…the bird started to beat its wings. However, it didn't look like it was going to fly away. It looked like it was just flapping its wings back and forth.
This barely started when Clare suddenly felt something building up on her back. At first, it was a small lump no bigger than her fist, situated right between her shoulder blades. However, as the bird kept flapping its wings, the lump got bigger and bigger. The pain that this caused was mind-numbing.
In less than a minute, the lump took up her entire back and seemed to smooth out into two equally-large lumps. At that point, the bird started to chirp in a steady rhythm. The lumps began to split open and the skin over the lumps quickly decayed and fell off. Where the lumps were, there was now a pair of bird-like wings that matched the color of her hair. They were folded and no bigger than her forearm. Clare was still numb with pain and unaware with what was going on.
The little bird stopped flapping its wings and folded them now. It took a look at Clare's back and apparently did not like what it saw. Now, it suddenly spread its wings out. Clare's own wings spread out underneath the shirt in direct imitation of the bird. Then the bird arched its wings backward, and Clare's did the same. The pressure that the wings held on her shirt was too much, and they managed to tear out two equal-sized holes in the back of her shirt; they did not completely tear the shirt to shreds, however.
Now that the wings were free to move outside of the shirt, the bird started to flap its own wings and chirp in its own rhythm again. Now, Clare's own wings began to beat in unison with the bird's. As the bird continued its little routine, Clare's wings began to grow in size, bones lengthening and new, longer feathers growing out at the tips. At first the change wasn't quite noticeable, then it was, as the wings got to growing around 1 inch in span per second. As the wings grew bigger, her papers were thrown about the room, and she herself was rising into the air.
After what seemed a lifetime of pain of Clare, but was only a minute in reality, the bird stopped moving, and was now looking at her as she 'fell' back onto the ground. Her wings had grown quite immense, reaching a span of about 32 ft from wingtip to wingtip. As the bird folded its wings, Clare's did as well. Now, when she stood, her folded wings would reach from about ankle height to about a couple of inches above her head.
"Ow…" Clare said, rubbing her head as her headache easily went away. "I wonder what that was all about…" She looked out at the bird waiting there, looking at something behind her back. She turned around… and that's when she saw her wings. She was about to scream when she covered her mouth before she got a chance to scream, remembering that her parents were asleep and she shouldn't wake them up. Still, she was quite mystified by her new appendages, and tried moving them around. It actually felt like second nature moving them around, and when she tried to flap them up and down, she rose about a few inches into the air. Flight was definitely possible, she supposed.
Looking back at the bird, she wondered why that little bird would do this to her. She then noticed all of her papers thrown across the room. She quickly picked them all up and put them back on the desk.
"How am I going to explain this to my parents?" she wondered aloud. But then…