Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

Molly crouches, her back to a boulder. She ties the laces of one sneaker, switches to the other. The angel sparkles. She’s thinking of that silhouette on the road before dawn. Thinking about angels and auras and belief and air conditioning and how none of it compares to the feel of the sun.

Then a black shape appears against the white concrete of the church steeple, like an afterimage left on her eye by the sunrise. She blinks and tilts her head. The shape resolves into a man, climbing up that sheer white face towards the angel.

Daniel. She stops the word in her throat, afraid of distracting him, of making him fall.

No handholds, no purchase, at an angle steep and tapering. Yet he keeps climbing, all the way to the tiny platform at the pinnacle. He grips the angel’s ankle. He pulls himself up onto the disc at the top of the spike. He looks the angel in the eye. Defiance. A challenge.

Molly gawks. He’s decided to act instead of speak. Something’s changed him—was it her? She leaves the left sneaker untied.

Daniel grasps at the scroll and horn, tries to wrest them from the angel’s grasp. He wants to take them for himself. To be the messenger. The angel resists. The dull figure and the glittering one shift and totter, circling, trading feints and lunges like two wrestlers on a Grecian urn. Their strength is evenly matched. Likewise their determination. It only remains for one of them to make a misstep.

There’s too much glare to tell who falters first. The angel beats its wings, but the feathers are fused, the weight of the gold too immense. Daniel yells something incoherent. Triumph.

They fall. The crash of their impact echoes from the buttes.

Molly clambers over the boulders. Her loose sneaker trips her up; she loses it. Her foot slips, and red rock rips skin from her knee. It stings. She leaves a little blood behind.

Where the flawless concrete meets the rough sandstone, she finds Daniel’s body, shattered. There’s nothing left of him to cry over or comfort. Her tears are toxic, swallowed up by the parched earth.

There was life inside him. Bones, a heart. Conviction. The angel was hollow.

The scroll is just a lump of metal. It will never unroll, and if it did, what would be written there no one could read or comprehend. But the trumpet… Molly picks it up, looks through it.

The trumpet is real.

Soon, the pastor and his congregation will rush from the church. Molly will have been the only witness. What should she tell them? What will they think?

Her mind conflates her father and the frozen angel, Daniel and herself. Her bike, back in Sedona, casting its motionless shadow over the manicured grass of the mini-golf course. Her braids, dangling straight in the windless desert morning. Her heartbeat, inexorable. Blinding sunlight. Blood trickling down her knee.

Molly scrambles, slips and stumbles over the boulders and back to the doors of the church. She waits, balanced, uneven, on one sneakered and one stockinged foot.

The doors swing open, and she lifts the trumpet to her lips.

In the middle of playing a round of Something Scary they got sidetracked and fucked for a while. After they were done fucking, they lighted cigarettes. Then, they started drinking. Again.

—My God. Look at that, she said. Her mouth sagged a little.

He grunted like he did when he wasn’t listening.

—Hey! I’m creeped out, she said.

—By what? He balanced two shot glasses on his lap and tried to avoid spilling tequila all over the blankets. He’d swiped the tumblers from the honky tonk across the highway where he’d also scored the X that was currently softening their skulls. The motel room was dark, the bed lumpy, and she kept kicking restlessly, and he spilled a bit regardless. He cursed and downed his in one gulp and handed her the other glass, managing not to burn her with the cigarette smoldering between his fingers.

She accepted her drink, took a deep sip and then held the glass loosely so the edge cast a faint, metallic light across her breasts. She exhaled and pointed beyond the foot of the bed to a spot on the wall above the dead television. —That, she said.

—What?

—That! Right there!

—Shit. Okay. He dragged on his cigarette, then poured another shot and strained it through his teeth, stalling. —Pretty weird.

—Yep, pretty weird is right. What is it?

He made a show of squinting into the gloom. —Nothing, probably. You trying to torch the place?

Ashes crumbled from her cigarette and glowed like fallen stars against the sheets. She swept them into her palm then into the now empty glass. —It just freaks me out.

—You’re easily freaked, then.

—No, I’m not. I’m the only girl in my family who watches horror movies. I don’t even cover my eyes for the scary parts.

—Yeah?

—Hell yeah. I don’t spook. I don’t.

—After some consideration I think it’s a shadow.

—That’s not a shadow. It came out when you were doing the story thing.

—See how a little bit of light from the highway comes in under the blinds? Shadows all over the place.

—Nope. I’m telling you, it came out while you were talking.

—Oh, then it’s gotta be a ghost. No other sane explanation. Woooo-ohooooo!

—Shaddup. I need another shot.

—Want this? Couple swallows at the bottom. He sloshed the bottle back and forth.

—Gimme. She snapped her fingers, then grabbed the bottle when he swung it close.

—Wait a sec, we’ll solve this right now. He leaned against her, reaching across their bodies for the bedside lamp.

—No!

—Huh? What’s the matter?

—Don’t do it.

—I’m trying to turn on the light, not cop a feel.

—Go ahead and cop a feel, but leave the light alone, ’kay? She thumped the bottle against his arm until he retreated.

—Whatever. Jesus. Got any more cigs?

She fumbled a pack of cigarettes from the nightstand, lighted one from hers and handed it to him. —Last one, she said, crumpling the pack for emphasis.

He slid toward his edge of the bed and slumped against the headboard and smoked in silence. A semi rumbled past on the interstate and the blinds quivered against the window frame. Outside was scrub and desert. The motel lay embedded in the implacable waste like a lunar module stranded between moon craters.

—Don’t sulk, she said.

—I’m not.

—Like hell.

—I’m not sulking.

—Then what?

—I’m looking at the wall. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s something else. Why can’t we turn on the light?

A coyote howled somewhere not too far off. Its cry was answered and redoubled until it finally swelled into a frantic, barking cacophony that moved like a cloud across the black desert. —Holy shit, what’s that? he said.

—Coyotes, she said. Scavenging for damned souls.

—Sounds fucking grandiose for coyotes.

—And what do you know? They’re the favored children of the carrion gods. Grandiosity is their gig.

He laughed, a little strange, a little wild, as if echoing the animal harmony. —So, what are they doing around here? Going through a landfill?

—Maybe you drew them in earlier with your howling.

—Bullshit. They can’t hear that. All the way out in the tumbleweeds?

—Sure they can. Howl again. I dare you.

—If coyotes sound this bad, I’d hate listening to jackals. Or dingoes. Remember that news story, years ago, about the woman on the picnic with her family?