And, now, he was thinking of Sandra less and less as the hours pooled in the empty house. He and Helen had argued. She’d wanted to stay another week, get him on his feet and into a routine. Hiram had made her go, just four days after they lowered her mother into the wound in the earth, the day the growths on his back split open and blood-smeared vines reached out. The pain grew teeth then and he knew he couldn’t have hidden it from his daughter for long. Advil, salve, nothing helped until he took a weary shower and felt an inexplicable relief once the water hit him.
He was beyond the point of denial—they were wings. Arcing out like snowy antennae from his shoulders, each smooth unfurling feather the length of a hand. They were soft enough for pillows once the blood was washed out and they dried. Another day or two, he sensed, and he could fold them beneath a coat. Afternoons were starting to touch fifty degrees, but still with a thread of ice in the air.
He sat at his desk and scrubbed his face with his hands. He typed ‘Jim Hudson’ into the search bar, and his finger waited for some sign, fidgeting near the keyboard. There would be thousands of Jim Hudsons, his own hiding in their midst, somewhere. Even in an obituary, he warned himself.
“You should stay through the weekend, Hiram Newell,” Jim had said that faraway night, and curled his hand into a tube through which he watched him. Then Jim said it again, only this time it meant, You should stay longer than that. But Hiram knew he couldn’t. The closest he would get was writing one long, anguished letter two years later, then tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces until his fingers cramped.
Jim had reached across the bed for him, and their bodies made a circle. One that had never, for Hiram, gained any circumference. He wondered how he dared dream of protracting it now, in the wake of his wife’s death, when his anatomy was occupied with becoming an angel.
An angel—what gave a man the right? He loved Jim. He was surer than ever, now the bottle was uncorked. He tapped enter and began to sift.
#
The wings matured entering the second week. He admired them in his wife’s standing mirror, reflecting that he’d never had any particular grace in his life. Sandra had always carried enough for the both of them.
But already they felt an organic part of his body. A bunching of the muscles in his back gave the wings a powerful flex and bloom, as if in warning, mating, or yearning for flight, all of which he was trying to ignore. They spanned six feet at this reach, until the elbowed joints bent and he collapsed them down against his back. Thin, hollow rails of bone extended along the outer edge of each. The feathers stank but he didn’t mind, as he now bathed every few hours. His pores thirsted for the comfort of water.
There were moments in which he reveled in the wings. There were moments in which he despaired of them. And in those various moments, either Sandra or Jim. He was delaying both. He’d stopped searching for Jim two days after he’d begun, unable to see how he fit into this new mythology. His wife, or someone of import, wanted him to join her, in heaven, he supposed. Hiram would have to find his own grace now, for angels did great works, lithely, purely.
At last he climbed up on the roof in the tenth night and jumped off. Both wings caught the air but couldn’t come close to holding it. He dropped like a stone and heard bones snapping, dry and brittle, the pain red then black. Sometime later he woke shivering on the grass, wet with frost in the building dawn light.
His left wing and arm healed with strange speed. The mild flu he picked up in the damp and the cold faded. The feathers began to spread over his skin just as quickly, emerging down his back and around onto his abdomen. The flightless wings seemed less grand to him now, after the failed attempt at the sky.
And there were other changes to consider. The full head of hair he’d managed to hold onto began to turn white and stiff. A bridge of skin grew between each of his toes. He lay in bed and stared at them, slowly realizing. Slowly accepting. Slowly coming to a decision.
He started hearing music while he lay mending. Distant strains of something circling in on itself, simple melodies that he could almost place. It had the quality of a shy transistor radio in the next room. Later, in spring, he might have assumed it was an ice cream truck, trawling some near neighborhood and carrying through the warming air. But this was more discreet, warm and synthesized, and it both calmed and drove him mad from wishing he could turn the volume up, to climb inside its notes.
Three weeks after the funeral, he resolved at last to find Jim. He swung his legs—which were thinning to the bone, the skin shading a charcoal gray—out of the bed. In the gloom of the hall a shape retreated from him, the twirl of a blue skirt as the figure turned into the kitchen. He followed but the room was empty. Sandra’s mother’s cast-iron skillet swung gently over the stove, as if it had been hung from its hook a moment ago, or touched in passing.
Sandra kept her distance from him. He woke the next few mornings to sense her pressed into a corner of the bedroom, away from the curtains, and when he stood or even looked toward her, she was gone. “What is it you want, love?” he asked. But her old force of personality had departed, or was slow to return.
He checked the mirror with an obsession. No angel he’d heard of was covered in feathers, as he might soon be. A swan, then. He felt certain that his neck would begin to stretch, the feathers continue to flower, and this old ugly duckling would transcend into something more beautiful. Because the symbolism of it—the very thought of it all told him he was meant to be with Jim.
His days settled into the routine Helen had wanted for him. He ate buttered toast at the dining room table and, from the corner of his eye, watched Sandra in her garden. She would only stand and look down at her flowers, hating them or waiting for spring, it was hard to tell. Her hair fell as golden as it had the afternoon he’d coaxed her virginity from her in her grandfather’s apple orchard, their skin likely dusted with alar. And, always just behind this image, he thought of that night on the lake, how she’d tried to coax him into the water.
He stopped wearing shirts so the wings could breathe, so the plumage could have its way with him. When his daughter called, she remarked on the brightness in his voice. He sat at the computer through the afternoon into dark. From his home in Charlottesville he placed a virtual pushpin in St. Louis and worked outward, scanning various links and social media accounts for pictures of Jim.
Sandra crept closer during his hours online, until at last she would stand behind him, still only a hint in his peripheral vision watching him work. “I always knew something wasn’t right,” was the first thing she whispered to him. “When you’d push into me. When I could even get you to.”
“Now that’s not true, Sandra.” He held his face in his hands. “We had forty-two good years.”
“Who is Sandra?” Her cold breath soft on his neck. “All I wanted was a man. I wish I’d known that was what you wanted, too.” She was gone when he turned.
#
Jim lived west of Philadelphia. Hiram broke down into sobs when he found him, first at the proof that he was alive, and then again just to see him, tall and hale in a crisp blazer. Hiram zoomed in on the photo and touched one pixelated cheek. Beautiful, still beautiful.
Below the picture were two thin paragraphs about Jim’s retirement last year as principal of a middle school. Hiram had only stopped working three months before that, and it seemed yet another thing to draw them closer. The article mentioned Jim’s eighteen years of service to the children of West Chester, Pennsylvania, his community service work, and that he was looking forward to time with his family. Hiram stared at the word family, whispered at it, but it would not give up its secrets.
A few more minutes and he had Jim’s phone number and address. Nearly two hundred and fifty miles separated them. Hiram stood and went to the window of the living room. Forsyth Street was a sunshone silence through the half-open blinds. He let his wings unfold to their full span, the sound like distant bed sheets being shaken out. Sandra used to do that out back at the laun
dry line, when they were younger.
The feathers had now claimed him from thighs to collarbones, covered him in layers of warm white. His hands ran up and down his body as the empty street aged past noon.
He wept again, with an elaborate, scared joy. Out at the edge of his hearing was that music. It carried the same elegant distance, and he thought it must be the music of the angel he wasn’t going to become. Somewhere in the house Sandra was crying, too.
812 Goshen Road. The address was full of harsh consonants, but Hiram relished each one as he tried to decide how to contact him. A letter or email would be the sensible thing after all the years, but even a phone call wasn’t enough. Not for this. He already knew he’d drive every one of those five hours in taut electrical suspense, just to see Jim’s eyes widen into circles of reunion.
“Did you want both of us?” He felt her murmur in his hair.
“I should have told you all those years ago, love, I should have. But you know, swans mate for life. And I did that. We did that.”
“You’re a creature now.” But she fell silent after these words. Hiram packed an overnight bag, sent Helen an email saying he was going on a little trip and she shouldn’t worry. He dressed in his best jeans and loosest shirt, buttoning it to the top to hide his feathers, the wings folded tight inside against his back. Sandra kept her quiet even as he eased himself into the old station wagon.
He bought a pack of cigarettes before he turned onto I-66, and the first one tasted like coming home at the end of a long dark trip, not this lustrous beginning. Every cough that scraped out of him was an old enemy making amends.
#
“Is this your swan song, Hiram?” Sandra whispered as the car passed north out of Virginia. He could see the suggestion of her in the rearview, in the middle of the backseat with her hands folded on her lap. She might have been smiling with her old half-mirth.
“Just let me have this,” he said, and stopped checking the mirror. He’d known her for more than two-thirds of his life, and though her humor could bite, her scorn never had. Pictures of how to approach Jim slid through his mind, but he couldn’t seize any of them for scrutiny. When he saw him he would know. He lit his fourth cigarette and rasped at its smoke. His throat was raw.
Just over the Pennsylvania line, he pulled into a rest stop. Sandra stood behind the toilet in the narrow stall as he sat there, his spindly blackening legs cocked out to each side. She chuckled soundlessly. From the stall next to him came the staccato clicking of a cell phone.
“You’re a creature now,” she whispered again, “a thing for cold water.”
“You could be just my guilt,” he told her. The clicking of the phone stopped at this pronouncement. “Because why would you haunt me? I loved you. We had a good life.” Hiram decided his business couldn’t be done here with all this attention. He should just go, get past these last few miles.
“I don’t know how I got here.” And she was gone, in a way that felt different, like the air had sewn itself back together around his guess, where she couldn’t fit. The toilet to his right flushed and bright white sneakers passed under the door in front of him. Hiram was left in perhaps true peace.
#
Jim’s house was warm and attractive, a brick split-level with a cavernous garage, openmouthed with invitation. The driveway sloped up briefly, so that Hiram couldn’t see inside. He rolled the station wagon a half-block forward and parked. His hands trembled. He held them up. They and his face had been spared this transformation, had gotten him here, ostensibly whole. But he sensed the rest of this would come soon.
Cars pulled into other driveways, home from work, and the sun already touched the top of the tree line, pointing shadows across the asphalt toward where Hiram waited. “Get to him while he’ll still know it’s you,” he said to no one, and got out of the car, the old door creaking. His bones creaked with it. His body cried out to be wet.
He stood at Jim’s mailbox and heard that same elusive music drifting out of the open garage. His feathers ruffled at it. His heart thrilled along a scale of breathless emotions. All the warmth folded inside the cold evening air seemed to settle upon him.
Hiram walked up to the garage and there Jim stood, reaching to hang a hammer on a wall peg. The sight of Jim’s back, his chambray shirt sliding above worn jeans, overwhelmed him. Here was the great circle, of course it was, and at his gasp, Jim turned. Hiram saw all those years pass across his face, furrows deepening along his forehead and around his eyes.
“Hiram?” His voice even richer than the memory of it. The eyes a hue lighter, perhaps. “How in—is that you?”
“It is.” Hiram swallowed, tried not to flex his wings inside his shirt, where they itched to escape. “I just came by to see if you ever found Otis.” His smile hurt. He touched his lips and they felt stiff and prominent. There wasn’t much time, then. The wonderful music played on, from somewhere in the house.
“Otis? My dog?” Finally Jim stepped toward him, still taller than Hiram by a head, that head as gray as his own had been a month ago. “No, I never found Otis. He just ran off, I guess.”
“Like I ran off,” Hiram said, and wouldn’t let himself look down at the oil stain on the concrete.
Jim grinned. “Yeah, at about the same time, too.”
“Well, I came to apologize, Jim. And to tell you things.”
“Tell me what things? Wait,” he said, and looked past Hiram down to the street with a sigh. “I guess you should come in and have a coffee.”
Hiram followed him into the kitchen. He leaned against a counter and watched Jim take two cups down from a cabinet. Still the music was a room away, its tones washing with a kind of mournful hope. “I never was raised with God,” he said, a tremor in his voice, “but I had to stay with my wife. I loved her. I don’t know how I could love you like I did, the almost terror of it, and still love her. But I found a way, I suppose.”
Jim paused with the steel pot over a bright red mug. “Now, Hiram, look.” There was a tremor there, too. Hiram heard it shimmer in the middle, in his name.
“When Sandra died I felt—I don’t know, but there was a freedom there. And I thought of your circles. You saying the eye is a circle, the first one. I had to—I just had to see you.” His fingers fidgeted with his shirt buttons, setting each one loose.
“Hiram.” Jim set the pot down on the counter, and the sound it made on the granite was a stark punctuation. “We had something a long time ago, and I still think about you. That’s more than I can say about most of the men I’ve known. But half our lives have passed. I’ve been with someone for twenty years. He’ll be home in half an hour. He’s got a fine son who’s given us two beautiful granddaughters.”
The music hadn’t stopped exactly, but Hiram could no longer hear it. “But we’re a circle,” he said. His fingers opened the next to last button on his shirt.
“You show up after thirty-odd years and expect what from me?” Jim said, looking down toward Hiram’s waist. “I asked you to stay, and you didn’t. We might’ve done great things together, but we didn’t. It’s okay. Not everything circles back. It can’t.”
Hiram’s shirt fell away to reveal his thick vest of feathers. He shrugged it off and the wings burst up toward the low ceiling. “I love you,” he said. “I love you,” and he stepped toward Jim, cupped a hand on his cheek, and kissed him. He felt the rigid cold of his own lips against the pinched withdrawal of the other man’s.
Jim shoved him away and began to speak, but Hiram couldn’t hear that either. There was pain in his ears and constricting his face. He saw the white tips of feathers creeping into his field of vision. The room blurred and he ran from the kitchen, through the garage, out of the broken circle.
He sat behind the wheel of the station wagon and wept as night thickened around him, a great urgency rising through the shame and lust. His body throbbed with change. He managed thirty miles south on the highway, until the wings shifted forward and began to take his arms into them, bone knitt
ing into bone. An exit sign loomed and he turned right, coasting down the ramp and grinding the car to a stop on the rutted shoulder.
His neck elongated as he staggered out. His torso bunched into itself, down and back onto his legs. He felt his lips peel outward, fuse together with his nose, and he let the resulting protuberance, a creamy red-orange, point him along the exit.
The surf of traffic noise continued behind him. Lights winked from a gas station down the road. Trees swallowed the rest. At last spring was returning to earth, even this far north. An irrepressible warmth moistened the dark. Time receded from him and he was compelled after it, into the wood full of black oaks and cedars and white pines. Sound came back to him, but the machinery and murmur of the world had somehow fallen away here. There was only the crackle of his shifting bones.
Hiram ached for his two great loves. He longed for Jim but wept more for his wife. She was the one who had kept him. He wished he could resign himself to her all over again. What Jim had told him back in that kitchen was right, but then where was the circle Hiram had spent half his life tracing? What did this transformation ask of him?
He was still endlessly in the forest when dawn threaded through the canopy of crosshatched branches, and the same muted hush coated the world like dew. At last he broke through into a wide and round clearing, within which was held a pond, a nearly perfect circle, its circumference marred only by a tongue of shore penetrating the water. Sandra sat on this tongue, or someone did. Thick bands of dirty light fell upon her there, and her hair shone gold inside of them. A spade jutted from the earth at her feet.
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