GIVE ME WINGS, GIVE ME WINGS.

She's still teasing. A mischief-witch only once every blue moon, for her health. "I drink enough for five. Don't say I didn't warn you."

Margot can't remember the last time she was so charmed by a grown man, kindness woven into the fabric of him. He moves through her kitchen like serving is second nature. Like she's the house guest. He fills the space between them with scents of cinnamon, earth, and premium ground she'd have to drive out some forty miles for at least. He's a blessing and a half now, isn't he?

"I've never been to Mexico," she confesses. As if the everything about her didn't already make that clear. Margot's a fixture of this land, its usher and its undertaker. The farthest she's gone is a few state lines, when the right manhunt promises a tasty extra helping for her mother. "Heard it's beautiful. Also heard the coffee's worth dying for. Way that smells, I'd say it's true."

She hasn't forgotten the bunting chick at the window, its pleas faint but persistent still. The coffee percolates at Lemuel's talented hands, and Margot lovingly crafts her own concoction off to the side of the sink. A watered-down mash of avian formula from the cupboard and mealworms she plucked out of a small separate fridge. This isn't her first baby bird rodeo. "What brought you up here? If you don't mind me asking. West Virginia's quite a ways from home, is all."

⠀⠀⠀𝐋𝐞𝐦𝐮𝐞𝐥’𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐬 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐝. His thoughts flicker back to Monte Atocha—a sunny town void of warmth. Passing smiles were rare. Women greeted one another with careful nods. Small talk was fleeting. Margot’s tenderness frightens him. Trying not to clench his jaw, he brings the flour to the counter for her. He shovels more coffee into the filter. The spoon clinks twice against the edge of the coffee maker before he retires it to the sink.

⠀⠀⠀“Home-” He mumbles, uncertain. “If you are implying Heaven is ‘home’, it would not be very much near to anything. I am far from ‘home’ because I have to be. Near to the soil is where I am meant to be, I suppose.”

⠀⠀⠀Sponge in hand, he scrubs at the spoon over the sink. He eyes the tanned skin of her knuckle peaking beneath ribbons of dark ink. Traces of dirt under her nails betray her days under the sun, in the garden, in the forest, digging deep beneath the earth.

⠀⠀⠀“Like you, I should think.” He pauses a moment. The gurgling of brewing coffee fills the silence.

⠀⠀⠀“We are similar, are we not? What keeps you to the soil may as well be what keeps me here.” Lemuel tries to ebb away the pressing curiosity in his voice. He is a guest after all, an unwelcome one at that. He can feel it—the way death clings to her as epithelium. It clings to him too. Heavy. Thick. Nearly suffocating.

⠀⠀⠀Like a fly, she said, he was always buzzing over rot. Or, she reasoned, was it he who brought rot with him?

⠀⠀⠀“Do you believe in coincidence, Margot?” He asks, watching her closely. “I am a construct of sepulchral waste and agony, ensouled only by the grace and mercy of a higher power. I was born of death and suffering and am most helplessly attuned to it; It will find me even if I should not seek it.”

⠀⠀⠀He is not one to beg the obvious, but her mystery is her allure. Drawn to secrecy, Lemuel seeks to understand her unmistakably. In this, he is infallibly devoted. In pursuit of the divulgence of her truest self, he bares himself wholly.

⠀⠀⠀“Would my presence beget yours or would yours beget mine? Tell me, have you found me or have I found you? If I am suffering incarnate, dear Margot, who, then, are you?”

⠀⠀⠀Done brewing onto warming, the coffee machine blinks its little green eye and chirps thrice. Lemuel makes himself small, now all too aware of his intrusiveness.

The radio hummed to life; unplugged and isolated on the kitchen table, buzzing as if it were trying to latch onto the signal of something in the air. Perhaps something was trying to latch onto it. Filtered noise chimed like voices, overlapping and unintelligible. One voice, however, stood out: masculine, accented, and doleful. It was pleading. A mournful droning, though the words were intelligible through the crackling of static. Then, silence. This happened on and off for a few episodes, and by the third visit from the radio voice, it asked only one, eerily clear question: ❝ Can I trust you? ❞

Leah's attention severed from her notebook, eyes wide and brows furrowed with confusion. Wooden legs scraped against the floorboards as she clambered from her chair to get closer to the old radio, giving a few encouraging thumps to plastic and metal in hopes it might clear the signal. ❝ Hello? ❞ No answer. ❝ Is someone there. Can you hear me? ❞ Silence. Then, the same voice, with the same urgent question: ❛ Can I trust you? ❜ ❝ I, ❞ —she breathed deep, exasperated that she was about to answer a radio as if it were a phone call— ❝ Yes. Yes, you can trust me. ❞ Beckoning voices from the fens. The shadowy woman at the edge of her bed. The aberrant wolf shapes in the trees. She'll be damned if she lets this be the spooky occurrence that pushes her to fear. Had she not been subjected to such strangeness in her short life, she might've believed her mind were playing tricks on her. Something materialising right there in her kitchen. Is that the shape of a man?

⠀⠀⠀𝐌𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐥𝐞𝐬 𝐟𝐢𝐳𝐳 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐩𝐨𝐩. Foamy matter gathers into tissue. Sinew threads each muscle together. Skin cells bubble into place, settling over perimysium wrapped ribbons. Organic mesh pulses in harmony.

⠀⠀⠀Limbs of an Angel reach out toward the material world, carbonated and semi-sheer. He casts his eyes upon her, saturnine and glossy.

⠀⠀⠀“I hear you; I trust you.”

⠀⠀⠀More a vermeer than a woman, he thinks. Her cotton tee is loose fitting and exposing a bit of her right shoulder. Her lily white hands are folded over her shirt as if in attempt hide her palatinate center. He realizes she has something of his—a lost memory, a milky celestine portion of his youth?

⠀⠀⠀“I have searched long and hard among the living on earth and between the shadows.”

⠀⠀⠀She bears her likeness, and somewhere beneath the contemporary she may still be. She could remember him and he could perhaps hold her, willowy and beladen with bittersweet ardency, as he would have liked to then.

⠀⠀⠀“Do you know who I am? What I am?” He asks plainly.

⠀⠀⠀His heart aches. He remembers the feeling of his wings and having loved and, perhaps, to have been loved. A feeling he has chased ever since she had disappeared from him and never once caught. Like a silvery hare, showing itself only for a moment and fleeing the next. His attempts to pin down memories are in vain; they remain a wild blur against the greenery.

⠀⠀⠀Lemuel’s memory is perfect, save for when his God has chosen to suppress it. He swallows bitter resentment, suffusing it over layering frustrations. His shackles all but chime behind him.