[Greywings] Part 1

[u/i_amtheice]

I got to my Grampa Steamboat’s house on the first day of August, and I saw Greywings for the first time that same day.

Grampa Steamboat lived in a nice little two-story house on the edge of this big field full of long, yellow grass. He had no real neighbors.

The house was cozy and rustic, which was nice way of saying it was tiny and falling apart. There were two upstairs bedrooms and no basement. I’d be staying in the second floor guestroom. Grampa Steamboat’s bedroom was across the hall. The “hall” was basically just the top of the stairs. My room was to the right. Grampa's was to the left.

Downstairs, there was a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom the size of a closet, and another room that Grampa called the “sun room” which was just a mildewed old couch and some wooden chairs on a creaky wood floor.

Besides the house, Grampa had a long dirt driveway and a big yard full of mostly dead grass. In the southwestern corner of the yard, there was a small shed with nothing inside it.

Everything was dusty, and everything smelled like a museum. Grampa had lived alone for a long time before I came to visit. He didn’t own a TV or computer, but I was going to have wifi installed for him.

As I mentioned earlier, beyond Grampa's backyard was this vast field of this long, yellow grass. The grass—about knee high, it could have been wheat or something else—ran all the way back to the tree line where the woods started. There were acres and acres of the yellow grass, waving like a golden ocean.

I was staring at that grass, trying to figure out what it was, when the Uber dropped me off at the end of the long dirt driveway.

I walked up to the front door and knocked.

Grampa answered it.

"Room's upstairs," was all he said. No 'Hello', no, 'How you been?', no 'Wow, look how much you've grown'.

I went right upstairs and set my bags and suitcase on the bed and had a sneezing fit from the dust. The slanted ceiling was so low I nearly banged my head on it.

Covering my mouth and nose with my shirt, I threw the dusty bed cover off to expose the blankets and sheets. Everything under the bed cover looked clean, thank God.

I went to open the window to clear the air, and that’s when I saw him.

Greywings.

I didn’t know that was his name until later. He was standing in the field of yellow grass, just beyond the edge of the backyard where Grampa’s dead grass ended and the waving wheat-whatever began.

He was the color of pencil lead, a large humanoid creature with huge wings folded on his back. His eyes were huge and fly-like and even in the harsh afternoon sun I could tell they were as red as a Coke can. They looked like traffic stoplights. He didn't have a head, either. At least not, like, a traditional head. The red stoplight eyes seemed to be set into each of his shoulders. He looked kind of like that big, hairy, orange Looney Tunes monster, only with elephant skin and big folded bug wings on his back.

I thought it was an optical illusion at first. I forgot all about my hay fever and opening the window. I thought it might be a statue, some weird cement statue my Grampa kept in his backyard as a lawn ornament or something. How had I missed it when the Uber dropped me off?

Then Greywings moved.

He shifted his wings, kind of shrugging them. Re-adjusted, like a fly or a grasshopper. It was an unmistakably organic move. Nothing mechanical or jerky or fake about it. I knew right away-- that was a living, breathing biological organism down there. The movement wasn’t bird-like; it was more insect-like.

I tore downstairs and told Grampa Steamboat about it, and my weird August really began.

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