In the Matter of Fallen Angels: A Short Story Read Free Page A

she'd installed in the Chevy S - 10 pickup truck that she'd bought with the money from her parents' life insurance policy and that everyone figured she'd sold on the road, after she threw open the back door of the General and barged prodigally back into life in Utopia, was, "Holy shit!"  Which was, all things considered, an honest reaction.
    In any case, it gave everyone plenty to talk about, especially after Angie and Old Man Stoat got into a shouting match fit to rival anything the Reverends could dish out, and all the while the angel never blinked one celestial lash.  It ended with Angie storming off, screen door banging, Chevy tires squealing and everyone agreeing that gossip-wise day five was the best yet, while Old Man Stoat sat on a corner of a picnic bench mumbling around a wad of Skoal so large that no one, not even Bobby MacReary, could understand a word he said.
    No one knew if Angie's leaving meant that she was gone temporarily for good again, but the fact was she had only driven as far as the levee a few miles downriver where all the teenagers hung out and drank beer and hil lbilly lemonade and hooked up and broke up in endless adolescent geometries, all of which Angie had run away from once already.  What awoke Quinn from his vigilant, blanket-huddled doze in the small hours of the night was that Angie Stoat cursed softly when she bruised her hip bumping into the corner of a picnic table.
    It was not raining that night and the moon was gibbous, nearly full, drenching the landscape in the sort of milky, pearls-on-black-velvet luminosity that drives poets to put words on paper.  Quinn watched Angie Stoat stand before the coop, her fingers curling into the chicken-wire.  He watched her step back and kick off her boots decisively, strip off the faded blue jeans and the slee veless black t-shirt that said “ Zeke's Custom Shop ” on the front, watched her unlatch the coop and walk in naked.  She had a tattoo of a dagger entwined with ivy on her right shoulder blade and her naked body twined about the angel's like ivy in the moonlight, limbs winding, one pale hand seeking to turn the angel's face from its moon-fixed gaze, shadow-tangled hair spilling like ink over the angel's shoulder, mouth seeking heat.
    To what avail?  None.  The angel stood firm in the moonlight, legs planted like columns, head tilted; maybe, just maybe, Quinn thought he saw the angel's wings quiver faintly when Angie Stoat disengaged herself with a short, rueful laugh, but that could have been a shivery trick of the silvery moon.  She stood hugging herself and regarding the angel, then stepped out of the coop, latching the door behind her.  Naked by moonlig ht Angie looked only seventeen—which she was—and too thin with shadows pooling in the hollows of her loins and revealing the frailty of her ribcage; but her skin was silver in the moonlight and when she stretched up her arms to put on her t-shirt her nipples were as dark as plums.
    Leaving, Angie Stoat caught Quinn's wakeful eye and paused and smiled an ambiguous smile that was neither triumphant nor defeated and was definitely not seventeen years old.  "You would have tried it too," she said with a shrug, and strode off into the night on her long, lean, blue-jeanned legs.  Quinn blinked his bleary eyes and settled back into his doze, not entirely sure he had ever awakened.
    So passed the fifth night, which may well have been the sixth, and it cannot be considered odd that neither Quinn Parnell nor Angie Stoat ever spoke of what was seen and done in those dark, mercuric hours, for a glance exchanged by moonlight is both conspiratorial and a secret of the most fragile sort that may be destroyed by a single word.
    On the sixth day the heat was worse, causing the air to shimmer and the cottonwood seeds to burst their pods and drift about the backyard like the down of molting swans.  It was in fact too hot to do anything but gossip, and that languidly.  Garrett Ainsworth brought