The old woman smiled again. “Ah, that one is easy. It is because no matter what happens, you will always remember that once upon a time . . . you flew.”

Justin nodded and turned back to the window. Far below he could hear the children at play.

He ached to join them.

But then he thought of the others he knew.

The ones who never laughed.

The ones who still needed wings.

“How would I find the way back?”

“Take the side door,” said the old woman softly. “It will get you home a little more quickly.”

Tucking his wings against his back, Justin stepped through the door—and found himself on top of the mountain. He could see the entire island spread out below him, could hear, even from this height, the laughter of the children.

Justin took a deep breath. Then he spread his wings and leaped forward. Catching the air in great sweeps, he soared up and up, then leveled off and flew.

Not toward home; Justin Jones had no real home. Flexing his wings, he pointed himself toward tomorrow.

Then he flew as hard as he could.

A Note from the Author

THE PRIMARY IMPULSE behind all of these stories was an urge to entertain. If some of them are perceived to Have a Point, please be assured that this was a secondary matter, and probably occurred by accident. First and foremost, in every case, I wanted to tell a good story.

The reasons for starting these stories, and the way they began, are nearly as various as the stories themselves. Two of them—“I, Earthling” and “There’s Nothing Under the Bed”—were originally written for anthologies I was assembling on specific themes: aliens and nightmares, to be precise. Because I was contractually obligated to write the lead story for each of these books, I was trying to write something that would either totally confound the basic perception of the idea—as in “I, Earthling,” when the “alien” is a child from our planet—or be as close as I could reach to my own personal vision of that specific topic, which is what the devouring emptiness of “Under the Bed” is all about.

Those were the simple ones.

“Am I Blue?” came about because Marion Dane Bauer asked me to write something for an anthology of gay and lesbian themed stories she was putting together. I submitted this tale with a fair amount of trepidation, since I knew the book was going to be quite literary and wasn’t sure how a light fantasy would be received. It was a more than pleasant surprise when she chose it to be not only the lead story, but the source of the book’s title as well.