I shot an angel

I shot an angel with my father’s rifle.

The recoil settled into my shoulder the way his hands taught mine, the trigger giving without resistance, the sound breaking the air and carrying out past her into the trees. She stood for a moment after the sound, as if the world had missed her place in it, and then her body gave way in a slow, unremarkable collapse, knees folding first, then the rest following without grace.

I walked to her because that is what follows a shot. Blood pooled beneath her, soaking into the grass. Her face displayed only the residue of a life that handled too many times. Her hands lay open at her sides. I nudged her shoulder with my boot. Her head turned with the motion, cheek pressing into the ground. Strands of hair stuck to the blood at her throat. Something pale moved beneath the fabric at her back, a shape that did not belong to bone. I crouched and pulled the cloth aside.

I used the buttstock of my rifle to turn her over, but her wings were not there, only marks that did not belong to a single moment. They lay over her in layers, older than the blood that moved now beneath her, older than me, older than the rifle in my hands.

Seams down her back running in outward and uneven lines, healed and broken, healed and broken again, where the wings had been removed piece by piece. My fingers moved there, feeling each slightly raised place that they were carved out of her. The proof that she had been stripped down long before I found her. Her eyes had not closed.

I brought her home. I dragged her by the arms across the yard. Her heels carved two shallow lines through the grass. The blood followed in a broken trail that darkened where the ground dipped. At the back of the house, the clothesline sagged between two posts, a sheet hanging there, stiff from the sun. I cleared it aside and looped the rope under her shoulders, hoisting until her feet left the ground. Her head fell forward, chin to chest. The line sagged under her weight. I used clothespins that bit into fabric and skin together, holding her in place as the day moved on around her. I stood there and watched the sunlight work to dry the blood at the edges, turning from bright to dark, pulling her skin tight where it clotted.

I went inside. I cleaned the rifle at the kitchen table, laying each part out. The cloth came away red where I had not wiped my hands. I folded it and set it aside. Through the window, her body turned slightly on the line.

That night, I brought her in. The basement door stuck halfway before finally giving way, swollen from the damp, weighted air. I laid her on the concrete and cut away the dress. The fabric peeled back from her skin where it had dried. Under the dim light, the marks on her body showed in full. Bruises in stages of fading, yellow at the edges, deep purple at the center. Fingerprints that had been pressed and left to decorate her body. Small, elegant scars along her ribs.

I turned her over and began to work the skin open along the old seams. The blade slid through tissue that had been cut before, meeting less resistance than it should have. Blood welled slowly, as if there was little left to give. I pulled the shape free, piece by piece, separating it from where it had been bound down. The wings came away in sections.

Feathers broke between my fingers. Some fell loose to the floor, light as dust. Others clung together in clumps, matted and stiff with old blood. The span of them, once assembled, reached farther than her arms ever had. Even damaged and reduced, they carried symmetry.  I set them aside.

Her body remained on the table. I left it there through the night. By morning, the skin had taken on a different color and felt like stone. Flies gathered at the edges of the wounds, that looked like movement in my peripheral vision. I worked over the next few days. Wire through bone. Thread through skin. Cotton packed where hollows formed. I shaped her back into something. The wings became difficult and they did not sit where I placed them. They angled away but I forced them into alignment, pinning them until they stayed.

When it was done, I hung her above my bed. The wall took the weight with a hollow sound as the nails went in. Her head tilted forward, not quite centered. Her arms stretched outward. The wings spread behind her, uneven, one higher than the other, feathers missing in patches where they had not survived my work. Her shape made home in the room, another object among objects, another thing made still. From the bed, I could see her silhouette against the wall, the shape cutting into the dark. Sometimes a feather loosened and drifted down, landing on the floor without sound.

I left the window open. Air moved through the room and across her body, lifting strands of hair and the edges of the feathers. The smell changed over time. At first iron, then something thicker and insidious. Sweet and putrid at once. It filled the room and sank into the sheets, into my clothes.

Days passed in the same pattern and I sat at the table and cleaned the rifle. I walked the yard where the grass still remembered the place she fell. The line outside swayed with nothing on it now, the rope creaking in the same rhythm.

At night, I lay beneath her. The wings cast a shadow that reached down to the foot of the bed. In the dark, it stretched wider than it did in the day, filling the corners of the room. I watched it move with the passing air, the edges shifting across the walls, across my chest.

Once, in the early hours, I woke to a sound. I sat up. It came from above me, from her, a wet tear where the seam had begun to fail, thread snapping through the skin, and when I opened my eyes I saw the line along her side had split, one stitch gone, then another, the opening widening as what I had forced into place pressed forward. The wing on that side hung lower, the nails above it biting into plaster that had started to break.

Another tear came from her, the same sound, close and contained and with it the rest began to go, each point giving in turn until the strain reached the wall. The first nail broke free with a crack. Her body dropped and caught on the others. Then they tore out one by one, ripping through plaster and wood until there was nothing holding her there.

The impact broke the wings under her, the lines along her back opened again in the same places they had been before. I got out of bed and bent down. The structure of her had broken apart. The seams no longer able to contain it, and what I had made with my hands came apart where I touched it. I lay back down beneath the empty wall looking at the marks where the nails had torn free. She remained where she fell. I kept her until there was nothing left to keep.