8.5

 

Roisin knew the answer already. Should she tell him the woman – Angela – was dead? She could answer herself without a second guess. She was no medical expert so telling anyone she had seen the woman break out of her mortal flesh and fly away would get her a long stay wearing a tight jacket in Wednesfield’s Cygnet Hospital. She looked at him and shook her head, glancing down at the flash of creamy-white as he stroked her broken hand, each movement of his palm causing the wrist to flex and expose more of the underlying bone structure. This was what Art school had lacked. The traditional dissection of a body while students watched and sketched the details. It was all very well to examine the skeleton as a dry, lifeless study model but to see the musculature covering them, and the flesh and veins layer around them tighter than cables in a public server was another lever of artistry. Had Virtual Reality come far enough to give her that level of detail? Laverstone’s local hospital had closed their body donation program, so somewhere there must be a computer capable of running a program with medical level detail. Could she train as a doctor to get access to it? Probably not, but there was a good chance she could work in a mortuary.

She looked again at the woman’s blood-soaked face, frozen in fear rather than the sanitised, peaceful end television generally offered and felt the motif surge within her. Skeleton and angel. Mortality and soul. The body was fragile, bones broken by chance. Yet in the terrified gaze Roisin saw wings unfurling, a soul rising, a trumpet sounding in silence.

The street around them carried on — footsteps, voices, traffic. Yet for Roisin, time had stopped. She pressed her hand lightly against the woman’s shoulder, feeling the weight of bone beneath flesh, the absence of breath.

Roisin took a breath, as if she could capture the last one the woman had exhaled and divine the meaning of transformation from it. “Skeleton and angel.” She nodded to herself as the reflection in the dead eyes faded as they dried. “Both existing at once. Always Fractured.”

The man holding his partner’s broken hand looked up, his cheeks streaked by the snail-trail of tears. He looked older than Angela, so perhaps her brother or father rather than partner as Roisin had first assumed. “What was that?”

She shook her head, pursing her lips into some semblance of gravity. “An old prayer I once learned,” she told him, “Nothing important.”

At first, there were only a few people — the man who had been walking behind the woman, a mother with a pushchair and another child by the hand, a cyclist slowing to dismount. They gathered hesitantly, their movements uncertain, as though the air itself had thickened around the fallen body and might infect them if they got too close. “I’ve called an ambulance,” said one girl with a local accent. “They’re sending one now. And the police, too.”

The man bent low, his voice sharp as a knife blade with urgency. “Angela! Don’t you dare die!” His words were military-clipped, his breath rattling against the sobs he was holding in. Yet beneath the command was love for the woman and a fear of being fractured further by her passing.

The mother covered her mouth, her eyes wide. Her gesture was self-protective. As if witnessing the death could force her own soul to be jarred loose from its housing, and she gathered her child to her skirts to shield them from the sight. Yet her skeleton trembled withing its mortal frame as the wheels of the pushchair rocked backward and forward against the pavement seeming to echo the first moments of the woman’s fall, where fate twisted between catching her balance and this tragic outcome.

The cyclist stood frozen, helmet in hand, his breath shallow. His posture was rigid, as though his bones has fused together into one whole sculpture. But when he stepped forward, placing a hand gently on the shoulder of the man who had shouted, his touch was gentle, a gesture of solidarity.

More people arrived, drawn by the sudden stillness. A woman stopped her car and got out, her phone extended, taking a video she could upload for the likes and the second-hand sympathy. The crowd thickened, voices overlapping, footsteps pressing closer. Each person carried both mortality and transcendence, skeleton and angel layered into their gestures. Roisin saw bones in their panic, wings in their concern.

One woman knelt beside Roisin, her scarf trailing on the pavement. Her hands hovered above the fallen body, uncertain whether to touch. Skeletal hesitation, angelic compassion. She whispered, “Is she breathing?” but the silence was already absolute.

A man in a suit crouched, checking the pulse of the intact wrist, his fingers deft and precise. His movements were clinical, old bones pressing against withered flesh. Yet his face softened when he looked up. “She’s gone,” he murmured, though the words felt too heavy for the air.