by Dawn Metcalf
She used to examine feathers under her plastic microscope when she was little and Dad wanted her to be a microbiologist. He said he’d wanted to give her the world, down to the littlest things. She used to play with her dollhouse for hours: little tables, little chairs, little books, little lamps, little baskets of bread. Still, nothing man-made was quite like a feather. Nature’s symmetry was like a puzzle and Consuela loved the minutiae of detail.
Consuela admired the feather’s simple precision and wished that she could pluck the barbs apart and count them, one by one. Try to peek inside and figure out its secret. It was a secret she was looking for, the secret to the Flow. If she could just figure it out, she could find her way home.
She ran the feather along her wrist and watched it ripple and re-form.
She lost the moment when fascination became compulsion.
It flittered in.
Her left hand lifted of its own accord and plucked another feather right out of the air. Consuela was surprised to find it there. She reached up and grabbed another—this time watching as it wafted in on a lazy pillow of air. She plucked another, and another, flicking her wrist just so, clicking her thumb and forefinger together like chopsticks catching flies. The universe answered her will.
Five blue-black feathers had fastened to her fingertips, extending outward in an exotic fan. She unfurled her fingers, watching the mirage of motion, a dark hummingbird dance.
And Consuela knew.
Placing a finger against the back of her wrist, she traced a line up her arm. A flurry of feathers materialized, whirling out of the world, filing through her window to follow her lead. A sound like the shuffle of cards filled her room under the sudden torrent of pinfeathers, breast feathers, contours, and down. They funneled in from everywhere—lining up like keyboard keys wherever she trailed one finger, then the other, drawing herself tattoo lines of wings and skin.
Blue-green-black and shiny as oil, soft as fluff and paper stiff; her skin whispered with the beat of wings and hollow bones.
Yes. She thought, Beneath it all, we’re just bones.
The world snapped open.
The world snapped shut.
Consuela bunched her legs beneath her and lifted her ruffled chin. Eyes upcast, she unfolded her magnificent wings and flew.
THE woman stumbled through the field, weaving in and out of cornstalks as if they were strangers at a bar. Her hair was a curtain of dirt blond and dirt. Her knees were muddy; she’d fallen more than once.
The glass bottle in her hand was her counterweight. Its caramel-colored contents sloshed, swinging her from one furrowed ditch to the next. Dead, choppy stalks cracked underfoot, and her shoes sucked mud like a whiskeyed kiss.
She tripped. It was the final fall. She knew it before she hit the ground.
Her cheek slapped hard, registering “cold” and “wet” as the mud pressed against her eyelid and plugged her left nostril. She tried to sit up, but thought that, perhaps, she was ready to reenter the earth once again.
Instincts thought otherwise. The woman coughed into a puddle, gagging and sputtering against the taste of silt. She tried to catch her breath, but the soft earth rushed into her nose and mouth.
Her coughing became bubbles. Consciousness winked fireflies. If she closed her eyes, it would be for the last time.
Consuela plucked her up like a hawk.
The thin woman weighed nothing, as if she were made of silk scarves. Consuela climbed with her quarry caught in taloned feet. Four beats like a wild heart, each chamber getting its due, and they soared past the face of a waning moon.
The smell penetrated Consuela’s head with twin scents of sick and self-loathing. She climbed higher, shaking these things loose in the whipping wind. Her mad rattling revived the woman, somewhat. The older woman wiped at her face, smearing brown filth across her nose and cheek while still clutching the bottle. Consuela frowned and squeezed the woman’s shoulder. The hand jerked. Glass shattered fantastically on the asphalt below.
A series of quick, fanning thrums lifted them higher, where the air was cleaner and cold. Death faded behind them like old perfume. The woman laughed in delight and slurred something coherent.
“I’m alive!”
Only then did Consuela permit them to sink into the warmer currents rippling up from the earth.
Perhaps she was supposed to feel omnipotent or benevolent or some otherworldly, compassionate thing, but all Consuela felt was an odd mix of disgust, a sort of parental worry, and relief that she’d made it in time. She wanted to tuck this woman in a safe place to heal, nested and comfortable and far away from here. Consuela caught a flat image of a battered orange hideaway bed seen through broken blinds, plastic flamingos, and a tangle of half-dead purple begonias.
Home, she thought, although certainly not her own. Safe. Consuela’s thoughts were animalistic and pure. She adjusted her pincer grip and banked into the east. A trailer park reeled into focus, speeding under her charge’s dangling, mud-encrusted shoes.
The woman looked up.
“Angel!” she crooned.
Hardly, thought Consuela as she dropped her burden unceremoniously onto a bare patch of lawn to sleep it off.
“ANGEL!” Consuela crooned as she and Sissy broke out laughing.
“To be fair, what did you expect her to say?” Sissy asked. “I mean, just look at you!” The Watcher gestured with both hands. “Show me those wings!”
Consuela tried, but they wouldn’t fit. Folded inside Sissy’s basement office, she realized how impressive she must look. V was still out on assignment and she crackled with unspent energy. It made her giddy. She didn’t want to be alone. And she wanted to show off her skin.
“Sorry, can’t,” Consuela said, shrugging. “I didn’t realize that she could see me.”
“Usually they don’t,” Sissy said. “Or, at least, if they do, they don’t tell. But I’ve long suspected that behind every angel sighting, fairy sighting, Elvis sighting, or alien abduction is just one of us doing our job.” She ran a hand over the flutter of Consuela’s elongated humerus bone. Consuela felt every feather bend and spring back. “You must have, like, a twenty-foot wingspan,” Sissy murmured, walking behind Consuela like a dressmaker. “How can your arms bend like that?”
“The same way you can remove your eyeballs,” Consuela said.
“Fair enough.”
Consuela rippled her arms in a shiver of joy remembered. “I could fly with these things—I flew!”
Sissy poked her in the bicep. “You’ve flown before,” she said. “Remember Rodriguez in the park?”
“That wasn’t the same.” Consuela struggled to recall. It was hard to think back to when she’d stopped living in the moment. “That was more like standing on a moving sidewalk or skating on ice. Not much effort involved,” she said, brightening with renewed laughter. “But, boy are my arms TIRED!”
Both laughed so hard, Sissy had tears on her cheeks.
“Wait, wait, wait—this deserves a toast!” Sissy ducked under one enormous wing and bounced toward a built-in bookcase in the corner. She removed a giant leather-bound edition of the Webster’s Dictionary and flipped it open, revealing stiff pages that had been glued together and a wide bottle hidden inside. Sissy winked.
“Once Dad realized that we could look up everything online, I think he decided to put this to good use.” She lifted the heavy bottle and plopped the hollowed-out tome on the desk. “The best part is, in accordance with the Flow, this thing literally never runs dry.” She spun the top off with a practiced twist and lifted it high. “To Bones: the Flow’s fluffiest angel!”
“You’re kidding me,” Consuela said uncertainly. The smell of whiskey and puke still clung inside her nose, yet Consuela was intrigued. “You’ve got everlasting Scotch?”
“Nineteen forty-six Macallan. Read it and weep,” Sissy said, offering the bottle until she realized Consuela was without hands. “You want me to pour you a bowl or something?”
“N
o,” Consuela said. “Let me take it off . . .” Not quite sure what to expect, she kneaded the back of her neck with the knobs of her thumbs, and feeling the telltale loosening and kiss of air, she shrugged her shoulders and shot her arms outward—the feather skin collapsed with a dramatic flump onto the floor.
“Wow!” Sissy cried. “Burlesque!” She handed over the bottle. “Here.”
Consuela sniffed the liquor with her senses cleared, not knowing if her body could eat or drink. The liquor’s perfume penetrated through the roof of her palate and danced in her sinus caves. The smell—earthy and vibrant—whispered in a voice that could carry across a crowded room. It smelled familiar, a warm presence of pipe smoke and old wood.
“This was your father’s,” Consuela said wondrously. Sissy smiled with nostalgic pride. Consuela watched the liquid play catch-can with slivers of bronze-gold light. “My father didn’t like to drink,” she said, “but he loved his cigars.”
Consuela inhaled, trying to catch a whiff of memory; that wonderful mix of scratchy, cherry-rich tobacco smoke. Her hand moved to touch the topaz cross that was not at her throat. It was back with her skin and clothes. She let her hand fall.
She called me “angel.” Consuela mused happily to herself. Mom and Dad would be proud.
“To angels,” she said, and drank. It felt elegant and numbed like fire.
“To angels!” Sissy crooned in mock worship.
“To you.” Consuela tipped and swallowed. “And me.”
They spent the rest of the night sipping phantom Scotch, tying spare bedsheets around their wrists and taking turns jumping off of the stately chair, spinning and leaping and playing at being angels until they wound, tumbling, down.
chapter eight
“Death is a mirror which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living.”
—OCTAVIO PAZ
CONSUELA woke tucked in a warm, cotton chrysalis on Sissy’s floor. She could feel the well-laundered blanket curled around her, protecting her against noise and light. She rubbed her fingers over her smooth skull and into the sockets, her knucklebones slipping deep into her sphenoids.
She was alone in the basement. A sort of lazy trust infused her. She’d forgotten how much fun late-night talks and laughter could be. It had been a long time since her last sleepover party. It made her miss Allison something awful.
She didn’t know where Sissy had gone, but she knew her own way out and spied her enormous, flowing cape of inky feathers hanging magnificently on the closet door.
Consuela politely folded the borrowed blanket, stacking it neatly on a decorative pillow lying flat upon the chair. The large computer screen was active and displaying a message in fourteen-point font:
At OʹSheas. New configuration = 126. Stop by? Yad
Uncertain whether the words were meant for Sissy or her, Consuela read the strange message again. She was intrigued by the invitation, but even more by the author—the Yad. If she was going to get home, she had to meet everybody, explore every option, and the Yad was someone new.
Toeing the limp feathers aside and sliding the closet door shut, Consuela headed for little Killian O’Shea’s room in Roxbury.
a young man stood precariously on a stool, his hands over his head, painting a long line over the door. He was formally dressed in black vest and pants, a long-sleeved white shirt rolled to the elbows, and a white undershirt that was strangely frayed, knotted strings hanging long past his pockets. Consuela watched him slowly trail his fingers from right to left, singing softly under his breath. She didn’t want to disturb him. It looked suspiciously like prayer.
He hummed to silence and cracked an eye open. “Hello,” he said.
“Hi,” Consuela said, uncertainly.
“It’s a ward,” the Jewish youth said, stepping down. “To protect the boy inside against the Angel of Death, as it is said.” He wiped his fingers on a rag. It was then she realized that the ink was really blood.
“Not to die before their time,” she finished.
“Exactly. Mine is to protect firstborn sons,” he said. “You must be Bones. I’m Yehudah Rosen, also known as the Yad—” He held up two fingers smeared with blood. “The ‘hand,’” he translated.
“Nice to meet you . . .”
“I don’t shake hands,” he said.
She dropped hers, recalling Sissy’s warning a bit too late.
He smiled. “It’s a respect thing. Shomer negiah,” Yehudah said politely. “I’ll only touch four women in my life: my mother, my sisters, my wife, and my daughters.”
“You have a wife?” Consuela squeaked. “And daughters?” The Yad looked all of sixteen.
“Not yet,” he said. “Someday, God willing, when I return home.”
Consuela nodded, looking up at the ward. It was powerful, she could tell. She was drawn to this spot almost against her will.
“That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be here. I have to go home.”
“Well, if it’s any comfort, I believe that if you weren’t meant to be here, you wouldn’t be,” the Yad said, adjusting a skullcap on his thick, curly hair. “Sorry, I don’t mean to sound flippant. I wish I could help.” He held up a waiting palm with a shy smile. “But since we know that some things can cross back, I don’t see why you couldn’t.”
“Things?” Consuela asked. “What things?”
“Well, I have this.” He reached up and removed the hairpin that held the circle of suede on his head. She wondered if he was joking. He smirked. “No, really. We all bring something with us that can cross from this world into the next. It’s usually something personally significant or associated with something personally significant. Cecily has her computer, Giovanni has his cigarette lighter, Wish has his paints.” He considered the tiny piece of wire. “Amazingly, it’s come in very useful.”
She laughed. “For picking locks?”
“Only when there isn’t a key,” the Yad said, looking back over his handiwork; his thoughts seemed to stir like a swirl of ink or blood. “But I’ve found that there is always more than one way to get at what you want.”
“Well, I want to go home,” Consuela said, surprising herself with her vehemence. She checked to see the Yad’s reaction. He simply listened. “Sissy said it can’t be done, but Wish said it can. V told me that intention is key and Tender tried to explain something about the power of the mind or words or whatever.” She tried to remember the shape of Tender’s speech against the vacuum roar of the Flow. “He said that if you’re willing to stand for something, it could become real.”
“Really?” the Yad said, intrigued. “He said that?”
“He said a lot more,” Consuela answered. “But most of it went right over my head.”
The Yad nodded. “Tender is very . . . intellectual. Although to hear him say that there is manifestation in our words, that we can speak things into being—well, that is a profound insight into the nature of truth. Words and numbers have considerable power.”
Consuela knelt down on the carpeted floor and peered up into the Yad’s faraway stare. Sissy said he’d studied the Bible, or something close to it.
“So you think he’s right?” she asked.
“Possibly,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that he’s wrong.”
The concept crushed her like a soda can.
“What is it?” he asked.
She tucked her hands beneath her knees, hunched into a ball. “So . . . did I do this?” she said, voicing something she hadn’t meant to admit. “To myself, I mean? By being so . . . afraid . . . ?” Of dying. Of living. Of doing it wrong. Consuela couldn’t finish. She massaged one bony foot, watching the tiny, round anklebones shift and slide.
The Yad squatted across the hall and crossed his arms in thought. She felt oddly honored by his silence, his not rushing to answer or joke. His was a long, careful contemplation. She had never considered her thoughts that important before.
“Perhaps you have it backwa
rd,” he said finally. “Perhaps this power was within you all along and only now manifests itself in the Flow.” He pointed at her skeleton almost without meaning to. “Before, it came through your thoughts and dreams and fears. As one of the Flow, you become yourself, pure and simple. Literal. Black fire against white.”
Consuela examined the floor. “Joseph Crow said something like that,” she muttered. “Wish, too.”
“There are many ways to say the same truth,” said the Yad. “And Wish wears a lot of them.”
A moment of silence stretched like the line of blood burning over the door.
“I’m sorry. I’m staring,” the Yad said. “It’s rude.” She hadn’t realized that he had been. He grinned ruefully. “I’ve never seen anything like you. When Cecily told me, I’d thought maybe a dybbuk? But you’re not a ghost. More like an angel. An anti–Angel of Death—an Angel of Life.” Yehudah dug a knuckle in his cheek, tilting his head as he grinned. “I wonder if the hand that stayed Abraham’s might have looked like yours? If it was one of us sent to make known that it was not Isaac’s time to die?” he said. “An Angel of God.”
Consuela chuckled, strangely flattered. “You know, you’re the second person to call me ‘Angel’ today.”
The Yad smiled. “Maybe, then, it’s true.”
She didn’t feel very angelic. Mostly she felt scared, a tittering nervousness that stayed buried as long as she was moving. As long as she could hide in her skin. Like this, she felt naked—all guards down. In some ways, she felt stronger, braver; yet in others, totally vulnerable. She missed her old skin, folded, lonely and abandoned in her room.
Who am I when I’m iridescent bone? Who is Consuela? Who is Bones?
She scratched the patella floating in the shadow of her knee.
“Don’t you worry that you’ll never get back?” she blurted. “Never get to find your wife and have kids? Grow up? Have a life?”