Popped the hooks. Felt it give way as her breasts forced it off her
back. Found myself staring at.
Two little wings.
The size of my thumbs. Bent and cramped. Broken. Folded. There, over her
shoulder blades. I touched them, and they were cold and hard as a turkey
neck I'd once found in the trash after she'd made soup with it.
#
"How did you get out?"
"With my wings?"
"Yeah. With your wings, and with no shoes, and with the old lady dead
over the tub?"
She nuzzled his neck, then bit it, then kissed it, then bit it
again. Brushed her fingers over his nipples.
"I don't know," she breathed, hot in his ear.
He arched his back. "You don't know?"
"I don't know. That's all I remember, for five years."
He arched his back again, and raked his fingertips over her thighs,
making her shudder and jerk her wings back.
That's when he saw the corpse at the foot of the bed. It was George.
#
He went back to school the day after they buried Davey. He bathed all
the brothers in the hot spring and got their teeth brushed, and he fed
them a hot breakfast of boiled mushroom-and-jerky stew, and he gathered
up their schoolbooks from the forgotten corners of the winter cave and
put them into school bags. Then he led them down the hillside on a
spring day that smelled wonderful: loam and cold water coursing down the
mountainside in rivulets, and new grass and new growth drying out in a
hard white sun that seemed to spring directly overhead five minutes
after it rose.
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