This is a city where numberless aspirations can be fulfilled.) Some wings are organza stitched onto school backpacks some are quilted cotton stuffed with dried flowers and clipped to jacket shoulders. (Not all aunties are actually aunties, but in Um-Helat, anyone can earn auntie-hood. At the Day’s dawning, the children of the city come forth, most wearing wings made for them by parents and kind old aunties. This places it within the migratory path of several species of butterfly and hummingbird as they travel north to south and back again. Um-Helat sits at the confluence of three rivers and an ocean. Even the monorail cars trail stylized flamingo feathers from their rooftops, although these are made of featherglass, too, since real flamingos do not fly at the speed of sound. It is a day of fluttering and flight regardless, where pennants of brightly dyed silk plume forth from every window, and delicate drones of copperwire and featherglass-made for this day, and flown on no other!-waft and buzz on the wind. It has little to do with birds-a fact about which locals cheerfully laugh, because that, too, is how local customs work. It’s the Day of Good Birds in the city of Um-Helat! The Day is a local custom, silly and random as so many local customs can be, and yet beautiful by the same token.
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