away so it brought them back again, the revenants slipping down to cover the body of the sleeping aviator like a shroud.

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In time the air filled with the hum of other flyers, with a chorus of lament and remembrance. And still, despite the envy and the spite of men, despite her mortal injuries, as the wings came to rest, what might be called her soul found its way home, navigating by means of the compass which in life had never let her down and which now remained true even in death, allowing the aviator to find her way back to fields of pollen rising skywards in the warm sunlight.

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Extract from the short story The Last Aviator

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