The How and Why of Twinkle Baby

"Teach me to grow like you do, Lacklustre."
The gourd lay smashed on the ground, the insides splashed out across the floor like a bloodstain. Lacklustre held a paintbrush in his tendril. A Christmas tree glistened wetly on the wall, like the tears on her blank white mask.
"You can never grow. You can only change."
Lacklustre's laccata oozed perfume like tobacco. His forehead still bled from the thorns. He thought he was a martyr.

"Teach me to fly like you do, Pigleine."
Pigleine cried a lot. This, she thought, was why she wore the sunglasses and cut her hair short. They said that Pigleine had sold her hair to be allowed to fly for one hour, once a day, at sunset. The fence was tall and white, it had been painted (but not by Lacklustre), and there was a tower or a statue of a steel skeleton through Pigleine's window. Pigleine was fat. Or, at least, moreso than Twinkle Baby, who ran up and down the stairs trying to hide day in and day out.
"You can never fly. Your wings are black."
Pigleine used to be a princess, or at least that is what she told everyone. An Eye-Tell-Young princess. But Pigleine was just a pig.

"Teach me to hate like you do, Omaha."
Omaha (whose real name was Otahu) always had two things that reminded Twinkle Baby of home. Somewhere, somehow, he always had a cigarette. The cigarette was often taken, but he always managed to find another. He never told where he found them, even when he was tortured for days on end. Twinkle Baby liked to listen to him scream. He had a pretty voice. If she could reach between the bars, she might have been his girlfriend. Omaha also had a baseball bat. Omaha, however, did not play baseball. He liked to live by himself, and when the Warden put someone else in his cell...Lacklustre liked to paint with the gourd-insides.
"You can never hate, unless you learn to love."
Omaha was a lot smarter than he looked.
"Teach me to love like you do, Omaha."
And Twinkle Baby learned.

The mask never comes off, and Twinkle Baby never plays baseball, never flies, and never grows. But she always changes (even her black wings change color), she knows how to fall and she knows how to love and she knows how to hate. She even understands why one does not come without the other, like white without black. Like falling and jumping (because she cannot fly, her wings are black).