Chapter 7.1

 

The room had grown dim, the light deepening into the sulphurous yellow of an approaching storm. A light rain had already misted the windows and ran down the glass in delicate veins, spreading outward like a map of rivers no one had ever walked. The air smelled faintly of petrol from the nearby garage mixed with beeswax and damp wood. Paul sat at the small kitchen table, his hands folded as though holding a tiny, fragile bird. Roisin leaned against the sink unit, cradling a fresh mug of instant coffee, her gaze fixed not on him but on the shadow his body cast across the floorboards. The shadow was longer than it should have been, stretched by the angle of the ochre daylight, as if it were reaching toward her.

Paul opened his hands as if releasing the invisible bird. When he broke the silence, his voice was low, as if they were in a cathedral where God would shush them if they got too rowdy. "It isn’t wings that mark the change. That’s the mistake everyone makes. They look for feathers, for flight. But the transformation is quieter—like a silence that enters the bones."

She took a sip of the bitter coffee, wishing she’d shelled out for the more expensive brand rather than the supermarket’s own label. It would have been improved with cream – or even milk – but she had only the choices of black or none at all, and nothing could disguise the acrid taste of cheap coffee when there was nothing to lift it from darkness. She put the mug down on the steel draining board. "Silence can be heavy, though. A burden, not a gift. How do you know it isn’t simply death dressed in furs and lace?" Although her voice sounded sharper than she intended, she was not mocking him but testing the edges of his thought, pressing against it to see if it would hold its shape or pop like a balloon in a gorse bush.

He turned in his chair to look at her, his shadow twisting and distorting like an living entity itself. "Because death closes. This opens. When a human becomes an angel, it’s as if the skin remembers the light it once bathed in. The body doesn’t vanish—it becomes translucent, a vessel for recognition." He shook his head with a smile. “Don’t take me for an expert or anything. These thoughts are all products of conjecture, and nothing to do with the Church or what I learned of the Bible growing up. Quite the opposite, really. Father O’Connell would have me whipped for even suggesting there could be a migration of one state to the other.” He put on a thick, Irish accent: “A man is the perfection that God created. It cannot be improved upon.” He laughed and dropped the heavy intonation. “That old bastard used the same argument against any change at all, whether it was a new ear piercing or a complete gender transition. He was a complete hypocrite. If man’s form was perfect in God’s eye, why did the old cunt wear glasses?” He reached for his mug, looked into the dark liquid, and seemed to change his mind about drinking it.

The ambient noise grew as the rain began in earnest, battering the windows like it was trying to get in. He lifted his hands, palms upward, as though offering them to the unseen deity. The gesture made his shadow flicker again, and for a moment she could see it in a pose of crucifixion.

Roisin kneaded the fingers of one hand with the other, massaging some feeling after holding charcoal all day. Looking at them, she realised how dirty they were, ingrained with wood ash and flakes of wallpaper and plaster from her makeshift canvas. From her brief inspection, she postulated her face might be equally as dirty. It was kind of Paul not to mention it, though she wondered if he wound have let her leave the house in such a state. She supressed a smile at the thought. “Recognition by whom? By God? By other angels? Or by the living who still need to see us?"

Her question hung in the air, heavier than the darkness of the coffee, the deep shadows of the Bible. Paul shifted, his shadow breaking into fragments across the floor as he stood. He stretched, the inverse curve of his back a sudden echo of the wings they were discussing.

"I don’t mean recognition like naming a subject. It’s more like being seen without being touched. A gaze that passes through you and yet leaves you changed."