In dreams you have been learning to fly, but the doctor only nods and smiles and pretends to listen when you try to tell him. He checks your reflexes and presses the coldness of his stethoscope against your spine, making patient noises with his mouth while you talk on.

You have been Awake twelve hours now and the world is bright and glossy and full of gleaming surfaces, just how you remember it to be. When you lift a hand (feeling a little sorry to find it stripped of feathers but captivated by the firm bones and matured tendons) the floor reflects your movements like a mirror. On the opposite side of the glass wall the grainy-looking figures you know to be your parents raise their hands in similar gestures, beaming, and though you have yet to speak to them you cannot wait to leave. It is your tenth and final year of Sleep (same as the amount of fingers on your feet and hands – you feel proud to have developed without any mutations there) and behind the glass the mother-figure holds ten helium-filled balloons while the father smiles and aims his camera.

You are going home – home! – just as soon as the doctor satisfies himself with the results, and you find the tension suddenly unbearable. You gulp and shudder and flex your fingers, restless. There is so much to say, to learn, to do (the prospect of flying excites you the most, even if you had to trade feathers for real skin) and you are sure your parents will listen to your dreams. Maybe you can even teach them.

“Hold on a moment,” the doctor laughs, almost maddeningly patient. He doesn’t understand your need to soar, the aching instinct to taste and touch air. You need to feel flight again, to extend your dream-wings and close your eyes, and the only way you will do that is if the doctor finally concludes his testing. One gloved hand probes methodically over the curvature of your shoulders as he consults his charts.

“Ten years to the day, are you? We understand your excitement, but a mature child must have learned tolerance by now.”

Baffled and slightly humiliated, you assure him that you can wait; you even clamp your hands between your knees to show off your ability to sit still. It was only the dreams that made you impatient, you explain; them, and the prospect of staying Awake (and flying) whenever you chose. He listens with perpetual calmness and hums an unrecognizable tune as he sorts through your file. You watch, vaguely agitated.

Your blood had been scrupulously tested during the first six hours of Waking; you have been found innocent of all the typical and atypical bodily mutations. The charts have all the proof, but the doctor seems interested in something else. He disregards the lab notes and flips to the inner documents; you seem to hover over the edge of the examination table as you wait on the verdict. To calm yourself you think of clouds, imagine the warm wind scraping your hair and tilting your wings…

A quick, angry pain between your shoulder blades causes you to cry out, as brutal and unanticipated as though you have been pierced by a knife. It is gone almost as soon as you become aware of it, but already you are (breathless) doubled over and the doctor is clicking his tongue and pinching the skin between your shoulder blades. Vaguely you are aware of a thrumming, throbbing sensation – a creature waxing and yawning beneath your skin – and when you glance up again the glass wall stares back at you, empty.

Hoarsely, you ask for your parents; you would like to go home now. The doctor is as unhurried as ever; he jots a note and rummages briefly with a gleaming side panel full of buttons before shaking his head.

He is sorry, but there has been a certain, ah, malfunction with your Sleep mode patterns. You are a rare case, but these things happen. Every once in a while a specimen’s imagination becomes stubborn enough to defeat the Growing censors, so that the things it ought to be learning in Sleep (adaptation, socialization, motor skills) become occluded by the specimen’s unconscious will. Like a parasite feeding off its host, this type of case can distort or even obliterate vital learning memory and may lead to some physical changes.

“These, of course, are easily corrected,” he explains, as the examination door opens and a nurse slips in, muffled by a mask and pulling a silver cart along behind her. Your parents are nowhere to be seen, and it suddenly occurs to you that you aren’t going home after all. Not for a long while, maybe. The doctor chats on, oblivious to the buzzing in your brain and the distant commotion in that secret place between your shoulders, as of a phantom bird battling for freedom.

“Not to worry. We’ve caught your case just in time, otherwise it would’ve given your folks quite the shock. Once it sets in it’s a little frightening how quickly these things develop, even outside Sleep. Why, we’ve had a specimen who dreamt of swimming and ended up with external gills, of all things! In your case… well, it’s a shame your folks aren’t pilots, isn’t it?”

You swallow the capsules the nurse urges toward you, but before you lie back down you ask the doctor if there’s a chance you will be able to fly again. You need to stretch your wings, you tell him; they are so cramped and itchy beneath your skin and you fear that they will wilt if they don’t get some air soon. The sky is an instinct, and you crave it as desperately as a fish craves water.

“Not to worry,” is all he will tell you. “You will be fixed soon. A malfunction, you understand…”

The rest of his words slip from your head and into a blue oblivion. The clouds are cotton against your feathers, and on your final flight the air is delightfully warm.