‘The Angel at the Corner of Throop and Lexington’

David Cleofas Avila resides in the Susan Fleming family collection, David’s art has been priced by Ames Gallery, recognized by the National Arts and Disability Center UCLA, and published in Peatsmoke Journal, Gabby & Min, NUNUM, and Harpur Palate. His poetry has been published in Oddball Magazine, The Poetry Cove, WILDsound Writing Festival, eMerge-magazine.com, Flora Fiction , and Breath & Shadow.

The Angel at the Corner of Throop and Lexington

There is an angel that lives at the corner of Throop and Lexington. Two doors down from the laundromat, just before the townhouse that hosts those jazz nights. I know it’s there. I’ve seen it. 

I live across the street from it. It’s in this old brownstone, with this glass canopy on the roof, that all the birds just love to flock around. Maybe it leaves bread crumbs out. Birds fly in and out through the windows. All kinds of birds, not just pigeons. Crows, seagulls, songbirds. I think I heard a lark there once?

Most of the birds fly back out. Most. That lark, I swear I kept my eye out the whole day, and the next. I never saw it fly out. I just kept hearing it sing. Until it stopped. 

The birds can’t help themselves. Like something’s luring them in. Sometimes the angel sticks an arm out the window, and a bird comes down and lands on it like it’s nothing. This pale, desaturated hand. It looks anemic. 

I’ve been watching it. Every Thursday, around 1 or 2 in the morning, it goes out. It wears this long black cloak over this brilliant white dress. It’s like a second moon. 

It doesn’t like to be seen. The first time I saw it, I called out to it, and it just ran back inside. Then I missed it the next week. I don’t want it to move away. I haven’t tried to talk to it since. 

I’m certain it’s an angel. It doesn’t have a halo, and I’ve never seen its face. But I’ve seen its back. Where its shoulder blades should be. I’ve seen that same glowing white dress, sparkling through the windows, with these two deep, crimson stains, right there and there. It had something behind those stains, once. It’s got too much empty space. Like there’s a vacancy in the air on its back. I don’t know. You’d get it if you saw it. 

Those Thursdays, 1 or 2 am, it carries out a trash bag. Two bags, that one time it missed a week. They look like heavy bags. Full, dense, dripping bags. Sealed tight. Whatever’s giving them that weight still seeps through. The trash bin outside their house is disgusting. It’s got this faint black goo that pools from it. It’s sticky. It stains the sidewalk. 

I haven’t touched the bags. I’ve got no idea what’s in them. That’d mean going outside, at 2 or 3 am, to sneak across the street into a stranger’s garbage. My curiosity hasn’t gotten that bad. Not yet.

But I think I know.

I think they’re stuffed with wings.

I think, every time that angel gets one of those birds, it nails it to a table. It secures its body and stretches its feathers out. Like a crucifixion. It gets this knife, or hacksaw, or dremel, and it liberates the bird’s wings. 

Then it tries to put them on itself. It reaches into those holes in the back of its shoulders, and it slides those tiny bird bones into its scars, and it bleeds out just that bit more, enough to see if those nerve endings will connect.

Or maybe it’s building bigger wings. Maybe it takes every bird it gets, and it takes off every feather, every strip of meat it can get its pale, dirty hands on, and it stitches them together into something bigger. It gets some bleach, or some paint, or something else and it tries to dye it that same iridescent white from its dress. 

Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it hates the birds. Maybe the birds taunt the angel with their wings. I bet they do it on purpose. Maybe the angel knows they’re doing it on purpose, and so that’s why it takes their wings off. Or, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s not an angel at all.

But I think it wants to be one.

It only happened once, but I saw it go outside one day, in the morning. It was a pretty bright Saturday morning, the sun was shining, and it was sitting at the top of its roof, just outside that glass canopy. I couldn’t see its face. Its back was turned to me, and it was like the blood behind it was still wet, still dripping. It had this long, golden hair, and it was shining like the sun. Bright yellow. Not blonde. Yellow. Daffodil yellow. Yellow like on the back of a baby duck. Yellow that you only see in the sun, and in spring, and that you wish you could capture in a picture, or in a painting, but you just can’t, because it can only shine like that, in that light, under that sun.

I couldn’t see its face, but it was looking up. Right at the sun. You know, like you’re not supposed to do. It reached its hand up. This pale, withered hand, up to the sky. I could tell it thought, if it just reached out far enough, it could touch that light. The thing was glowing. Not just its dress, not just its hair, its whole body was like a second sun. I couldn’t look away. It’s probably the same thing the birds felt. I just watched, and my eyes hurt, but I kept looking, because it kept stretching its arm up, into the light, and I felt like I wanted it to touch the sky, like it deserved to reach the sun, like I was seeing something monumental and terrifying and ethereal and heartbreaking.

Then it put its hand back down. It went back inside. And that was that.

And I wondered, or, I still wonder. 

Was it that it didn’t reach out far enough, or was it that something else didn’t reach back?

Trace McLaurin has worked as a screenplay writer, game developer, and desert park ranger for the past few years. As a black and trans writer, she has a passion for finding beauty in the peculiar and the forgotten. Her work strives to be unusual, captivating, and inviting, just as she hopes this story finds you.