WINGS

I am sitting at the edge of the cliff, looking out over the ocean. The sun is setting, slipping behind the hazy clouds which seem to float on the water, casting a pink and orange glow over the Earth. The colours appear to dance on the waves, and I imagine the fish below, iridescent as they slip through the light slicing down in to the depths of the sea.

Ven is stood upon the hood of the car, straight backed, head tilted upwards slightly, as if surveying his empire. Or perhaps that is exactly what he is doing. I turn to him and tell him that it’s time to go, to which he responds by shaking out his wings dramatically and then pulling them sharply in again. A white feather catches on the breeze and lands pointedly at my feet. I am unimpressed. It is a gesture I have seen a hundred times before, and I have no more patience for his petulance. I leave the feather on the ground and get in the car. Perhaps someone will find it before it disappears, and an amazing thing will happen to them. I bang on the roof of the vehicle with my fist and after a few moments, he leaps down and opens the passenger door, regarding me with a smile.

“I remember a time when you weren’t so cold,” he says.

“I remember a time when you weren’t so arrogant,” I retort

“Really? Do you?” He gets in, his wings shrinking and folding behind his back so that he can sit comfortably.

“No,” I laugh then, out loud, and Ven joins in. We are both sitting in the car, laughing, watching the sun set over the sea.

“Where do you want to go?” I ask him.

“North,” He replies, his smile fading. “We need to go North.”

I have no idea why Ven chose me. I have never believed in angels, or even in God for that matter, but there you go. If I have learned one thing through all this, it is not to be so sceptical. To believe that anything can truly happen, even things beyond fantasy, beyond what we truly know is possible on Earth. For Ven, I gave up everything, and yet I have gained so much in return. I no longer know who I will be without him when he finally departs.

I manoeuvre the car back on the road and turn left, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I do so. My hair is currently blonde, and I like it more than my natural colour. Sometimes, when we are alone and playing around, Ven messes about with my hair, creating dramatic effects with it, as though it is spun with gold, or flows like a river, or perhaps studded with a thousand tiny butterflies. He does it to make me smile, if I am angry with him, if I am angry with the World. It usually does. I would love just once to walk in to a room with a thousand tiny butterflies in my cascading hair and see everybody gaze at me in awe and wonder but of course, I can’t do that. The worst thing, you see, about being friends with an angel, is that you can’t tell anybody about it.

We had had an argument, earlier that day. We were back in England, had crossed on the Ferry from Calais and I wanted to drop by and see some old friends. Not my family or anyone close, just some guys I used to go to college with in Kent. I suppose I just wanted to do something normal, go to a bar and order a beer and a pizza and talk about the weather and the news and people we remembered from our past, but Ven had forbade it. He thought I would say something, I knew he did, even though he told me that he trusted me implicitly. I told him that he couldn’t stop me, that I could do what I chose, but he stunned me, so that I was frozen, trapped in time and couldn’t move. I was angry. When he let me go I drove out to the White Cliffs without speaking a word to him.

I am quick to forgive, however. I always was that way and never saw the point in long, drawn out silences or in being sullen with someone for days and weeks on end because of some vague mishap or wrongdoing on their part. It is probably a good job, or Ven and I would spend most of our time together in silence.

“What’s North?” I ask, as we pull on to the main road. Ven is eating a packet of chocolate buttons. There are only three things, apart from me, that he particularly likes about Earth; dogs, rain and chocolate. The glove box is full of packets of the stuff – especially of the button shaped variety.

“I’m not completely sure,” he says “But I know we need to go there. I think it will all become clear. We need to move though. We need to get there tonight.” This of course is no problem for him, since he has no need to sleep. It’s no problem for me now either, since I can take on qualities which I would previously have regarded as super human. Besides, I like driving through the night. I like the quietness on the roads and the moonlight and the bats and foxes flitting in and out of the hedgerows and shadows. I have always been a night person. When I first met Ven, I was working the graveyard shift in a psychiatric hospital. I didn’t have to do much, I’d just sit in the office reading a book or typing up some patient records and listening out for trouble. If there was any, then I would call the security guard or the duty nurse – but the patients had mild, if chronic, illnesses and tended to behave themselves for the most part. Sometimes I would wander out in to the garden. It was well kept, with a pond and a little fountain and a white bench under a pear tree. It was supposed to be a soothing place for the patients to wander about or sit in. One night I was out there and I saw a man, right down by the hedge where the garden bordered the road. I froze for a moment, wondering if it was one of the patients. There was something odd about him. Ven told me that he was lost, that he needed help. That he had heard this was a place to come to for help. I laugh whenever I think of this memory, because I had thought he was maybe suicidal, maybe needed someone to talk to, when in fact he needed so much more from me, even though he had the power to kill me in an instant. He asked me my name. Laurie, I told him. He said his name was Venetio, that he had a proposition for me.

Ven reaches over to the glove box to retrieve more chocolate. I tell him he’ll get fat, and he glares at me, stuffing the chocolate in his mouth. We both laugh, because we both know that angels do not put on weight.

I wonder where I would be right now if I was not with Ven? If I was not in an old Vauxhall Cavalier, heading to the North of England under a blanket of twinkling stars, sat next to a chocoholic angel who came to me for help. Me, of all the people, in all the World.

“Why did you choose me?” I asked him that night as we sped away on a motorbike stolen from Rikki the night security guard, heading for the continent. It is a question I have asked a dozen times, and I have never received a satisfactory answer. Maybe I should stop looking for answers. Maybe I will find the answer when I have stopped looking.

“I’m glad you chose me,” I say, staring at the road ahead.

A few moments pass.

“I know,” the angel replies.

1368 words.