It Sings

Daniel held on tight to the steering wheel, as if an abyss opened beneath him and that was the only thing keeping him from falling. Thick teardrops dotted his jeans and he felt the coldness creeping in through the cracks in the windshield. In front of the headlights, Elizabeth looked like a spirit. Arms crossed over her chest, she stared at what laid in the gutter. This is what happened to Tommy, Daniel thought. This is my punishment.

The engine vibrated arrhythmically, foreshadowing its death, and over its rattle, that music that made Daniel think of a chorus of children singing among the ruins of a temple; an ancient and powerful song, an atavistic litany.

“It’s a miracle, Daniel,” Elizabeth said.

The engine sputtered out and Daniel raised his head. His wife still looked at the gutter. In her eyes, tears and a smile. Under her chin, she had made a knot with her hands.

With the melody still echoing within him, Daniel got out of the car and his trembling legs got him to Elizabeth, under the sea of light of the headlamps.

The prairie was infinite and, in that moment, eternal. The mountains shadowed the horizon and the sky was low and asphyxiating. And that song, endless and terrible, louder now, filled everything.

“It’s a miracle,” Elizabeth repeated, her voice cracking. Daniel followed her eyes into the ditch and saw it there, lying on a bed of rubbish, and it wasn’t a child. Wings bent and broken under a contorted body. The chest going up and down as life waned, death coming for it, unhurriedly, knowing its final victory over everything that once was born. Every time it drew a breath, black, thick, bubbly blood welled out of its side. The antennas on its head barely shaking, sensing the microscopic life on the nocturnal breeze. Daniel found his own face reflected on two polyhedral eyes that appeared to stare blindly into the nothingness. And it sang. Through its oddly childish lips, it sang.

“He sings like Tommy did,” Elizabeth said.

“What is it?”

Elizabeth turned to look at Daniel. In her eyes, a million stars, invisible on the clouded sky.

“He’s an angel from God,” she said. “A cherub.”

The creature sang and the couple, embraced, watched it die.