Untitled
Charlotta Dai
“You’ve been dreaming lately?”
He kicks his feet back and forth against the concrete, thump, thump, thump, as he asks, tongue curved with something unreadable as he does.
“Sure.”, he flings a rock into the ravine down below, “Sure I have.”
Closed off. Gated. Unable to provide a straightforward answer.
They both know that he’s been lying. They wouldn’t be in this situation otherwise.
“Have you been dreaming? Or have you been hallucinating?”, he asks again. His breaths come out in little puffs in the coldness of the night air. It’s not snarky, he’s not trying to make fun of him, he’s so genuinely concerned and worried that it makes him want to spill everything to him in an instant.
His skin freezes over, frozen solid to the ground, he wants to run.
He couldn’t run if he wanted too, because, because–
He looks ahead. There’s a woman at the edge of the ravine, multi-eyed and clothed in a white sheet. She bears large white swan sings, bloodied and dirtied.
“I don’t know, maybe I have been.”
There’s another one. Another lie. Another angel. Devil wings.
“Can you give me an answer to the question or?”, he’s getting mad, irritated at his lack of answers. Good. If he keeps it up, maybe he can finally leave him alone to die.
“No.”, he tries for a steady voice, tries for something that’ll stick instead of making him push further.
Another angel. Golden swallow wings. Covered in blood. There’s some sickening symbolism behind it, that he knows for sure his English teacher would have a thrill about discussing for an hour in class.
“Do you see them?”, he asks before he can get pressed about it again. Answers the question in a roundabout way, rounding the edge of the question well enough to make his father proud, “The Angels?”
He looks ahead, a thousand eye stare to the angels lining the rocks of the ravines like trees growing out from the soil.
“No.”, he answers, “I don’t see the Angels.”
Another one sprouts from the ground. Coal-covered canary wings, the barest hints of yellow peeking out from the dust.
“Are you lying?”
He turns. Looks into his—thousand—hundred something eyes.
Another angel. Too many eyes and eight wings.
“Yea. I am.”
He’s lying. Lying. Lying. Lying.
As the words echo through the trees, the angels, leave, turn their thousand eyes away, averting them like they might be watching something unholy, and god forbid they watch something like him spilling his guts out in the middle of the woods at a ravine.
“The angels are gone.”, he states simply. He finally gets up.
“Go home. Go dream.”, he stands up and walks away, a thousand eyes stare at him from the back of his head.
His wings flutter, the feathers dissipating through the trees as he does.
A singular feather falls onto his hand.
Gold. Blood Covered.
He turns, back to the ravine.
There’s another angel staring back at him as he does. It tilts it’s head.