The Turtle Who Grew Wings

A Story for All Ages, by Aaron McEmrys

Sweede was a turtle (a desert tortoise, actually. Please don’t ever call her a turtle, she hates that!), and every night when she fell asleep, she dreamed of flying.

Safe inside the dusty shell of her dreams, Sweede soared high above the desert floor, gliding across the sky with long-winged condors and stubble-headed vultures; Joshua trees small as flowers beneath her. But although Sweede broke the laws of gravity every night she awoke each morning still stuck in the same old shell.

To make matters worse, she remembered her dreams, every soaring one of them. So as her sisters and brothers baked sleepily in the noonday sun, their heads resting as heavily on the ground as so many stones, Sweede looked up at the wide blue sky and sighed.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like being a tortoise; she did, she loved feeling the sand firm beneath her feet and lolling in the thick red mud of the arroyo. “But surely this can’t be all there is!” she exclaimed to her best friend, Janie, not for the first time. “It doesn’t make any sense, but I just know I was born to fly.” But Janie didn’t answer, having fallen asleep in the cool shadow of a cactus.

“I wish I were asleep. Then at least I could at least dream of flying….but what’s stopping me? Maybe I don’t have to be asleep to fly!”

And so began one of the greatest adventures in the history of turtle-dom.

The next morning found Sweede up before dawn wearing hot pink leg warmers and a matching headband. Beads of sweat rolled down her face. “Jump! Go on, Jump! On the count of three – one, two, three – jump!” and with a herculean effort she did it – she jumped! Not very high, it’s true, maybe just high enough for a very thin cactus needle to pass under her feet, but still, when you’re a jumping tortoise you gotta celebrate every victory.

All day long, she kept at it, “1, 2, 3 JUMP!” until the shadows grew long and the cries of night birds filled the air.

But try as she might, Sweede couldn’t take off the ways birds do, no matter how hard she lunged skyward.

“Maybe I need to climb higher, start from a perch the way the eagles do,” she thought later, drowsily, as she soothed her sore legs with ice packs.

And so it went, day after flightless day; but at night, yes, every night, she flew.

One night Sweede woke up to the sound of approaching thunder. Outside her snug burrow the wind howled and the cacti huddled, bent nearly double.

“Aha!” she thought, “The moment I’ve been waiting for!” and Sweede waddled out into the storm to the cliff’s edge just as fast as her thick limbs could carry her.

“Wait for it, wait for it” she told herself until just the right moment, when an especially powerful gust of wind powered up the hill behind her. She felt it under her shell, lifting her up, up, up - or so it seemed – and Sweede jumped higher than any tortoise had ever jumped before – which is to say about two inches in the air before the wind caught her shell, spun her like a top and blew her right over the cliff’s edge.

She crashed and smashed all the way down, her poor little head and arms and legs tucked as far into her shell as they could go. “Whooo….maybe I can’t fly, but at least shells are good for something.”

Now, another tortoise might have given up on flying right there and then. But not Sweede. Sweede just limped back to her burrow, put on some more icepacks, and quite literally went back to the drawing board.

Down in her burrow she set up a big chalkboard and spent hour after hour sketching, measuring, and theorizing as a bold idea began to take shape.

A crowd of curious turtles gathered outside her door and peered in her windows as one delivery truck after another drove up to drop off yet another stack of curious wooden boxes. Seriously, Amazon will deliver anywhere.

Soon strange smells and colorful plumes of smoke began to rise from Sweede’s chimney, accompanied by much clanking, banging, tearing, pounding and sawing.

Finally, after days of hard work, Sweede opened her door and pushed her way through the crowd of concerned neighbors. Never had a tortoise looked so determined. She wore her lucky pink sweatbands and on her head a turtle-sized hot pink crash helmet.

Up the high hill she went, followed by the whole village and watched curiously from above by every circling bird. And there, on that same high point she had blown off just days before, Sweede unfolded her wings.

Framed in wood, the canvas sails rippled in the morning breeze. Sweede fastened the harness around her shell, adjusted her goggles and double-checked her emergency airbags.

With one last look at her worried neighbors she said, “Wish me luck” – and jumped.

Sweede jumped off the cliff – and for a few heart-stopping seconds she did fall, but then the wind filled her broad canvas wings and wonder of wonders – she was flying – Sweede was flying, just as she’d always dreamed!

High and higher the wind lifted her in a great turning spiral as her friends dwindled into thunderstruck reptilian dots far below.

Even the birds were impressed. “Nice wings, man,” whistled rough old condor. “Yeah, that’s one sweet ride you got there, turtle,” cawed Raven.

Sweede smiled politely, but she barely heard a word, so happy was she as the whole of the world opened up before her open gaze.

Some weeks later, as she stood under bright lights at the Desert Reptile of the Year Award ceremony, a reporter from Hiss Magazine asked, “You’ve done something no turtle, no tortoise, no reptile, period, has ever done before. What’s your secret?”

“Well,” said Sweede bashfully around the enormous award in her arms. “All my life I dreamed of flying and I tried everything I could think of – but in the end, I guess I had to be brave enough to try something new, the only thing left after everything I could think of had failed. That’s when I finally flew.”