Night Feathers

He didn’t know she was an angel when he met her. Hair the color of flames at night, outshining every star. Eyes like the sky when it’s closest to heaven—azure and infinite in the early days of autumn, or the sharpest days of winter.

He was scratching out a living in the South Dakota dirt when she found him, and there must have been something she liked in the way he said hello, because she never left. It rained the day before she appeared, and then, it didn’t rain again. She came from light already dipped in darkness. 

White wings and soft whispers are the stuff of fairytales. He knows that now, if he knows nothing else. He knows that when they argue, it’s to the explosion of thunder, sending spikes of razored lightning into the fragile earth. That her hands are Heaven and Heaven is violence, wars erupting across the surface of the firmament, angelic rage spilling through the peaceful dome of the sky. 

“I will come back,” she says each time she disappears, sometimes for weeks. He asked her where she went, once. He never asked again. He thinks it might be because of him.

When she’s gone, he sits alone in the cabin his grandmother left him, watching solemn-faced news anchors report on famines and earthquakes and an unexplainable plague.

All the while she is changing. Her eyes and mood are dark. Her hair no longer glistens like flames on her shoulders, and she rarely speaks. He presented her with a bundle of flowers yesterday, before she left, and now, he stares at them in a vase on the kitchen table. Brown petals and wilted leaves leave a stain on the white tablecloth. The vibrant green vase, purchased with the daisies at Freda’s Florist and Gifts, has dulled to jade.

He dials Freda’s number. “It’s Ethan,” he says. “I bought some flowers from you yesterday. Daisies. Twelve dollars and fifty cents.” He pauses. “Yes. They’re dead.”

She says she doesn’t understand it, that none of her flowers are lasting, she wishes they’d just get some rain. A breeze to stir the air. 

He hangs up on her apologies.

And waits. 

Three months without rain.

She returns with a thump and the familiar rattle of the porch railing as she refolds her wings. He meets her at the door, and she stares at him, her face set into a snarl. She catches herself when he recoils, trying to smile, and now, her mouth is bent with pain. He shifts his eyes to the hand curled around her left arm, scarlet blood seeping out from between her fingers and dripping onto the porch. 

She steps past him into the house. He casts a look around before he ducks inside after her. The air is still, like death. The vine wrapping around the porch railing—his grandmother tended it for years before she passed, and he touches it for her every time he goes past—is now wilting, the leaves dropping onto the ground like dust. He will water it tomorrow. 

Four months without rain.

“Sit down,” he says in the small living room, the TV still turned to the news, experts hurling ideas about the mysterious drought and arguing about the dry lightning and barren thunder. He snatches the remote up and shuts it off, but she stares at the black screen like she’s still watching it while he goes for the first-aid kit. 

He dresses the deep gash tenderly, sponging away the blood and wrapping a white bandage around her arm. He doesn’t have to tell her the wound will scar. They always scar. “Listen—" he says, but she shakes her head.

When she gets up from the couch, pulling his grandmother’s blue-and-purple block quilt around her naked shoulders, she leaves a single night-colored feather behind. His hand shakes when he picks it up. 

He didn’t know she was an angel when he met her, but he fell in love, and is only now beginning to understand there are consequences. 

“You have to go back,” he yells, brandishing the ebony feather like a weapon, hearing the beginning rumbles of rainless thunder and not caring. “You don’t belong here!”

Her eyes flicker to the window. Another dust storm is building outside. Grit taps against the windows, blocking out the sun. She thinks his fear is for the fading landscape around them. She is wrong. He’s already forgotten how to live without her, but she’s turned into someone he no longer recognizes.

“I would end the world for you,” she says, her azure eyes darkening in the falling light.

“But I am the world,” he replies, helplessly, desperately. 

She considers him, her wings snapping out as though she finds herself in danger. An antique lamp crashes off the end table and explodes into a hundred deadly shards. A row of photos, caressed by the tip of her flashing wing, fly off the wall and shatter on the floor. He and his sister, in various stages of childhood and adulthood, faces fractured and dusted with glittering glass. He sees only the darkness of her, those night-colored feathers. Her flame-tinged wings are losing themselves in her desires, and the darkness is spreading, spreading, spreading. 

Five months without rain.

He puts the feather in an envelope and hides it on the top shelf of his closet, underneath his ski jacket from last winter, but he hears it late at night whispering her name.

If he had known she was an angel when he met her, he could have walked away.

But then he knew only the woman who wore his t-shirts on Saturday mornings, who leaned over the counter while he made pancakes, stealing strawberries and syrup from his plate. By the time he learned the truth, running his hands over her powerful wings and seeing where the halo had been burned into her fiery hair, he was already in too deep.

He doesn’t know if she’s an angel when she leaves him. 

She doesn’t apologize. Angels don’t say sorry—he knows that. Her wings are fully ebony now, her hair dulled to russet brown, her eyes gray like the winter sea. She doesn’t look at him as she steps out onto the porch, taking nothing with her, and somehow still leaving nothing behind. He watches her in silence, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. Didn’t he always know? Heaven is for real. This, all of this, himself included, is an illusion. 

How quickly it will pass away.

She is gone in a whisper of wind, a stirring of the dry brown patch of the grass around them. The dust is constant and thick, pouring into his eyes, into everything he owns. It’s the same way for miles. No one can figure out why a little town in South Dakota has become a living wasteland. He stopped watching the news weeks ago, but the evidence is everywhere. Death follows on her night-colored wings, plants and vines crumbling to dust at her touch.

Six months without rain.  

He fell in love with an angel, but if only—

It’s too late for that now.

He tries to burn the ebony feather, but it glows darkly in the flames, unharmed. He tries to cut it up with scissors only for the blades to break in his hands. Finally, he accepts this as a consequence of his choice, a burden he must bear. He puts it back in the envelope and replaces it on the closet shelf. 

The rains come, but his grandmother’s vine is a skeleton along the railing, refusing to crumble and yet unable to return to life. He stands on the porch and stares up at the hundred-year-old apple tree in the front yard, the only living thing rooted and ancient enough to hold on. 

Well. Besides him. 

Time passes unevenly, lurching into days that all feel the same to him now. The seasons creak to life again, and slowly, the mark of her is erased from his world. He plants and plows and sits alone on a couch that is older than he is, occasionally turning pages of a Bible that seems to burn his fingers. 

It’s been a year now since she left, snapping open those violent wings that were just a shadow against the glowering night sky. He’s leaving, moving cross-country to be nearer his sister and her family. His niece—Emma—is four now, and he wants the chance to know her. There’s nothing here for him now, anyway.  This town has never recovered from the stain of her. The dust has settled, and the rain has returned, but there’s still a bare patch in his yard that unsettles him. He bought a goldfish for company, and it died within a day, floating belly-up in the pristine water. He’d thought it was a fluke, but three goldfish later, he gave up. He decided against trying his luck with a dog. 

Sometimes, he still hears her name being whispered through the walls at night, but he’s learned to shake it off and continue on. He has to accept there will be consequences, that he can’t just go about his life unscathed. He remembers that last wound he dressed for her, the result of some celestial battle she refused to speak about. They always scar. Which reminds him, he has one last thing to—

“Look!” 

At the sound of his niece’s voice, he looks up from the box of glassware he’s sliding into the back of his Toyota. His face is already breaking into a smile when he sees what she’s clutching in her tiny fingers.

“Emma, drop it!” The words come out strangled as he springs across the yard and smacks it out of her hands. 

Summoned by Emma’s sudden wails, his sister bursts out onto the porch, her concern turning to confusion when she sees what the fuss is all about. 

A single night-colored feather, dark and glossy, the grass already fading brown where it landed.