Dead Angels
I have some short stories that the 'glur may enjoy. I'll start posting my way through them, I suppose, starting with Dead Angels. The actual title is "In a Ditch," but that buried the lede a little. The demands of the era.... Enjoy.
Someone poked my shoulder. I cracked open my eyes begrudgingly to see the neighbor's kid, staring at me, framed by the afternoon sun. He pointed back behind him and beckoned. I sighed and stood up, dusting the dirt off my pants, and picked up my blanket, tossing it in a heap over one shoulder.
"What's up?" I asked.
He didn't say anything, just looked at me with wide and dazed eyes and beckoned again before setting off across the fields, bare feet slapping against packed dirt, so I followed him, down the path, and to the cracked old asphalt road that led down out of the mountains. I left my eyes half-lidded, basking in the summer heat as I followed the loose shadow of him, wandering past trees and fields and wild grasses that were starting to go gold with the season.
"Look." He said, finally.
I opened my eyes and looked, and then it made sense. Down in the ditch, surrounded by a loose ring of kids, was a dead angel. It'd unfurled, all feathers and wings and blank eyes staring up at the sun.
I immediately grabbed the kid's face and turned it away. "Go on, get." I said, sharp. "You shouldn't be lookin' at this."
He stumbled, and I gave him a gentle shove at the shoulderblades. He broke into a stumble, and then an easy jog back. I watched him go, and turned to the others, clapping my hands. I tried not to look. "For all've y'all too. Get, get."
The sound didn't reach them. I had to pull out my pocket knife and clash it on the asphalt, bright steel on dark, lumpy stone, before they startled, and scampered away, leaving just me and the angel in the ditch.
Then, I looked at it.
I thought I recognized it. My cousin had an angel a while back. I don't know what happened to it. It might've been the same one, might've not. She tended to keep mum about stuff like that. I didn't know. Most people didn't like talking about their angels.
I looked down the street. Next car that came rattling along would call the folks down the hill, and they'd come up to haul the body away to dispose of it properly. If any of the parents were told, they'd probably do the same. I didn't know what they did to dead angels.
I looked back down at the poor dead thing, lying there, staring up at the blue, blue, empty sky. It frizzed on my eyes. A tear started to gather at the corner of my eye, and I blinked, and more tears came after it.
I slid back into the ditch. The grass was rough and tall, pushing up against my jeans with a hiss as I half-slid, half-stumbled to the bottom of the ditch and pulled out my work gloves from my belt.
Eyes still half-closed, navigating by touch and by the fuzzy sensation of a dead angel, I folded up its wings all careful-like until I could grab the body. The feathers were like gossamer, and itched wherever they touched my skin. I pulled my shirt up over my mouth, when I noticed. I didn't know what angel dust did if you inhaled it, but it was probably better not to test my luck.
Getting the thing up out of the ditch was easier than I expected. Once the wings were all arrayed, and I managed to get a grip on the smooth inner wheel, it was almost easy.
Angels didn't weigh as much as I thought they would.
It rustled against the grass as I dragged it back up onto the road. I spread out my blanket, and then dragged the angel onto it. It fit. Barely.
Moving the body any further was even harder. I didn't even know where to put it. Angels didn't like dying where you could see them. They didn't like being where most people could see them, anyway, I knew that much. So I squinted at the trees around me and tried to get my bearings. That way to town, that way down the mountain, that line of trees snaking across fields, and that lumpy hill that they huddled around in a big cluster. That was what I was looking for.
Lighter than expected wasn't light. Dragging the blanket across the pavement was not a pleasant task. It got only a little easier when I made it off onto the dirt path. Every foot I dragged it, I had to crush down the grass to either side. I had to take a break, halfway there, and I left it at a distance, staring at it out of the corner of my eye, panting in the hot air and fanning myself.
Every time I looked at it too long, even indirectly, another tear came and trickled down alongside my sweat.
Our town didn't have a speaker or priest or nothing like that. She'd died last year, I thought, and her daughter was still off in the big city, doing whatever it was that the daughter of the faithful did in cities where they'd run off to. I think she was having a good time.
She came back now and again.
That reminded me to get up and start hauling it again.
The glade I was pulling it to was cool, even in high summer. At this point, it was bumpy going, trying to haul the blanket over the knotted roots and leaf litter. In the end, I couldn't get it all the way to the pool. I had to leave it a little to the side, under a wide pine.
I sat there, and then I looked at it again. It still sat there, eyes still blank and staring. It was dead. Dead as doornails.
A speaker'd have a nice word. A priest'd have a nice book to read. I pulled off my glove instead and reached out to the central eye. I touched it, and it fizzed against my skin, even dead, as I pulled it gently down, like I'd seen the undertakers do, so it didn't have to look no more.
A single glittering teardrop beaded as I closed its eye, and quickly soaked into the pale feathers of its body, leaving a dark blotch. I did it again, and the same thing happened. And then again, and again.
Angels had a lot of eyes.
The last eye closed, and I stood up, suddenly creaky.
"Rest well," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say. My right hand was numb.
I left it there. Told the village kids to not go down to that hole a while. I didn't have much else to do.
Next Spring Break, the speaker's daughter told me that angels faded at sunset after they died. "You didn't need to haul it all the way out there," she'd said.
I looked at her. "I did," I said. "I think."
She looked at me back a long while, before she said, very thoughtfully, "I guess so."