No one knows what to do with the angel tangled in the power lines. The poor thingâs body was wrapped around and around the sparking wires. A twisted-up ball of heavenly light. The face was obscured by a bent haloâa golden glow that sometimes oscillates like bad television signal. The wings float loosely in the air, all twelve feet of silken feathers, ragged and torn at the ends.
A storm had felled the trees and the poles and anything taller than a chicken coup in one swoop. Anyone who dared cross the puddles and debris had to risk being electrocuted by the live wires or blinded by the angelâs weakly pulsing light. Cooing sounds emerged from the angel, sad little calls for distant ears.
The creature would periodically make a break for it tooâwings going taut and rising in a flurry of trumpets and frantic flapping. The electrical wires held fast, twisting against the angelâs soft flesh and pushing back. It fell, it always fell, back into the nest of wires and would make those weak cooing noises. I was an ornithologist before all this town, town, town and couldnât help but think, pigeon.
The chaplain went first. He got down to pray under the angelâs bent body, close as he dared and in the mud. Everyone knew he wasnât but a few weeks off the drink and his hands still shook when he lifted up the cross. The nun, she was retired but we still called her that, caught the 921 bus to the next town that same day.
Some said she was going to the next town over to get a proper priest. Others said she had crossed herself and high-tailed it out of there. What bad luck it was going to be to have a dead angel in our town electrical wires.
All this debris and only the birds can get close enough to it, flapping around the angel's head and perching on its mighty back. They call to each other.
Davie, who I had once loved, offered to fetch his shotgun and put it out of its misery. The youngest one there, a girl named Clara, cried so hard she had to be walked back and forth down the lane three times. We opted to put âshooting a messenger of heavenâ on the back burner. We gathered up wire cutters, holy books, rubber boots, and a good tree-cutting ax from the mess of our homes and piled them up. We'd wait a day or so at least, watching the angel and all silently hoping it would make it out on its own.Â
I wasnât a praying woman anymore. My house was a testament to a lot of broken things before it was ever leveled by the storm. But I didnât have any little ones to walk up and down the lane and my car had survived just fine and I owned the best pair of binoculars out of anyone. So, I kept vigilâit was the least I could do.Â
I sat and watched and sometimes cooed back when the angel let out long melancholy ooo's. The relief trucks were late if they were even coming and I drank in small sips from my third water jug. The chaplain came at sundown and he passed me a better drink from his flask. I wasnât a praying woman anymore so I took a long sip and passed it back.
âThink itâll make it out?â I asked, nodding at the angel, and the chaplain took a longer drink. I gave him a small smile and elbowed the man. âGlad you stayed, at least.â
He nodded again and began to pray, never taking his eyes off the wires up above.
The girl came when the day tucked behind the trees into full dark. She was a darting, quiet thing and I nearly missed her rustling through the grass.
âYou shouldnât be out here,â I told her tiny form at the edge of the puddles. She drew her knees up under a big sweater.
âI have to make sure he doesnât try anything . . .â she said and I knew she was talking about Davie, who I could no longer love.
 âDoes your mama know youâre out here?â
She mumbles from inside her oversized hoodie, âI canât let âem do it.â
I sighed. âHe wonât, not with me here,â I said and waved her over. I made the little girl climb into my lap to stop her shivering and the chaplain gave us all a blanket to huddle under. The angel flapped those dirty wings and cooed.
I let the little girl use my binoculars to make out that bent halo and loose curls. She got fingerprints all over the lens and I tried to ignore it.
âI want to be a meteorologist one day,â Clara said, unprompted. âSo I can warn people about stuff like this.â
I snorted. âAnd I want to be a poet.â
âHush,â Markus says to me and then to the little girl, âIâm sure youâll make a great weather lady one day, Clara.â The chaplain gave a punished smile and it made me want to make fun of him just enough to stop it. Clara frowned.
âDid you always want to be a chaplain?â she asked in return, a bit meanly, and the chaplain didn't answer.
I cleared my throat. âDo you think thatâs what it was trying to do? Trying to warn us?â
âOr maybe it was just unlucky,â Markus says, rubbing a hand down his long face.
I snorted. âA bad day at work.â
âDoes god allow for bad luck?â asked the little girl and the question hung limp and loose like those wings.
âWhy donât we ask it?â I say, and we laugh, weakly. We call out to the angelâquestions and praise and hopes for tomorrow that weâll get it out. Or maybe we'd have to get the shotgun tomorrow. The glow of the creature is so weak. Near midnight, the girl suggests we go looking for its trumpet. If it had been there to warn us, it might have carried a horn, and if it had a horn, we might be able to summon help from its friends.
We search, feebly, avoiding the sparking wires and the upturned wood and metal. We go around in the mud on our hands and knees until we match the trapped creature. Though, we never do figure out what to do with the angel tangled in the power line. The night was long and bitter and we didnât have anywhere else to be, the drunken chaplain and family-less woman of the birds and that little girl.
Before dawn, I am asleep, we are all asleep, dead to the world like the day will never come. And in the morning, the wires are loose on the ground and quiet. The angel is gone and a relief trucks have come. A part of me hopes the creature made it out. The birds after all peck at the wires on the ground. A part of me is relieved to see that Davie is here and he has all his supplies in the back. The trucks arrived and the power company remembered us enough to cut off the power.
I have nowhere to be, and walk the little girl home. Gloria is happy to see her and offers me a place to stay the night. I tell her my car is just fine. Still, she says, just a night.
The window in the guest room faces the electrical wires. Theyâll rebuild them one day because you canât waste the material all the way out here. Clara will go off to college one day. The chaplain will leave the drink for good, he will, and the church in the same breath. I will write a poem one day and it wonât be any good.
The poem will be about the electrical wires outside my windows. How I donât know if the angel made it out, but the birds still perch there. They preen and sing and fluff. I count them one by one in the pre-dawn light. Some are flesh and blood. They clean the feathers of the ones that arenât. Pearly blue jays sing, barely visible, and letting out forgotten songs from yesteryear, and there are fewer ones in the proper light. The angel wire they call it. Year after year, the birds return with their bodies or without them, to sit one by one in a line. Pearly outlines preen their living grandchildren and sing to lost mates and fluff invisible wings, and I close my eyes and listen to the ghosts.
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