Before We Are Dust

Leo

One frozen night, when breath came out like steaming plumes and frosted on scarves, when no matter how thick a guy's socks were his toes numbed up inside his shoes, Josh walked alone down the street with his hands in his pockets. He wore a hat, which his mom had made for him this last Christmas, and a dark blue thrift-store overcoat, and he didn't have a scarf. His gloves were getting old. There was a hole in the lining at the tip of his index finger.

He was a little bit drunk, just enough to be cautious of everything, and when he heard the noise from the alley he didn't want to know what it was. He stopped anyway—it was a weird noise, like a soft chorus of groans in many voices. He didn't want to know, but he looked down the alley between the Quizno's and the discount cigarettes place and saw blood leaking out on the ground, burgundy-black by moonlight and streetlight.

Josh couldn't move along after all. That groaning choir sounded again. No, he couldn't move along and pretend his senses hadn't told him anything. He took a deep breath and stepped back into the swallowing dark of the space between two buildings, past the smelly sandwich shop dumpster and the slightly less fragrant cigarette-store trash, over lunch wrappers and chip bags and a few scattered, empty Camel cartons, to the dead-end back. Blood soaked into his fifteen-dollar tennis shoes, and like every horror movie doofus he called, "Hello?"

A little whisper of the choir, lost when a car grumbled past behind him. He thought he heard where it had come from, and turned his head to see.

In the dark, there was a suggestion of great white wings. His heart bounded up and started thumping away in his mouth as he followed the line they made stretched out from brick wall to tobacco store dumpster. Just some stupid tag. But the line trembled at the ends, and even while he thought it, he knew it wasn't a tag at all.

He didn't feel the cold. His breath puffed out thick as smoke, but he wasn't cold anymore. Adrenaline fired hot like vapor in an engine.

An angel lifted his face into the light. For a moment, no steam came out of Josh's mouth at all. Beautiful, beautiful—but streaked with black blood, blood in the curly hair, blood down the naked chest.

"Jesus Christ," Josh said, and the angel glowered at him. He felt like he'd farted in church. "Sorry."

"Take your blasphemy and leave me alone to die," the angel said weakly, with many tongues.

But Josh, finally, was rummaging in his coat pocket for his phone. "I'll call for an ambulance."

"No!" A blast of hot, heavenly sound nearly knocked Josh off his feet. The two windows nearest the angel shattered. Broken glass hailed down on the beautiful head.

Josh let his phone drop back, deep into his pocket. "Okay." It made sense, he guessed. What would doctors do with this guy? He couldn't see any straps across the chest, any harness like there would be to hold wings on. Anyway they looked too good. Either he was a hell of a cosplayer, or he was what he looked like.

"Leave me," the angel said. So weary. "I've failed."

Josh went to the mouth of the alley to look up and down Main. Another car went by, but no more in sight. A couple of drunks staggered into the Crown Memorial. He didn't want to be seen, but when he weighed that against a guy's life... and besides, he could always say the angel was a cosplayer. They were only three blocks from Josh's house, three blocks from home. He'd worry later about what his housemates had to say. "Can you stand?"

The only answer he got was a look that pierced, even in the alley's shadow. He went to one knee, one foot beneath him.

"Come on. Help me as much as you can."