I was seven the first time I saw them. 

                    Children of all ages and sizes with wings of all colors on the ground scavenging for scraps that might have been dropped from Flyers above. They looked so tiny from my fathers broad back, crawling like the ants in my ant farm. I stared at them for a while, them fading in and out of view as my father wings went up and down.  After a while, I asked my father who they were. He said that they were the grounded, the children and disabled ( because there were disabled apparently) who were stuck on the ground due to the inability to fly. The children were to young, He said, to young to fly. And the disabled couldn't. 

I asked him where their parents were and he said, in the way that father had always spoken towards me, "dead." This fact had shocked me. Up until now I had not realized that parents could die. I'd thought about this fact for a whole week until it had hit me. MY parents could die. After that  I became more clingy to my mother,(father didn't permit me to cling to him) and dreams haunted my sleep for months. It was only after my mother assured me that she wasn't going anywhere that I slept peacefully. 

She Lied.