Brian lounged against the sofa, sipping a beer. His friends floated above him, talking animatedly and slowly spinning in the air as a group. Lisa caught his eye and glided toward him, her smile sweet but a little forced, as she reached out her hands for his and moved her body, pretending she was dancing with him.

He grinned and reached toward her, but she motioned for him to stand. The couch was low, more of a mattress with cushions really—fine for people who move effortlessly through the air. But they never seemed to understand that, muscular and fit as he was, it was irritating for Brian to have to scramble to his feet from the floor. Not to mention that his body ached from keeping up with them all day. He really wanted that beer.

But dark-haired, quick-eyed Brian was always game. He put down the beer and pushed himself up, trying to make it look easy. But he staggered as he got to his feet, and Lisa’s hands went to her mouth. “Oh, sorry, Brian! I didn’t think…”

“I’m fine!” He chuckled and swayed crazily on purpose. “Ya know. Brian, the klutz. And there’s the beer too.”

She wiggled in the air and then flowed around him languidly, stroking his cheek as she passed with a gentle breeze. “Your legs are sooo strong!” Her send gushed. “People think gimps are weak but they’ve never seen you hike over that ridge, like today. No wonder you have muscles.”

He smiled, a bit less broadly. This called for some modesty. The flavor of her send wasn’t fake exactly, but she did want gratitude. He ducked his head and managed to blush a little, by thinking of what she might actually look like undressed. Not that he would ever find out. And he carefully shielded that thought, as well, making sure not even the littlest hint slipped out.

“Liiiiisa!” The send was drunken and raucous. One of the other guys calling her back.

She giggled and gave Brian a parting smile.

Brian sank back on the low couch, making sure his face showed only mild amusement. Afterward, he would come to realize that that was the evening when he became aware of how much he pretended for the benefit of abled people.

Lisa and several of the others came to lounge on the couch near Brian but mostly turned slightly away from him. It wasn’t on purpose, not really. Most people just weren’t very aware of him. He rarely added much, except to laugh at other people’s jokes or clowning around.

Chad, a tall, handsome guy, popular with the girls, was talking long and loud about a professor who had given him a bad grade on a paper. “That ground crawler!” Brad’s send simmered with righteous anger. “He thinks we don’t have any other classes.”

“Chad!” Lisa flapped a hand in front of her face, feigning shock, as she cut her eyes at Brian.

“Well, obviously, not like you Bri,” Chad dismissed it. “You’re not an idiot.”

Brian laughed and patted Lisa gently to ease her discomfort. But the awkward feeling didn’t dissipate until Brian noticed it was time for him to catch the last shuttle. He left without forcing anyone to say goodbye. It was more than an hour later, sitting on the slow, clunky night shuttle, that Brian let himself clench a fist in anger. Yeah, it was a shitty term Chad had used.

“Ground crawler.”

That was the expression people used a lot to mean “idiot” or “asshole.” It wasn’t that they necessarily thought flightless people were stupid, though Brian knew a lot of them did wonder. His disability wasn’t neurological though. His wings had been severely injured at birth. It was a purely physical disability.

And Brian accepted his lot well enough. His parents had been matter-of-fact about it with him when he was a kid. They didn’t want him to develop self pity. There were shuttles for the old and infirm or for people with several small children. He could use those.

Because most flighted people lived in towers and much of the social life went on many floors above the ground, there was often a pulley system for bringing large furniture or supplies in and taking garbage out. Brian carried his own harness and clipped in to get up to his friends’ apartments or even to a lot of classes without stairs, though these days universities were required to build stairs to make the buildings accessible for the disabled.

All the hiking, using garbage pulleys, going the long way around to find the one staircase in a huge university complex and all that was a nuisance. But now that he no longer lived with his parents and in the shelter of their social group, Brian was starting to realize that was the least of his worries. His classmates and friends, even most professors, saw first and foremost the way he was nailed to the ground, awkward, clunky and forever limited.

It galled, especially completely unconscious, seemingly innocent comments like Chad’s. People used “ground crawler” or just “crawler” or “mud” as derogatory terms for all kinds of things. And mostly Brian was fine with it. It was just an expression. The people using those terms probably weren’t even remotely thinking about him when they did. But he was starting to realize that the attitudes behind that kind of expression did most definitely affect him.

A couple of weeks later, he was in an interview for a summer internship with a science lab. He’d seen the interviewer’s face stiffen when Brian came in, walking… on the floor. The supervisor’s questions lacked enthusiasm, despite the fact that Brian knew his grades and previous experience were the best in his class, likely the best in the whole biology department at the U.

When they moved on to the tour of the lab, he saw why. The whole place was set up for flight. The lab was completely 3D, work stations positioned on the walls of a giant amphitheater, information charted on screens hung in the middle, screens one had to move around to see all of. It would be laborious to reach the work stations with cables and pulleys. It would be impossible to quickly reference the screens without darting around in midair, as several lab techs were doing while Brian watched from below.

He let himself be shown out. They said they’d be in touch. They weren’t.

Brian had always resisted getting involved with “disability organizations.” He figured they were for people who weren’t able to integrate themselves into society. He was strong, smart, adaptable and in excellent physical condition, except for his wings, which he wrapped against his back to keep them from flopping around uselessly.

Creative commons image by randomix of flickr.com - an image of a Man dancing on a glacier

The night his attitude shifted yet a bit further was supposed to be a big celebration. Brian, Lisa, Chad and their whole group of friends were going out to a party put on to celebrate the end of term. It was also Brian’s birthday, so he thought he’d consider it a kind of a birthday party as well, maybe even let it slip at some point and Lisa or someone would propose a toast. That would be nice.

Lisa and two other girls even glided low on the way there to stay within sight of Brian as he hiked through the snow-clogged utility areas between the towers, spaces reserved for service trucks, construction crews and waste removal. But when they reached the gleaming new tower where the party was being held 200 feet off the ground, Lisa streaked up to ask about the pulley, since it wasn’t visible.

And Brian knew before she came back down quite a while later that it was one of those “out of order” situations. Who knew if it really was busted? Sometimes they just didn’t want to deploy it. Anyway, they’d refused, insisted it was a private club. They weren’t required by law to always have the pulleys operational. They were very sorry.

So was Lisa. She looked downcast and truly torn as her two girlfriends took off toward the party. She bit her lip and looked troubled. Brian wasn’t about to tell her it was his birthday to boot. He wanted real friends, not pity.

“Go on!” Brian sent with forced bravado. “I’m going to enjoy the walk home. Clear my head. No big deal.”

She waved and followed her friends. Brian felt conflicted inside. On the one hand, it felt wrong that the whole group should have to change their plans, if just one of them was barred from the place. But on the other hand, he couldn’t help thinking that they would have been furious and all refused to enter, if it had been someone else for some other reason, such as the club wouldn’t let in Black people, like Chad’s buddy Leon, or trans women like Lisa’s friend Erin. But when it was because they didn’t want to unroll all their cable, that was just kind of sad—if you were Lisa—or not worth even noticing—for most.

Brian walked in the gently falling snow, not homeward but further on between the towers, The lower floors were almost all used for technical stuff and there were few lights, but there was a big moon that cast a pale radiance on the snow. He shoved his hands into his pockets and kept a steady pace to try to walk off his irritation and loneliness.

Being mad will get you nowhere with friends. He’d tried a few times when he was younger—with his best friends in high school—just to ask for some small shift in plans that would let him go with them. And they were quick to take offense. Some of the guys had accused him of “faking” or at least not trying very hard, saying he was just playing for pity or else too lazy to go work out, which they thought could have cured him.

Others had argued vehemently in Brian’s defense, but even those had stopped seeing him as a close friend to hang out with and come to see him either as a cause to fight for or an “inspiration,” because of how he wouldn’t let distances or physical obstacles stop him.

Brian’s boot slipped and he staggered, barely catching himself and looking up from his bitter ruminations. That was the self-pity his parents had always warned him away from, he supposed. And here was something to lift his spirits. A flat expanse, a dusting of snow over hard thick ice. He remembered now that there was a lake in this area, between the towers. He’s swum in it freshman year in the summer. But it was the end of winter now and the ice had been frozen solid for weeks.

Brian slid out onto it, one foot then the other. He crouched and then pushed off with one foot, twirled. The ease of motion reminded him of the way abled people flew. He started to hum under his breath. With no one out there to see, he felt free to move. He took a couple of test stomps on the ice and then started to move to the beat of the song in his head, one of his favorites from the audio-radio. Tap tap tap, slide, tap tap tap swish!

The song wasn’t actually very popular. It was one he liked because of its staccato rhythm, like fast walking. Fliers had nothing very staccato in their world. Everything was smooth, and their music and dancing was like that, always gliding, always liquid. Brian liked foot-tapping, even knee-slapping music. He kept going out onto the ice, moving with the rhythm and then jump and slide and spin.

He fell, of course. But it wasn’t bad with a bit of snow on the ice and no one to see his clumsiness. He got up and went at it again until his breaths came fast and a cloud of frozen mist rose up around him. He wasn’t even the slightest bit cold anymore.

“You… fun… beauty…”

The send was disjointed, barely containing words. Brian stopped instantly, his hands falling to his sides and his slide turning into a slow turn.

“No… stupid… stop…”

“Yeah, you think I’m stupid, do you?” Brian hurled the thought into the darkness.

“I’m stupid, not you!” The sound slashed through the quiet night with shocking abruptness.

Brian spun around. There, on the lower ledge of one of the towers at the edge of the lake, sat a girl—slight and tan with blue tinted hair. And she’d yelled at him. No one yelled with sound, unless they were doing a comedy routine on TV and wanted to depict someone completely anti-social.

Technology had made using voice and sound more common. Yeas ago, Brian knew, it had been just a secret code for the mind blind. But today, people watched videos and listened to audio music. With advances in education, now everyone knew how to speak and understand audible language, not just sending. But still except for long-distance communication and recordings, which could not be done mentally, audible speech wasn’t used and especially not in a shout.

The girl fluttered down to him, her face twisted up into an expression of distress.

“Sorry… sorry… sorry,” she sent.

Brian put his hands in his pockets until she touched down near him, skimming across the ice.

“I do apologize,” she said in a quieter tone. “I shouldn’t have interrupted you.”

“Why are you talking?” Brian sent to her. “I’m not dumb, you know. It’s my wings that don’t work.”

She shook her head and looked down shyly. “Please speak out loud. It’s really not my thing, sending. I can’t do it much at all. You saw. My thoughts don’t send well, and I receive even less than I can send.”

“Really???” Brian’s voice creaked. He’d spoken in class exercises but never to friends.

“Really.” She grinned at him. “I’m mind blind and mostly mind dumb. Just the way I was born.”

“Oh, damn. I mean,” Brian struggled for the spoken words, “You’re not… I mean, that sounds like calling me a crawler.”

She laughed, a tinkling, sparkly sound. “True enough. You sure weren’t crawling just now. It was beautiful. Really. I meant it. That’s why I got a bit over enthusiastic.”

Brian shook his head. Audible words came stiffly to him. He wanted to express in some diplomatic way, that he understood that she was being kind, but that she didn’t have to. Fliers were always more beautiful than his clumsy movements. Instead he just shuffled his feet around.

“I mean it,” she said, as if she could pick out what he hadn’t even sent, let alone spoken for her benefit. “Flying can be beautiful, but when we push against something, push away, we just keep going. There is something so beautiful in your movement. You… always return. You… you move like a heartbeat, in a rhythm.”

The wistful way she said it did make it sound like something worthwhile or even admirable. Brian glanced up at her. Her face glowed with enthusiasm. She actually meant it.

“I’m Carrie, by the way,” she said, putting out her hand. He automatically responded, clasping hands the way fliers did.

“What are you doing out here?” he stumbled, trying to think of something relevant to say. “It’s sure cold for flying.”

“It is,” she nodded. “But most people at parties won’t talk the way I can hear. I go to the U, so I’ve seen you around. But I guess, I gave up on social life a long time ago.”

“You? You study?” Brian was trying to construct in his mind how that would work. The professors always sent. There were videos and recordings and all but mostly you had to sit in class and receive sendings from the professor and the other students.

“Yup, I study.” Carrie grinned, looking just a little smug. “I have a tablet that turns the professor’s sends into a kind of code, designed for the mind blind to communicate. It’s just squiggles on a screen or even on paper. It’s called writing.”

“Wow! That’s amazing!” It actually felt like Brian’s mind was expanding as new realizations and understandings settled in.

“It isn’t perfect, of course,” she chuckled with a sideways look as he turned back toward the towers. “The computer makes mistakes and it’s slow. If the prof talks on and on, it gets seriously behind and starts skipping random parts, which can be a problem. But it’s better than nothing.”

Now, they were gradually moving off of the ice toward the shelter of the buildings, Carrie hovering near and Brian sliding and skidding as he went.

“I guess I haven’t let myself think about how much I have in common with other people with disabilities,” he admitted finally. “I wanted to think I’m just physically disabled. I mean, like, at least I’m not mentally disabled. You know, as if that is really the big divide, not between the abled and all of us together.”

Carrie nodded, flitted around a corner and pushed a buzzer to open a large garage door low on the tower they were near. “We have a way in for… well, gimps of all kinds.” She coughed out a laugh. “This is my place. We even have stairs. You’re welcome to come up. And yeah, I know. You’re not the only one to feel that way.”

“I really… I mean. I don’t mean to be offensive.”

“Not at all,” she said, her warm eyes showing that she really didn’t mind. “It’s the world we live in. We’re taught to judge each other as less than perfect. Flying and sending are so-called normal. But there could be a world where everyone walked and used sound to communicate. There, we’d be normal. My body and brain seem fine to me, as long as I’m with my mind blind friends. And you sure look like you have a good body.”

Brian went through into the warm entry room and started up the stairs—the most normal thing in the world, and the rarest.