Cecelia Ahern - Roar

The throbbing in her back intensifies. It spreads from her lower spine all the way to her shoulders. Shooting pain, that aches but also brings a strange relief. Like contractions during labour, coming and going but building in intensity all the time, powerful waves of super strength.

As she nears the women, they stop talking and turn to her. They are blocking the path, she will have to ask them to move aside. It is childish, but it is real. The pain in her back is so intense it prevents her from speaking. She feels the blood rushing to her head, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She feels her skin straining on her back, tightening. She feels as though she will be torn open, just as when her babies were born. And it is because of this she knows that life is coming. She lifts her chin, she straightens up, she looks the women directly in the eye, not afraid, not intimidated. She feels immense power, immense freedom, something these women don’t understand – and how could they? Their freedom has never been threatened, they have no experience of how effective war is in turning men, women and children to ghosts, in turning the mind into a prison cell, and liberty to a taunting fantasy.

The skin on her back is taut now and she can feel the fabric of her black abaya stretching and stretching. Then there’s a ripping sound and she feels air on her back.

‘Mama!’ her son says, looking up at her wide-eyed. ‘What’s happening?’

Always anxious about what’s next. She delivered him to freedom but he is still in custody, she sees it in him every day. Not so much her daughter, who is younger and adapted more easily, though both will forever see all life through the gauze of truth.

The abaya rips completely and she feels a violent surge from behind, as she’s pulled upward. Her feet leave the ground with the force of it, then land again. She takes the children with her.

Her son looks fearful, her daughter giggles. The women with the tennis bags look at her in shock. Beyond them she sees a lone woman, hurrying away from the school, who stops and smiles, hands to her mouth in surprise and delight.

‘Oh, Mama!’ her little girl whispers, letting go of her hand and circling her. ‘You grew wings! Big beautiful wings!’

The woman looks over her shoulder and there they are: majestic porcelain-white feathers, over a thousand of them in each wing, she has a seven-foot wingspan. By tensing and untensing her back muscles she discovers that she can control her wings, that all this time her body was working in preparation for flight. Her primary wings are at the tips of her fingertips. Her daughter squeals with delight, her son clings to her tightly, wary of the women staring at them.

She relaxes her muscles, folds her wings closer to her body and wraps them around her children, cocooning them. She lowers her head and huddles with them – it is just the three of them, wrapped in white warm feathery delight. Her daughter giggles. She looks at her son and he smiles shyly, surrendering to this miracle. Safety. The elusive treasure.

She slowly opens her wings again, to their full grand span, and she lifts her chin in the air, feeling like an eagle on top of the highest mountain. Proud, reclaimed.

The women still block the path, too shocked to move.

The woman smiles. Her mother once told her, the only way to the end is to go through. Her mother was wrong; she can always rise above.

‘Hold on tight, my babies.’

She feels their trusting grips tighten around her hands; they cannot be torn apart.

Her wingspan is enormous.

Those little hands gripping hers are all the motivation she needs. Everything was always for them. Always has been, always will be. A better life. A happy life. A safe life. Everything they are entitled to.

She closes her eyes, breathes in, feels her power.

Taking her children with her, she lifts upwards to the sky, and she soars.

She sits on the bench in the park every weekday at lunchtime, the same bench, the same park, beside the lake. The wooden bench is cold beneath her. She curses, stands, pulls her coat down lower over her rear end and sits again, the padding protecting her a little more. She unwraps her ham-and-cheese baguette and spreads the tinfoil open over her lap. A squished tomato oozes beneath the bread, causing it to become soggy. This tips her over the edge.

‘Fucking shitty motherfucking tomato.’

She could tolerate her intolerable colleagues at work. She could tolerate the disgusting man on the bus beside her this morning who picked his nose for the entire trip and rolled his snot on the balls of his fingers as if she couldn’t see him. But the tomato. The fucking tomato is the icing on the cake. She’d only wanted cheese and ham and this unwanted addition has turned her bread to mush, leaving the cheese squished and stuck to the bread as though it’s all one gooey substance.

‘Bastard tomato,’ she grumbles, throwing the entire baguette on the ground. The ducks can have it.

Every lunch hour she visits the city park. Her office is nearby. Stocks, trading, asshole colleagues. This bench is the quietest, it is set away from everybody else. She comes here to feed the ducks and as she does she mumbles about the people who piss her off. She vents her frustrations over her fuckwit boss, her delusional colleagues, the turbulent stock markets. Feeding the ducks is her punchbag.

Most of her colleagues go to the gym on their lunch breaks, run off their issues for forty-five minutes and return to their desks cocksure and smelling of active shower gel and deodorant, and throbbing with testosterone. She prefers the fresh air, the peace, no matter what the weather. She needs to grumble and rant, and with every piece of bread she throws, a problem is eliminated and a little of the frustration ebbs away. Only, she’s not too sure it works – sometimes she finds herself getting worked up into a seething frenzy as her head fills with all the things she should have said – valid points and arguments she should have made back in the office.

She stares at the lump of soggy bread roll she has thrown on the ground. A few ducks fight over it, peck at it, but ultimately it falls well short of the all-out battle she’d thought it would spawn, which only goes to prove how unappetizing the baguette is.

‘You should have broken it up into pieces,’ a male voice interrupts her thoughts. She looks up and around with surprise. There’s nobody there.

‘Who said that?’

‘Me.’

Her eyes fall upon a mallard, standing away from the other ducks that are pecking at the bread roll, and each other.