A Day Of Faces Read Free Page A

around me and shuffled through the garden, barely keeping my eyes open. An owl hooted somewhere in the graveyard beyond the far fence. Something scurried past and disappeared beneath all the accumulated crap. Some of my friends thought it was creepy backing onto a cemetery but I kinda liked it. You knew where you were at with dead people.
    As I approached, the shed door swung open again on its rusty hinges, revealing a black hole of a doorway. Once I’d found a fox sniffling about in there, back when I was a kid. Having heard random tabloid stories of foxes creeping into babies’ rooms and attacking them, I did what any good squamata would do - I bit it. It was dead before it even reached the fence. That was the first and last time I used my venom on anything living. I was pretty annoyed that the memory had resurfaced, in fact.
    Something acrid was in the air. I could taste it. There was something coppery, too, like when you cut your lip and taste blood.
    I reached the door and put a steadying hand on it before it banged shut again. As I was gently closing it I perceived a large shape inside, heaped in a corner, unmoving. Freezing, I willed my eyes to adjust faster to the darkness and wrestled whether to run back to the house or investigate further. Or just close the damn door and bolt it shut.
    Instead, I peeked in closer.
    It was a body, I realised, as I discerned legs. There was something else, though, making the torso hard to figure out. The body still wasn’t showing any signs of movement, so I crept a careful step into the shed, leaning down close and flicking my tongue to try to get a better reading.
    The coppery taste was blood. I should have recognised it earlier. There was a lot of it in here, splashed across the floor and the wall where the body lay slumped.
    Where the shape of the body had been difficult to see I now realised was due to two half-folded, feathered wings, which were probably each five feet across when fully extended. They connected at the shoulder blades, as tended to be the case, with one folded awkwardly across his chest. I traced the blood back up to a gaping hole in the right wing, where the feathers were burnt and caked with dirt. Slowly piecing it together, I figured this guy had been shot while in the air, and had maybe come down in the graveyard.
    Sometimes my brain is a bit slow. Not when it comes to thinking of the name of an actor in a movie, or the exact track listing from an obscure album. I could recall that kind of shit straight off the top of my head. But the important stuff? That was often like wading through mud.
    That’s why it took me far longer than it should have to realise this was who the cops had been after at the club.
    Let’s face it; there was no way I was getting any sleep tonight.

morphology
    mɔːˈfɒlədʒi/
    noun
    a particular form, shape, or structure.
     
    It was a habit of mine: not seeing horrible, gory wounds. I’d go as far as saying it was one of my main hobbies. I expended an extraordinary amount of effort into seeing people with whole, unruptured, fully-functioning bodies.
    Call me crazy, I just kinda liked it that way.
    This made two in one evening. Sure, this guy wasn’t inside-out, but the hole in that wing wasn’t doing him any favours and had turned the shed a dark crimson. Every step I could feel the squelch as my bare feet soaked up more of his blood.
    I’m usually pretty decisive. But not this time.
    In version one I tip-toe back out of the shed, scamper back across the garden and pick up the phone in the house. Ten minutes later the police arrive, storm through and take the guy away. They thank me, my dad’s impressed for the first time, and I get a great story to tell at school. I never see the guy again.
    Or maybe I give him the full fox treatment, biting into that bloodied wing and sinking my fangs in deep, poison flowing into his body. He wakes, jumping to his feet, and lashes out, his strong arm smacking into my face and knocking me