We had to take the stairs, because my wings couldn’t fit in the elevator.

It was embarrassing. I tried holding my arms high at first, trying to keep the feathers from trailing the steps, and it looked like I was pantomiming being led off in chains. But then I came to the landing, and even though it was on the outside of the motel it had an enclosed ceiling that my feathers were brushing against. So I had to backtrack and try again, walking backwards while holding my hands in front of me as though I were jogging or boxing.

“You look like Rocky in reverse,” Jen said, watching me from the landing.

“Hush.” I gritted my teeth, as I felt my wings brush the walls of the stairwell. I couldn’t see them, but I already knew they were curved outwards from my arms. I’d found that out yesterday.

I pressed my hands together like I was praying, trying to keep my wings close enough together that they didn’t bump into anything. “Now you look like you’re doing penance,” Jen observed, as I got up to the landing.

“Hush.” She went up the stairs the rest of the way, as I carefully rounded the landing without bumping my wings into anything. I stopped for a moment to look out over the parking lot, at the sides of buildings and the freeway in the distance, and I started to feel claustrophobic. I focused on the white puffs of breath in front of me instead, and started working my way up the second flight of stairs.

“I’m serious, Arrow.” Jen still called me by my screen name. “You’re being OCD about this. It’s like Mister Monk Becomes a Yokai or something.”

“I am not a yokai.” I finally got up to the second floor, beside her. “And I didn’t ask to have my nerves backfire like this. If my insurance was any good I’d be seeing a doctor about it, not this … this … friend of yours.”

Beneath her scarf and stocking cap, she was trying not to smile. I followed her eyes down to my hands, which I was still holding out in front of me.

“This isn’t funny!”

“Okay, then.” She started off down the walkway, on the side of the motel. “This way.”

I followed her past the rows of numbered doors. Trying to calm my nerves, and ignore the strain in my wrists from holding my hands up so long. I could just let my “wings” drag, of course, but it didn’t feel right. It was like walking up to a wall, and feeling your face plant into it from a foot away. I didn’t know how to describe it, except that it was just really unnerving.

I rounded the corner, and saw Jen stop in front of her friend’s room. I hurried to join her, but just as I did one of the housekeepers came out of a door ahead of me, and started pushing her cart past. I pressed myself to the railing with my arms out in front of me, but my inside wing wasn’t close enough, and I felt the cart slide slowly and painfully past it. My face contorted, as I felt my feathers get pulled back and break, and I squeaked in pain just as she went past.

Jen stood there a moment watching me from down the walkway, as the housekeeper rounded the corner. Then she came up and saw the pained look on my face. “What’s wrong?”

“It hurts,” I said through my teeth, my eyes still locked on the ceiling.

“Do you need me to scratch it for you again?”

“Yes!”

She started to do so, and I recoiled. “Not that way!”

“Which way, then?”

“Towards … that way,” I said, pointing. “Away from me.”

She moved her hands through the air out in front of me, trying to smooth my feathers back into place without being able to see or feel them. It stung at first, but after a moment I let out my breath as the pain stopped.

I stifled a grin. I could feel her massaging my wing, and it actually felt kind of nice.

“Is that better?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She stepped back, and I stood away from the railing, still holding my hands out. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Her friend wore a white sweater and blue jeans, and had vaguely asian features. “Sorry about the mess,” she said, sweeping food wrappers into the trash from the desk where her laptop was set up. “I’ve got ten more articles to write if I want to make this week’s rent.”

I looked around at the inside of the room … cardboard boxes piled against one wall, canned goods stacked next to the microwave. The coat rack was crammed full of clothing on hangers, and her laptop was old and beat up. She switched off the TV, then tossed the remote on the bed before looking up at me. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced.”

Jen took a deep breath. “Arrow, this is Katherine Sato; Kath, Arrow Quivershaft.”

She held out her hand, and I looked back down at her. I’d been peering at the display set up on the nightstand … it looked like there were ceramic figurines of some kind, set up around a large “jewel” that I was pretty sure was made of glass.

I shook her hand carefully, stepping back a bit so that my feathers didn’t bump into anything. “Uh, hey … ”

“So you decided to take a new name?” she asked, letting go.

I just looked at her blankly.

Jen coughed. “I think it’d work great for him … but no, that’s just his screen name.”

“Oh.” Kath cocked her head at her. “I thought you said he was a yo-”

Jen coughed again, louder and more insistent, and I could feel my face turning red. “I see,” Kath said, examining me as if she were looking for something. Looking closely at my hands and arms.

I clenched my fists, and tried to think of a polite way to put this. “Can you help me, or not?”

“That depends,” she said, “on what you want to be helped with.”

“I want this to stop.” My eyes were drawn to the jewel on the nightstand again. “I want these feelings to go away, so I can get back to my life without worrying about … bumping into things with nonexistent body parts.” My face was still red. “Can you help me with that?”

“Absolutely.” Kath nodded.

“You can?” I stared at her. After getting talked at by Jen on the ride here, I’d thought I was going to get a hard sell on converting to yokaiism.

“Yep.” She sat down at her laptop, and typed in a URL. “I just want to make sure that you know what you’re dealing with, first.”

I sideyed Jen, as she sat down on a bed piled with more clothes. Then I looked back at the screen. It was a website for an Android app, and there was a big QR code — like a blocky bar code — to the side of the page. “You’ve got a smartphone, right?” Kath looked up.

“Yeah, one sec … ” I raised one of my arms, stepping around awkwardly to keep my wing from brushing the wall, and carefully got out my phone from its case. Then I brought up the barcode reader and scanned her laptop’s screen, and my phone asked me if I wanted to install the app. I tapped “Okay.”

“What is this?” I asked.

“An augmented reality app. It layers a visual overlay onto your phone’s camera view, so you can see things that you otherwise couldn’t.”

“Like what?” I watched the progress bar as it installed.

“Try it and find out.”

I started the app, holding my phone towards the wall in both hands. It was dark there, so I turned towards Jen where she sat on the bed. Then I stared.

She was looking up at me, bemused, but that’s not what I was staring at. I could see my wings — huge brown and tan primary feathers, protruding out from my arms. One of my fingers got in front of the screen, and I could see a bird’s scaly, taloned digit. (The jewel on the nightstand looked normal, though … I checked.)

“How is this possible?” I asked, waving one hand in front of the lens. My hand felt the same as I clenched it, and wiggled my fingers around. But it looked like a hawk’s foot, shaped like a hand.

“It isn’t,” Kath said.

“What do you-” I jumped back, dropping my phone. I’d turned to look through it at her, and had seen a white fox’s face, and three fluffy tails right behind her.

I stared at her, pressed back up against the door, as Jen reached down and picked up my phone. “That wasn’t because of the app,” Kath said, calmly, as though she’d expected my reaction. “You can already see people’s real selves. You just needed an excuse to try.”

My heart pounded, and I could feel sweat form on my fists as I kept them held out in front of me. “But you didn’t even tell me that that’s what it’s for,” I argued. “How was I supposed to know?”

“You knew.”

Jen was holding my phone out to me. I took it, carefully, and looked through it at Kath again. Her fox-form seemed blurred and out of focus now, and it hurt my eyes to look at it. I turned the phone off.

“Okay … ” I took a deep breath, trying to make the words come out right. Fighting down panic, and fidgeting with the phone in my hands to distract myself. “This is not what I came here for. I don’t want a lesson in yokaiism or what I’m ‘supposed’ to be. I just want to go back to being myself.”

Kath was unperturbed. “This is yourself.”

“I’m leaving now.” I reached for the door, feeling my feathers rustle as I did so.

“No, Arrow, wait … ” Jen stood up, and put her hand on my wrist. “She’s right, one way or another. Even if this is just your brain playing tricks on you, then that’s still a part of yourself.”

I looked at her, trying to control my breathing, and wondered if she could see just how scared I was.

“You know they’d just put you on drugs at the hospital, even if you could afford to be treated. So let’s see what Kath has to say, alright? Why don’t you sit down and tell her how this all started.”

I let Jen guide me to where she’d been sitting, on the bed next to the heater, careful not to bump my feathers against things. Then, slowly, I let out my breath and let my arms rest at my sides, feeling my wings touch the bed. Jen stepped over them, and came to sit down a few feet away.

I looked up at Kath. Just for a moment, I could see the fox muzzle that I’d seen through my phone. Then I saw her face, expectant and nonjudgmental. Waiting for me to begin.

I looked away and closed my eyes, trying to think how to start. “I’m not sure if you know what I do for a living … ”

“I don’t.”

“I give tours on an historic submarine. An old naval vessel.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The sailors who lived there … it wasn’t like Star Trek or something. It wasn’t even like today’s subs. They were crammed in with barely enough room to move. There’s a reason that we can’t give tours to handicapped or overweight people. The corridor’s only a couple feet wide, and just getting in and out of the bunks, or the tables in the ship’s mess … it takes some doing.”

“Are you claustrophobic?” I heard her ask.

“I wasn’t before this … ”

“What happened?”

I swallowed, tensing up as I remembered. “I was giving a tour … ”

“Uh-huh.”

“I was in front of everyone else. A whole tour group … like a homeschool group or something. Kids and younger teens. They weren’t playing on the equipment or anything, but they were asking a ton of questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like … how the equipment worked, and stuff. I don’t remember. It was getting harder and harder to think.”

I couldn’t hear her say anything, so I just went on. “It started with this itching, all over my forearms. I couldn’t stop scratching. I was getting embarrassed; I mean, I was wearing short sleeves and all. Then I felt them.”

“Your wings?”

“Yes.” My heart pounded harder as I said that. Up to that point, I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that that’s what they were.

I went on, starting to shake and to sweat. “I could feel them pressed against things, crammed up against the walls. I couldn’t reach out and demonstrate stuff anymore. I couldn’t … I could barely move.” I was losing control of my breathing, and had to take a couple of deep breaths. “I had to get out of there. I couldn’t explain why, I just needed to. The whole tour group had to go back outside and make way for me. And the kids made rude jokes about what they thought I needed to do, but I didn’t go to the bathroom; I didn’t even head for my car. I walked.”

“You walked off the park grounds?”

“Yes. I didn’t even explain to the manager. I couldn’t, I was messed up so bad. I was scared, I didn’t know what was happening to me … I mean … okay, I knew. Okay? I knew what was going on, but I was scared. I was scared that it’d keep going, and I was scared that I wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

“I had to give him a ride back to the dorms,” Jen said. “He called me when he was halfway there.”

As long as I was spilling my guts in front of them anyway, I decided to just keep going. Opening my eyes now, and fidgeting more with my phone. “It was knowing that made it so terrifying. If my legs had just given out all of a sudden, I wouldn’t have been afraid; not at first. I would’ve been upset, and confused, and then heartbroken when I realized I’d have to adjust. But this … ” I moved my hands to gesture at myself, and could feel my wings as I did so. “This is what I … what I’ve … ”

“What you’ve always wanted?” Kath asked.

“Yes, and I know it makes no sense for me to be so upset like this. Okay?” I fought back a shiver, as I saw her tails swish in my peripheral vision. “I’ve been a furry for years now. And awhile back I was on a huge reading kick about yokai … wondering what it’d be like, and stuff. Reading people’s stories.”

“Did you know what species you were?”

“Nnn … ” I gritted my teeth. Then I sighed, slumping my shoulders. “I knew what species I wanted to be. What caught my attention the most. I made my fursona a red-tailed hawk … ” I started sweating again, as I said it. It felt like the words were sacred.

“And?”

“And that’s it. I never ‘came out;’ I never posted on any yokai boards or anything. I just went back to being a furry.”

“How come?”

A chime sounded on Kath’s laptop. She walked over and closed the lid, and I looked away so that I wouldn’t see her; her fox muzzle, and her tails. I swallowed, waiting for her to go back to her chair, and went on. “Well, partly because of how silly it was. They never prove anything, I mean; it’s just like a religion that way. And besides that, they’re always some cool, awe-inspiring species, like raptors or dragons or something. How come there aren’t any cockroach or warthog yokai?”

“Maybe the kinds of people who are born with those spirits aren’t given to introspection,” Kath offered.

“Yeah, see?” I held up my wing. “That’s a ‘faithful’ answer. That doesn’t answer my question.”

Kath ignored that. “You said that was only part of the reason. What was the rest of it?”

I looked down at the floor, as my face turned red. “Because I felt like I didn’t deserve it.”

“Oh?”

I was turning the phone over and over in my hands. “I’ve been up close, next to an injured red-tailed hawk, before. They’re not … they’re huge,” I blurted out, talking until my brain caught up. “They’re like two feet tall, and they look so streamlined and perfect. They can fly, for goodness’ sake! I see them soaring overhead, and it’s like I remember what it was like. And I want to join them, so bad.”

“So because it meant so much to you, that’s why you had so much trouble accepting yourself as one.”

“Yeah, I-” I paused. I felt my skin crawl, as sweat broke out all across it. She hadn’t talked about turning into a hawk, she’d talked about accepting that I already was one.

“I don’t know,” I made myself say, my voice shaky.

“So what do you want to do?” Jen asked.

And I knew the answer, of course. I knew what I’d dreamed and fantasized about. I just wasn’t ready for this. I couldn’t; not with my job, not with the classes I needed to take. Not with my life the way that it was. But more than that, it was scary because I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t know what I’d become, or what it would feel like. I just knew that I wouldn’t be able to go back.

A change like this sounds wonderful when you dream about it. But when you have to face it, it’s terrifying.

I took a deep breath, then another. Trying to calm my nerves, and to think of a reasonable course of action. “I … I want-”

The power went out.

The heater shut down, and stopped blowing hot air behind me. The only light in the room came from the curtains, filtered through shade trees outside, and the soft glow of Kath’s sleep-mode laptop. She sighed, and I saw her outline facepalm.

“A brownout?” Jen asked.

“Looks like it,” Kath deadpanned.

I squirmed. “I should go … ”

I heard a puff like a furnace starting, and saw a flickering glow. Kath was holding out one hand, with a … cigarette lighter? … in it, but I only saw the flame, as though it was dancing on her fingertips. And as she talked, I saw the outline of a thin, vulpine muzzle, and saw hints of movement in the air behind her. Where her three tails were swishing.

“Listen.” My heart pounded, as I strained to hear what she was saying. “Your ‘problem’ is not going to just go away. I tried, when I was younger. But something always reminded me, and I fought and fought until I broke down, and realized I couldn’t anymore. Not and still be myself. I’ve seen people who’ve put this behind them, but they had to become someone totally different, so you’re going to change one way or another. It’s your choice what form that takes.”

“Okay … ” I was shivering, and not from the cold. My gaze was fixed on the twitching outlines of her tails, because I couldn’t look up at her face.

“Maybe you don’t have to change all the way right now. Maybe there’s a way you can live with yourself and still be this self. But whatever it is, you’re not doing it right now, because if you were this wouldn’t have happened.”

“So you think I should-” I stopped, as Kath got up. She walked right in front of me, to open the door, and as she did her tails smacked me in the face. I saw them, and felt them, and I jumped in my seat and tried to brush the fur out of my face.

When I looked up, and saw her in the light from outside, she just looked like a normal woman. “I don’t know what you should do,” she said, putting one hand on her hip. “But my guess? You’re a bird of prey, and your instincts triggered when you were locked in a submarine. Maybe that’s not natural for you.

“Maybe you need to fly.”