by Dia Reeves
On the opposite wall, a picture of the same couple sat off center on a table in a silver frame. It was engraved with the names Thomas and Alice and a date.
“September 19th. I had my B Squad meeting that day. That was the day I found you crying in your bubble.”
“I only let myself cry on the anniversary of their deaths.”
“That’s the best way to die”—he took a drink from the can—“together. Good for you, penciling in sadness. It always takes me by surprise. Like, I’ll be eating red beans and rice, minding my own business, and then the next second I’m sobbing like a baby. Every time I think I’m over Dez’s death, it sneaks up on me and knocks me over the head.”
Jimi was sure he could taste Ophelia’s saliva through the ginger ale, a poison-sweet flavor. Not as good as licking her skin, but a good enough test to start.
“I don’t know why I said all that with him here. You’re way too easy to talk to.”
While Jimi waited to see if the taste of her would kill him, he realized the silver framed photo was off center because a black phone, an old-fashioned one with a rotary dial, took up most of the space.
Above the phone, on the wall, was a plaque: To speak to the dead, dial 9.
“When my folks spoke to each other, it was always intense. Scary intense. But you’re easy to talk to, too.” Her hand crept into his. “Easy to be around—”
Jimi scrambled to the phone. “Is this real? Can I call Dez?”
Ophelia could only stare at him dumbstruck, so Pallid Jon answered.
“Might as well, Romeo. You’re dead to her now anyway.”
“Thanks!” Jimi lifted the receiver and dialed 9. The clicky-spin of the finger wheel seemed endless, and then a voice spoke:
“Please state your party’s name.”
“Desiree de la Vega,” Jimi said, way too high pitched.
“One moment please.”
The phone almost slipped from his grip, his hand was so sweaty. Would he recognize Dez’s voice; he hadn’t heard it in forever. What would he say? He’d rehearsed long speeches over the years, what he’d say if he only had one more chance, but all that was gone.
Dead to her now? Dead to who? To Dez?
“Jimi,” said a voice from the phone. Not Dez. A woman. A phantom pressure in his head. “Come home now. You have to come home.”
The floor disappeared. The room disappeared. Jimi was falling. So fast, the breath was snatched from his lungs.
Chapter 13
This place. Again.
The cracked earth, the heat of the boiling magma roasting Jimi as he fell face down toward the ground. Not the usual fiery rivers or bare rock rushing to meet him. Instead, a large crater, like something from Mars, yawned blackly below him. Bottomless? Jimi would find out for sure, unless he suddenly sprouted wings and—
Oh yeah.
His shirt tore away as his wings extended.
But he kept falling.
Maybe the wings were vestigial, like chicken wings. Or decorative, like peacock feathers—only good for attracting mates. Except Dez wasn’t exactly rushing to greet him. That hadn’t been her on the phone anyway. It had been a woman. An older woman. Old enough to be his mother. His other mother?
If so, she wasn’t rushing to greet him either. The only thing in a hurry to say hello was death.
The widening crater of darkness, suddenly obscured by an enormous snow white wingspan. With a girl at the center.
A girl in white.
She caught him about the waist, and his descent first slowed, then reversed.
“Ophelia?”
“Use your wings, damn it,” she gasped. “I’m not the Hulk.”
“Use them how?” Jimi almost shouted, but as soon as he thought it, the rookie flight muscles in his back and shoulders began to pulse and stretch until he was carrying his own weight instead of burdening Ophelia.
Who had wings. Huge ones. With feathers.
“Come on!” She flapped once and glided away, unfazed by the fists of hot air that were knocking Jimi about, disorienting him.
Before Jimi could attempt to gain mastery of himself, something pinched his foot. He thought Ophelia might have circled back to him and was impatiently urging him on, until the something got a firmer grip and climbed him like a tree. A tiny thing scampering up what remained of Jimi’s shirt, clinging like a baby. Like the thing he’d seen when he’d slid out of the parish hall during his failed deliverance. Old, but disturbingly infantile. Winged.
“Such tender ears,” it said, teeth pointy and dripping saliva. “She won’t mind if you don’t have ears.”
It lunged and snapped at Jimi’s head, but Jimi grabbed it by the back of its moist neck and flung it away, along with the rest of his shirt. It only flew at him again, easily following Jimi’s uncoordinated churning through the turbulent air.
A swarm rising from the black crater, which wasn’t bottomless after all, but filled with hideous cherubim. Hideous and hungry.
They lit upon Jimi, who squirmed uselessly against tight grips and sharp teeth. They kept biting him. His chest, thigh, back. Tearing off pieces. Weighing him down. Despite his flittering wings, he felt himself sinking under their combined encumbrance.
One of the hideous cherubim flew at his face, lunged for his nose, but both of Jimi’s stingers jabbed it, the venom flooding out. So much that the creature burst over Jimi like a hot water balloon.
Jimi couldn’t do that to all of them; he’d used up his venom. He could feel its lack, the way he could feel that his bladder was empty. He didn’t know if it was possible to parcel it out, a few venomous drips at a time. Not that it mattered now.
A different hideous cherub grabbed at Paul’s lunch bag. Tried to rip it away to get at Jimi’s naked torso. But Alexis needed those green thorns.
Without thinking about it, Jimi spun, pirouetting until the cherubim lost their grip on him. He darted away. The bag was still there. The thorns. But not the hideous cherubim. He’d left them far behind.
Jimi no longer hovered helplessly in a sea of turbulence, but sped across the sky. He understood it now. His body did, anyway. It was a balancing act, a complicated one, but only when he thought about it. If he just did it, it came out all right. Today’s most important lesson, though, was that Jimi was fast. Faster than the hideous cherubim. Faster than Ophelia, who was up ahead, gliding in slow circles, trying to keep ahead of her own plague of cherubim. Trying and failing. Some had already attached to her like fat ticks, overloading her slight frame. She seemed tired, and she was bleeding.
They’d made her bleed.
Jimi darted closer and slapped one, then another off Ophelia’s body and out of her orbit. And the one biting her leg? Jimi flew close and gave it a dose of its own medicine.
“Ow!” it screeched, rubbing the bloody bite mark on its leg as it flapped away. “We’re only following orders.”
Jimi didn’t want to hear about orders. He grabbed Ophelia’s hand and outdistanced the rest of the cherubim easily, even with Ophelia’s added weight, which was negligible. Like her bones were made of spun sugar.
“Jimi,” she yelled. “It’s that way.” She pointed left and up toward the dangling phone cord.
He headed that way, Ophelia gliding behind like the best kite ever; the hideous cherubim giving chase—golf carts chasing a Saleen.
Despite the perilousness of the situation, Jimi realized he was having fun. He was flying for Christ’s sake. With Ophelia. Who had wings. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. Too busy luxuriating in the power and usefulness of his wings after so much time spent hiding them in shame.
The second Jimi and Ophelia grabbed the phone cord, they shot up. Jimi’s eyeballs slipped and slid, unmoored in his sockets, until he crashed onto something butt first, and his eyes spun to a stop.
They were on the floor of Ophelia’s room. She was across from Jimi, her back to her bed. Pallid Jon was holding the phone’s handset in a limp grip, staring at the two of them like they�
�d flown in from Venus.
“I told you,” he said. “No sneaking off.” He slumped into the chair near the phone, as though the strength had gone from his legs. Miss Rictus jumped into his arms.
“What’s going on in there?” boomed a voice from the other side of her bedroom door, startling them. “What was that noise?”
Instinctively, Jimi, Ophelia, and Pallid Jon answered, “Nothing.”
After a breathless moment, the footsteps moved away.
Jimi lay there, heart racing in a way that felt like eminent death, and only gradually slowed enough that he could feel the separate beats. He sat up, dizzy. Though his eyes had stopped spinning, his brain hadn’t gotten the message. Looking at Ophelia helped, gave him something to focus on.
She pulled the ubiquitous wet wipes from her pocket and dabbed her arms and legs. She hesitated, then dabbed Jimi’s face. He had his own wet wipes, but he let her do it anyway, let her clean off gory, multicolored muck from when that thing had exploded all over him. Jimi remembered that. He’d been having fun. He remembered that too, but now he felt only nauseated. The bad taste in his mouth from biting one of those things wasn’t helping.
Pallid Jon frowned at the phone and put it to his ear. “Who is this?”
“She’s still there?” Jimi grabbed it from Pallid Jon. “Dez?”
“Why didn’t you wait?”
That wasn’t Dez. He remembered that too. Now he remembered. He hung up and slumped back to the floor.
Pallid Jon said, “Who was it? It sounded like a woman. Speaking gibberish.”
“It wasn’t gibberish. She asked me why I didn’t wait.”
“You understood that?” Pallid Jon looked impressed. “What language was that?”
Instead of answering, Jimi held Paul’s lunch bag like a teddy bear until Miss Rictus crawled into his lap. She snuggled with Jimi until his urge to vomit passed.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had wings?”
Ophelia threw the filthy wet wipe across the room and into a wastepaper basket. Disappeared inside the cocoon of her wings, a regressed butterfly. “Because you can control winged things.”
“Since when?”
“The blue bird? The bee? The ducks?”
“I’m not controlling. I can’t help it if other winged creatures see me and go, ‘Look at this noob trying to do things’, and then decide on their own to give me a helping hand.”
“Like I did?”
“I didn’t ask you to come. I’m glad you did, though. You and your goddamn direct line to hell.”
“It’s never done that before! Don’t blame me.”
“What the hell happened?” asked Pallid Jon.
“His dead girlfriend tried to kill him.”
“It had nothing to do with her,” Jimi said. “I think my other mother, the winged one, lives in that place. Like, that’s where that side of the family lives. She keeps trying to get me over there. Sending people after me. Pulling me through all kinds of doors.” He inched away from the phone.
“Why?”
“Dunno. Don’t want to know.”
“You need to find out,” said Pallid Jon. “Quickly. Cuz you look like she killed you.”
“I’m sure it’s all some cultural misunderstanding, and if it isn’t, so what? I’m not going back there—”
“You didn’t go there this time. You were kidnapped—”
“And I don’t want to talk about it!”
He did, but not with Pallid Jon. Maybe Ophelia though, who was easy to talk to. Usually. Now she sat silently, cocooned, expression guarded. She was sad about her dead parents, she had wings, she could bend reality and escape time itself, but he wasn’t any closer to reading her than when they’d first met.
“You really are the Angel of Death.”
“I am not.”
“Some kind of angel.”
“Angels aren’t the only winged people.” Ophelia gave him a look. “Obviously. Too bad it didn’t work out with the phone and all. Too bad you and your dead girlfriend didn’t get to have your glorious happy ever after beyond the grave. But by all means, feel free to enjoy the rest of your day. Somewhere else.”
Shutting Jimi out, shutting him down. Even when she’d been his troll girl, she’d never been mad at him. Why was she mad? He was the one who’d almost gotten killed, thanks to her antiquated phone technology.
He stood, Miss Rictus moving up to his shoulder. “Can I try again later?” The only thing he could think to say. If she let him come over later, when they were both calmer, he’d find out what she thought about his other mother situation. About how to handle it.
Pallid Jon said, “Your mother would just grab you again. If you wanna talk to the dead, best to do it in person. Ophelia can take you.”
Miss Rictus hurried back to Pallid Jon, bright eyes trained on Ophelia and her bristling feathers, watchful.
“What?” Pallid Jon was trying not to act nervous. “He’s all right, isn’t he? You’re the one who brought him here. Miss Rictus likes him; you know how choosy she is. You’ve done it before. You like going the extra mile for humans.”
“I do not!”
“What?” Jimi said. “Take me over where?”
“Into eternity.”
Ophelia threw the empty ginger ale can at Pallid Jon.
“Ouch! What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re not an angel,” Jimi said. “You’re a shepherd! That’s what you were going on about that day at the bridge. You shepherd people out of the world.”
“We’re not supposed to talk about it. Specifically because of people like you: pathetic, self-absorbed, bossy people who think the dead spend their entire afterlife caring about what the living are up to. People like you, hounding us night and day to shepherd you back and forth like some ferry service. Who has time for that?”
“Time isn’t relevant in eternity.”
She whirled on him. “Then why don’t you take him over, Big Mouth, if it’s so important?”
Jimi said, “You do it.” It sounded like an adventure to him, like they’d have to spend time together. A lot of time. “What would make it worth your while?”
“Larger breasts.”
Terribly awkward silence.
“What?”
“Give. Me. Large. Er. Breasts.”
Jimi looked at Ophelia’s chest, but nothing of her figure was visible through her fluffy wings.
“Can’t do it, can you?”
“It would have been interesting to see him try,” Miss Rictus said.
“A phone call is one thing,” Ophelia continued, “but I’ve been down this road. Only one time and under duress, and I still got in trouble. The Mayor said she’d banish me next time. I’m not putting my ass on the line for you, especially when I’m the only one risking anything. Just to prove something I already know—that your dead girlfriend is no longer interested in you.”
“Friends take risks,” Jimi said. She’d clearly never been properly socialized. “Lots of risks.” He thought of all the things he’d shared with her. Things his best friends didn’t know. “That, Ophelia, is what friendship demands of us.”
“We’re not friends.”
Chapter 14
The next day, César and Giselle were in the baby’s room: Giselle in denim overalls and a snapback, César in dark jeans, his jaunty be-bop hat, and a Ralph Lauren henley soaked through with sweat. They had painted earlier, replacing the somber colors in what had been César’s office with a bright, baby-friendly design. Now they were rearranging the new furniture.
“Try the corner.” Giselle plugged in a lamp shaped like a bee, a pale green handprint stamped fetchingly over her belly.
“Woman, make up your mind. I’ve moved this crib five times already.” César stretched his arms overhead, spine crackling.
“The feng shui has to be right,” said Giselle. “I mean, how much would it suck if little Janis absorbed a bunch of negative, life-wrecking energy just because we were too l
azy to position her furniture advantageously?”
“We? I’m the one doing all the work.”
Jimi said, “How do you get somebody to do what you want?” He was in the doorway, had been standing there a long time, but they looked surprised to see him.
“What somebody?” César seemed hopeful. “A girl somebody?”
“Does it matter?”
Giselle squealed. “César, look!” She shook out the yellow blanket out so they could admire the bees stitched into it. “It matches the lamp! I didn’t notice that in the store. Good luck and karma are already filling this room.”
“Good. Then the crib can stay where it is.” César studied the blanket as Giselle tucked it into the crib. “If we’re going for a bee theme, we oughta bring Honey down. Hey, Jimi, what do you think about giving Honey to Georgina?”
“Honey?”
“Jimi’s old cuddly bee,” César told her, fanning himself with his hat. “He used to drag that thing everywhere.”
“How cute. I bet Janis will love it, too.”
“She said she didn’t want to be friends.” Jimi wilted against the door frame. “Nobody’s ever said that to me before.”
“So it is a girl!” César exclaimed, like he thought he was Sherlock. “What happened? Were you a jerk to her?”
“I might have called her some names”—troll, ghoul—“but she invited me to her house, so how mad could she have been?”
Giselle and César answered together:
“Plenty mad.”
“Son, you have no idea how women work. One of my old girlfriends let me take her out to dinner, got all dressed up for me real slinky in this dress she knew I liked, spoon-fed me chocolate mousse, and then dumped me over coffee.”
“I’ve done that,” said Giselle. “It’s a very effective strategy when you want to utterly crush a man’s spirit.”
César said, “But you’re not that far along in the relationship?”