Free The Anatomy of Wings by Karen Foxlee

any bird I would be a wedge-tailed eagle. If I was a wedge-tailed eagle I would live only for the joy of flight. I would soar at great heights, on top of the wind. I would be above everything, over the desert and scrub, over the long empty rivers, over the little towns clinging to the highway. I would be apart from everything.
    If I could have sung then it would have been a very sad song. I would have sung
If you miss the train I'm on, you will know that I have gone, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles.
    A long time before then Mum said I was bornwith my singing voice already inside me like a gift. She said everyone was born with a talent waiting to be discovered. When she said it she was putting on her Grape Freeze lipstick in front of the mirror and I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub making up songs.
    There are many different types of singing. There is singing to keep yourself company, which is like talking to yourself only with a tune. There is singing onstage to make other people happy, which requires practice and sweaty palms. And there is sudden singing, which happens when songs rise up, without warning, inside you and there is nothing that you can do but open your mouth and sing them.
    Sudden singing was the only type I really missed. When sudden singing happened it came out of the blue and made me feel so good that my toes curled up and I got goose bumps all over my body and tears in my eyes.
    Sometimes it was a simple unannounced
Somewhere over the rainbow
at the kitchen table. I would feel the tune coming. It unwound inside me. The words followed quickly and I couldn't stop them. They came out of my toes and my stomach and my skin. They flew out of my mouth like they had wings.
    It didn't matter at home because everyone was used to it. Danielle would tell me to shut up. Occasionally a wild and unexpected
Hey sister, go sister,
soul sister
would startle someone or Dad would shake his head and say Jesus Christ after a surprising
Hallelujah.
    After my singing voice got stuck I could still feel the sudden songs inside me piling up. I didn't know which songs they were, just that they were there. I could feel the outlines of them. It felt wrong. I held my stomach while they struggled. I couldn't even sing the anthem at school. I just had to hum quietly and the humming sounded strange in my ears. It had no tune.
    When I knocked on the door Nanna didn't answer straightaway but I heard her moving slowly toward the door.
    Finally her old crinkled hands came out of the dark cool inside and held my sun-warmed face between them.
    “Jennifer,” she said. “I knew you would come.”
    Inside everything was the same but she had changed. She was thinner. Her back hump stuck out more. The lines on her face had grown deeper. She hadn't brushed her two curtains of hair. When she opened the fridge to give me water there was only a packet of biscuits and nothing else. The kitchen window was shut and a fly buzzed madly against it. When she came close to me her breath smelled of sweet tea and sadness.
    “Tell me,” she said, pulling out a kitchen chair for me and dragging hers closer. “Tell me.”
    I told her about when the aunties and the cousins left. I told her about the beginning of school and Mr. Barnes. I told her about Angela but not the underarm hairs bit. I told her that Dad had gone back to work and how he made his own lunches. I told her that Danielle's perm had dropped quite a bit. I told her I was not allowed to visit her.
    Nanna looked very tired and when she spoke it was as though finding the words made her feel weary.
    “It is our secret,” she said.
    She poked her bony finger into my chest.
    “And what of this?” she said. “Is your voice still here?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    “Still stuck?”
    “Yes.”
    “Here, I have been thinking, I would like you to try this.”
    She took my cup and demonstrated for me. Instead of drinking from the side closest to her mouth she put her lips over the